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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Caroline Drodge of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Arthur Cross and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the sit's terms and conditions.

I was born in October 1931 and lived in Burbage. The village midwife, then an old lady, was going down to Swansea for a period, and took me with her. We’d been there two weeks when war broke out. They started bombing the ports so we came back.
My father was a woodworker. He made rifles out of floorboards for me and my younger brother and sister. We started doing drills with our friends. The grown ups used to gather outside the Liberal Club to practice their drills. The Sergeant asked us children to show them our drills.
I went to Church School, moving to Grove Road at 8 or 9 years until I was 11. We had evacuees in the school from 1940/41, many of them from Birmingham, where they were starving. We grew potatoes and other vegetables. There were more evacuees after the Coventry raid. They spoke in a different way. You were not accepted in Burbage unless you were born here. (My mother came from Nuneaton.) Some of them had never seen a cow before. They were scared of green spaces and kept together in groups. At 11 years I went to Westfield Secondary Modern and left school at 14 years. I used to go to Westfield by bus. Apart from the grammar school, schools were seen as factory fodder. Many couldn’t afford a blazer for school. All our teachers during the war were old age pensioners, who were ill in winter. When we were short of teachers we had the PT teacher. Senior pupils, aged 17 years, from the grammar school then came to teach us. They joined up at 18 years. There were 40 — 60 in a class and it was an all boys school. We had the cane a lot. Lady teachers made you stand outside the classroom, then the Head would come round and cane us. Our hands often bled.
I lived in Windsor Street, and then later moved to Lutterworth Road, opposite the Liberal Club. There was an American base in Burbage.
The trip to Swansea was the first holiday I had. We used to go to Leicester and Wicksteed Park as Sunday School outings. We went to Dudley Zoo one year in six buses from the Robinson garage. The trips carried on during the war.
We used to play cricket and football in the road. There wasn’t much traffic as petrol was restricted. There were some buses and lorries and the farmers could get petrol. There were lots of bicycles. We made our own interests, fishing and making things with our hands.
We couldn’t afford much meat. We bred 100 Dutch rabbits in a big shed. I’ve never eaten rabbit since. I learnt how to kill and skin a rabbit when I was 8 or 9 years. The skins were pinned outside to dry and sold to a dealer for clothes. I had to gather the grass for them every day. We ate about two per week.
Milk floats came round daily. There were no fridges and we had to stand the milk in pails of water. It didn’t last well in summer.
Officers moved into Burbage Hall in 1944. They were here for five months and went over on D Day.
We became more adult as children. The library only had adult books, so we used to read them, including cowboy books, Roy Rodgers and Hopalong Cassidy and academic titles. The librarian was Mrs Simpson. Rupert books were also around. The only books at school were English and arithmetic.
There was no electricity, just candles and gaslight. The wireless batteries would run out, and we used to take them to the garage opposite the Sycamores to get them recharged on the accumulator.
The only entertainment programmes allowed on the wireless were ‘music while you work’ and ITMA.
We had a steel shelter in our house, which the government supplied. It measured 4 feet by 6 feet and it doubled up as a table. There was a gas lamp in the room. I shared a room with my brother, and my sister had a small one. My parents had a room in the front. Planes went over and a land mine fell. Three houses including ours were damaged. The windows blew in at the front and out at the back. We were in bed at the time. The three houses were lifted off their foundations, and there was a crack through all three on the inside. We pushed rolled up newspapers into the cracks to fill them. We were infested with mice and rats. We caught 13 rats in one day. We had a copper to wash our clothes in, and a gas cooker.

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