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Although I was born after the war ended, it still had an effect on my early life. It is a period I remember as grey — grey suits, grey or black cars, rationed foods etc.

I was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, on 3.3.48. My father was in a reserved occupation as an analytical chemist at Stewarts and Lloyds; making steel tubes and fabrications including P.L.U.T.O (Pipe Line Under The Ocean ) for the Normandy assault. My mother also worked there but was a Bristol girl. They didn’t talk much about the war except about the bombing raids on Bristol and the South Wales and Newport steel works. Well into the fifties the Anderson shelter still stood in the garden.

At the bottom of the garden was a large Bramley apple tree with one side almost sliced off and propped up. My parents told me of the night the barrage balloon fell into our street and wedged between our pair of semi-detached houses and the next. The steel cable fell across the garden and the crew did not know the balloon was down and had become wedged. The cable was like a giant cheese wire as it was reeled in, and damaged our houses. It also sliced off the apple tree which never recovered. The balloon terrified everyone and it took some time to stop the winch. If the balloon had torn, there could have been an explosion big enough to wipe out the street, which was hastily evacuated as everyone smoked in those days and there was an anti-aircraft gun sited about two hundred yards away in a field. Half the roof was ripped off the house next door and the guttering was always a bit wonky for as long as I could remember. Every time I looked at that tree, I could imagine the scene that night.

Newport was fairly heavily bombed because of the steel works and the docks, but nothing like Bristol and Cardiff. The barrage balloons were necessary; even though
It was not always the Germans that they threatened. At night my parents would hear the bombing of Bristol across the Bristol Channel where of course many relatives lived.

Not a gripping story, nor anything special but a lot of the war was like that for many people. Just long hours, worry, sleepless nights and occasional terror - not always a direct result of German action! The war was rarely mentioned after it was over, even by my relatives in Bristol. We kids were always talking about it and attacking imaginary Germans, but we hadn’t lived through it.

Many years later, a German friend told me that his father was the same; he never mentioned the war. But during an allied attack, his infantryman father had hidden under a tank, which was hit by an anti-tank gun. He lived, but his hair was white from that moment on.

The balloon came down in 1941-2. My parents were Barbara and Arthur (Jimmy) Hodgkiss. They lived at 6 Badminton Road, Newport, Mon. with my grandmother, Florence Tucker.

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