大象传媒

I was probably about 7 and two of my friends used to walk with me to school, in all about 2-3 miles daily. I used to have to cross the A5 road in Shrewsbury and I can remember the huge army tanks. I think why I was so frightened was because I couldn't see anyone driving. It was just these heavy noisy pieces of metal. We used to cross near an island and watching a tank turn makes a terrific noise. I would be very frightened. My school was at the top of a hill and I was always terrified the brakes on the tanks would fail and these tanks would come hurtling down the hill. This actually happened although I wasn't there at the time. On one occasion a tank came hurtling down the hill and crashed through a gate into a field.

My very first dream which I can remember was about German prisoners. This was because I would very often see open-top lorries with German prisoners of war. There was a German prisoner of war camp approximately one mile from where I lived on the outskirts of Shrewsbury. There would probably be about forty men on each lorry and each lorry had a British soldier with a gun standing guard over the prisoners of war. As a child I used to wonder why the prisoners didn't attack the one soldier and take his gun. The very vivid dream I had was of many German prisoners chasing after me and of me running into my bedroom and hiding under my bed. The Germans came into my room and I could see their feet from under the bed. Then one soldier looked under the bed and at that point I woke up! For months after I wouldn't look under my bed as I thought a German soldier might be there. Very often at night my mother would wake both myself and my sister to look at the glow in the skyline of the fires where German planes had bombed targets. I remember it being very bright in the middle of the night. I can remember the drone of planes at night and I can still hear the noise to this day.

After the war ended when I was about 11 they started to allow the Prisoners of War out of camp. We invited them to our church and there would be about fifty of them. They would sit on one side of the church and at the end of the service we would give them tea and cakes. By this time we were no longer frightened of them. Most of them could not speak English and every so often the sermon would be in German. People in the congregation got to know them quite well and would often invite them into their homes for meals, particularly at Christmas time.

I can remember the way some Prisoners of War were treated at the end of the war by people who were still fearful of them or just didn't like them. One recollection is of flooding in the town of Shrewsbury and of having to walk across wooden planks to get to the centre of the town which wasn't flooded. I can remember German Prisoners of War being pushed off the planks into the water and I couldn't understand why they were being treated so badly as we had accepted them into our Church and we knew they were family men just like our own families. A few German Prisoners of War were allowed to stay in England and a few of them married English girls.

One of our neighbours had worked for the 'Daily Express' in London and he was moved out to Shrewsbury with his family. We used to play with his daughter Sally and we would play in one of the shelters. We were used to the sirens going off as practise and would take no notice but the first time Sally heard the siren, she screamed and ran all the way home telling everyone to take cover. We thought she was mad but she had actually experienced the bombings in London which luckily we never did.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.