大象传媒

Although I now live in Newcastle upon Tyne, I was born and brought up in Southampton, on the South Coast of England.

My father had been in the Royal Navy for 15 years between the wars, signing on as a boy-entrant at age 15, and signing off in the summer of 1939. What happened next is almost unbelieveable, but it's true.

When war was declared, (in September 1939), my father tried to re-enlist at his previous rank. He was turned down, and told that he could enlist like everybody else, and start from the bottom again! (My father remained convinced until the day he died that this was because he had a 'black mark' against his name, because he had been involved in what was called 'the Invergordon Mutiny', which wasn't a mutiny at all, simply a sit-down strike against a draconian pay cut).

So, my father took a 'reserved occupation' instead, and worked throughout the war in the Southampton docks as a rigger, as well as being in the Home Guard - (Dad's Army). The dock area of Southampton was very busy, and a major bombing target for the German air force (the Luftwaffe).

Being a keen fisherman before the war, Dad used his fishing skills to supplement our meagre meat ration, (2 ounces per person per week!) as follows.

Before actually starting his shift, he would bait several fishing lines and just throw them over the side of whatever ship he was working on. During his lunch breaks he would check and see if he had caught anything, and re-bait as necessary. At the end of his shift he would bring home his 'catch' - still alive, and the whole lot would go into our bath, with enough water in it to keep them alive. You see, we did not have refrigerators or freezers in those days, and keeping the fish alive meant that they didn't 'go off'.

There were always fish in our bath - plaice, eels etc, and they made an important addition of protein in a time when meat was in such short supply that it was virtually non-existent.

(Incidentally, the house next door but one to us, was hit by a bomb and blown to bits. We were safe in our Anderson shelter, and our house suffered a few cracks in the walls, but that was all.)

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