大象传媒

This is one of the stories collected on the 25th October 2003 at the CSV's Make a Difference Day held at 大象传媒 Manchester. The story was typed and entered on to the site by a CSV volunteer with kind permission of Gordon Dickenson.

Bright lights of Yarmouth and the Bombing of Bradford

The first memory I was on holiday in Great Yarmouth, just a vision of the promenade and all the lights and some kind of little water ways with the lights twinkling, in hindsight all I could see was darkness and blackness, the blackout was a feature of the war.

The majority of my memories were in Bradford Yorkshire, there was very little activity. There were air raid warnings every night and you could hear the bombers droning over and then returning. There was one bombing raid and the theory was the pilot had panicked and dropped three bombs in Bradford, and that鈥檚 all we actually experienced.

When the air raid came, my mother gathered the family together and we rushed down into the cellar, we had a work table, and all crouched underneath there until the all clear was sounded. It was freezing with just a blanket. After the event my mother said there was more than one way of dieing and she didn鈥檛 want to die of pneumonia, she said we鈥檇 stay in bed next time. Fortunately there were no more air raids, so we got by staying in our beds. We did have air raid shelters on a recreation ground about one hundred and fifty yards away, both brick and earthen, but these were never used. As children, later on we just used to run through them because they were dark, it was a scare as they used to run the full length of the recreation ground.

As a child I don鈥檛 think I fully understood what was going on around me. My father had been in the First World War so he was exempt and too old to fight, but he was called up as an auxiliary fire man. Because the whole family was there there wasn鈥檛 this feeling that something was happening. I had two uncles that were in the war, they would come on holiday and I was proud to go out with them because they wore the uniform. On the whole I think we were divorced from the reality, apart from I things like the blackout, we noticed too that all the sign posts were taken down because invading Germans might know where they were. There was the cooperative society, which was called The City of Bradford Cooperative Society, and they blacked out The City of Bradford, it鈥檚 like dads army, you know? We鈥檙e doing everything we can incase there is an invasion.

My biggest memory is probably when I was about ten, I think it must have been the preparations for D Day, all the recreation grounds were taken over, there were hundreds of lorries just parked there and barbed wire round there. We were told they were foreign soldiers, they were Belgian, this must have been several months before D-Day its self. This must have been the build up, but again nobody knew, you didn鈥檛 have the intrusion of the media telling you or twenty four hour service, you just read the headlines but you were basically fed a line that everything was going alright.

I had one uncle who was in the war who fought in fifteen countries, all his experiences he kept to himself, he landed in the south of Italy and fought his way up to the north. He was in the signals section of the Royal Artillery, he was at the front line as it were, trying to get evidence of where the enemy were so they could actually fire the artillery. I don鈥檛 think he had massive respect for the Americans who had massive fire power and stayed in the background and just blasted away. The stories he told were more about the bureaucracy in the army rather than what was happening. They were in Iraq or Iran, one of the tents they had put up was slightly out of line, so, instead of moving that one tent the colonel said move all the others! Whether it was to keep them occupied, as he tells stories of painting pebbles and putting them around the tents. This is what you get from war, these short brief periods of panic, and then long periods of inactivity.

During the war, because you didn鈥檛 know everything different, you didn鈥檛 realise you were in rationing or food shortage, it was only at the end of the war there was this great thing for bananas. Most people didn鈥檛 know what a banana was until you got these strange yellow things. I remember going with coupons to the local specific store, sweets and things were very limited, in fact I stopped eating sweets and have never eaten them since as a result of that. We were short of things like sugar for baking, we used to pool. My grand parents were alive and they didn鈥檛 use the sugar so we got their bag of sugar. I think there was probably a greater community spirit, it鈥檚 difficult to explain how that was, it鈥檚 is when you start reminiscing and talking about the golden age, when you could walk the streets. For instance when my father was called on duty at weekends, the fire station was in Nelson Street in Bradford, which was about two miles away, I used to walk with his and carry his thigh length boots that he would wear, then I would walk back home in the dark all by my self. You can鈥檛 imagine now a nine or ten year old doing this! It was a secure society. We went to school on our own, came back on our own, went to the recreation ground on our own, this is why it was such a disappointment when the Army came and took over the recreation ground, but then we would play out on the street.

I can鈥檛 remember VE Day, VJ Day which was in August or September we were on holiday again in Rhyl and I can remember they had got some old rowing boats and they burnt those on a bonfire on the beach, that was the occasion the, big celebration. We weren鈥檛 into street parties in Bradford.

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