大象传媒

Although I now live in Staffordshire, my home town is Ashington in Northumberland.

At the out break of the 2nd World War, I as a five year old who obviously did not know what all the fuss was about, and as Ashington had very little contact with the fighting side of the war, there was little to enlighten me.

I do not know the date of this event, but very early in the war, I remember my father taking me up to the 'top end' of Ashington to see what was a great tragedy for the people concerned.
A Sunderland flying boat had crashed onto the town demolishing houses in at least two streets, with considerable loss of life to both crew and townspeople.

62 years later, the details have obviously dimmed, but I can still recall the ugly gash in those two streets. There were many more tragedies in the country due to both enemy action and accidents such as that above, and hundreds of thousands of people will be able to tell of greater tragedies in their wars, but to the eye of a six year old, that crashed Sunderland flying boat was the war.

Brian Hall

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