大象传媒

My real first memory of the war was the day the annoucement was made on the wireless. One of our good neighbours, a Mrs Woollams, who my mum relied on a lot came to our house for a good cry and to offer each other some support. They both could well remember the First World War and how it had affected different families'. Straight away, there was talk of food rationing and many things being in short supply. I was 4 1/2 at that time and there are lots of nice memories of that time. There were always lots of horses in our street belonging to delivery men, the baker (from the co-op), the milkman, the man who collected the pig food, and the men who emptied the dustbins. On or two exceptions were the grid cleaning lorry, and my dad who drove a bus for a living and used to bring it home most nights because he mostly had very early starts next day. I felt very proud to see the coach by our house as none of my friends had even been on a coach and I used to let them have a look in but not to sit in the drivers seat like I did. It was very frighteneing some times when the pig man came because I don't think his horse had been trained to other traffic, and at the slightest noise, or if a dog ran into the street near to him, he would rear up and gallop off down the street pulling his cart full of swaying pig bins behind him. The problem was, the street was a dead end and across the street was a fence of iron railings with spikes on the top into which he would crash. This would upset him even more, because he could not escape at all from his heavy cart. The bakers horse was by far the most docile, and the baker had always got a piece of bread for me to feed it with. But the best time was with the grid cleaning lorry, it would amaze me how much rubbish came out of each grid, but I suppose that all depends how much us kids dropped down! One of our favourite things was scrumping apples from the local farm (this is where the pig man kept his pigs), but you had to be so careful of getting caught, so we used to go at dusk when it would not be so easy to see us. I had to pick who went with me, as some kids could not keep it to themselves where the best apples were. At the bottom of the street, where the fence was, is where we spent most of our time after school and weekends, because this was common land and our playing fields with a brook running through it, and we could always catch newts, frogs, dragonflies and see plenty of water voles.Most grown up people kept some kind of domestic animals and we were no exception, as our family kept lots of chickens in the back garden of our house, and this grew during the war into quite a good concern, so we took over the garden of the man next door(who didn't like gardening anyway). We had perhaps 40 laying pullets and as these grew into old hens, they would be sold or exchnged with the neighbours for other items. I think it was Autumn when new day old chick would be fetched from the town market and put under a low light bulb to keep them warm, with old woollen clothes around them. There were some losses and it was sad to see the dead ones thrown out. My father seemed to be able to get hold of chicken corn quite easily on his coachtrips into the country. My brother Ron, kept and bred rabbits for a hobby, and we had about 6 hutches in theback garden with perhaps 6 breeding does altogether. As soon as babies were born, they were sold or given away to his friends. To avoid distress from my mum and sisters at rabbit stew time, our rabbits would be swopped with neighbours rabbits, so we were told anyway. At mating time (because we had our own buck) I wasn't allowed to watch what went on, but I wasn't bothered then because I didn't understand anyway. We had a very large cooking pot on the gas stove in which my mum and sisters would boil all our potato peelings and any other scraps of vegetables. This was mixed with KARSWOOD POULTRY SPICE to make them lay better, also we would bake the egg shells in the oven then crush them with the rolling pin to feed back to the hens to aid digestion and form new eggshells. One old man, a Mr Tansley, kept goats on a piece of waste ground at the bottom of our street next to the common, and we used to watch him milk them into a small saucepan, and when he had gone we would try it for ourselves, but the goats used to get very agitated, so there was something we weren't doing quite right! At the time Christmas approached we would start to sort out which of the hens were to be killed and sold or eaten by our family, these were selected by age or infirmity by my mum. The killing was a bit messy so I won't go into that, but they were hung over the bath to drain, so no one could take a bath just then. At this time of year anyway, the bath taps and plug hole were very often frozen up, and we had to resort to the tin bath in front of the fire. This was done on a rota basis with the girls first and then us lads next, but you had to promise not to wee in the tub unless you were last. One of the worst things in the cold weather was the outside toilet freezing up, we mostly kept a candle burning all the time when we had any, to try to keep it in use. Another memory I have is of the evacuees arriving at Common Station (this was on the far side of the common) and I sat on the footpath in front of the Rifleman Pub (still open) and watch in amazemnt as all these scruffy little kids were herded from the train onto waiting Midland Red buses which had queued up ready for them. Shortly after the buses moved off and the next time I saw them was down our street accompanied by a policeman and a Red Cross woman, who read from a list and seemed to know how many kids were in each house, because the lady took children to each house which hadn't got many already. Next door to us there lived an old lady with her son, so they were asked to take two and they took two sisters which she did, much to the delight of the local lads! A few weeks later as news got around, others were billeted around us, and apart from talking funny, soon got on with us all. We had one or two near misses with bombs dropped onto nearby area, like the railway track at Great Bridgeford and although it is a few miles away, our house shook and the windows rattled quite awful which brought more tears from my mum. There were a few onto the English Electric factory, where tanks were made for the army, and quite a bit of damage was done to the tank shop. One of my delights was to watch the great big tanks being driven up to the rail head at Common Station to be loaded onto flatbed trucks to go off to war. The tank drivers used to delight in making the tank spin in a part circle to create lots of sparks and tarmac much to the delight of us watching kids.The big common st the end of our street was a massive size, it was so big people siad that airplanes could land on it and remembering the thinking then about Germans landing at night, as we were told they would, some men came one day to cut deep trenches across the common in a large "H" pattern.The trouble was that the common was so boggy that the very large crane that they had bought to cut the trenches with, soon sank almost over its roof,much to the delight of us watching hordes of kids.It took a lot of men and also a large towing truck anchored to a great big willow tree on the edge of the common to pull it out.Every time it rained heavily the trenches would fill with water especially in the winter time, and it made a great skating lake and for wild sea birds, but I don't know how they found out about it! The bogs were caused by the local salt works pumping brine from underneath the ground to make salt and Stafford was well known for salt. On a Sunday afternoon we would creep into the salt works through a broken fence and look at the large salt pans which wre all steaminghot and always seemed to creaking and hissing. The pans were made by being riveted together on the corners and we used to collect the small discs of metal that had been punched out of the rivet hole for catapult catapult ammunition. Another good thing was a winder warmer, this consisted of a tin can (a treacle tin was best) with a wire handle on the top, with nail holes bpunched all around the sides, filled with any bits of coal or coke and lit off the gas stove. This could be carried around as long as the fuel lasted out. Most things were rationed during the war, and everyone was issued with a ration book by the War Ministry. The most important part was the sweet ration, so on the first Sunday of each week, our local sweet shop would open at nine o'clock for us kids to spend our ration. The best coupon was the 'E' which bought you four ounces of a very restricted type of sweet, all depending on what the shop man had that week. Sometimes instead of being made with sugar, the sweets were made with honey and were not half as good as they should be. Very often, before getting home all the sweets were gone and it was such a long wait until the following Sunday! Other things like clothes were also on ration, but this didn't bother me so much, because I think most of mine were handed down from my two elder sisters or from church and jumble sales of which there seemed to be an awful lot. For all foodstuffs each family had to register with a local shop to supply most things so we, like hundreds of other families, picked the local Co-op, which was ok until they had delivery of Canadian apples or some other type of scarce goods, when it was chaos to get served as the whole town seemed to be there at the same time as me in the queue. With us being a large family we didn't seem to go short of much in the way of foodstuff, although I don't remember any fat people at that time, we always had plenty of eggs to eat and my gran, who kept a small farm in Herefordshire, sent us things like dripping, when I think they had killed a pig. We seemed to have had plenty of tea, and my dad would take some to the coach garage where he worked and swap it for something that we were short of like sugar, if one of his mates didn't use sugar.

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