大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Allan Price on behalf of John Liversedge and has been added to the site with his full permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

My boarding school lay a few miles from the railway marshalling yards at Darley Dale, a likely target for German bombers - especially those returning from raids on Sheffield. We used to lie awake in our beds at night listening to the drone of aircraft high overhead on their way to Sheffield.

One night there were bombs dropped on Darley Dale - and many of them missed the target, fortunately makeing huge craters in the moors. I can remember well collecting shrapnel from the bomb craters when our school authorities felt it was safe for us to go near them. For many years a tail fin of a German bomb was one of my prized possessions.

Like many youngsters, excited by spy stories told in wartime, we were always on the lookout for possible real life spies. There was an old tramp who used to haunt the area around the school. We were convinced that we had a transmitter in his ragged ruck-sack, which he used when the German bombers flew over at night. We also suspected him of flashing lights at the aircraft whenever we saw beams of light in the nearby woods. True enough, the blackout regulations were broken from time to time, whether by poachers or actual spies!

My final memory is of an embarassing incident involving my old grand-father. On a visit to our house, home to two families, with five children in each. We each had individually named, one pound jars of jam on the table at meal times. Jam which had to last a whole month. Obviously, we guarded our ration of Jam with our lives and did not take it kindly when grand-father tried to help himself, first from one pot, then another, to shrieks of childish protest. No doubt he left his ration book at home!

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