大象传媒

(Story typed by a UCN Community Volunteer)

Although I was only eight years old at the outbreak of the Second World War, I remember vividly that sunny September day the third in the month in 1939. We didn鈥檛 have a proper radio but in common with most with most other people we had what was called a wireless relay receiver, which was a speaker connected by wire to the central receiver at the Relay shop in Horsemarket. On it we could receive the only two 大象传媒 programmes and also Radio Luxembourg, for this service we paid sixpence a week.
Later in the war when the Germans occupied Luxembourg, we used to listen for fun to the propaganda broadcasts by the British traitor Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce). After the war he was executed in the Tower of London.
On that day in 1939 we sat after dinner listening to the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announce that we were at war with Germany. For a few months it was at first a phoney war, there wasn鈥檛 much fighting just the occasional air raid, many recognition flights by single aircraft.
We of course had the blackout from the first day. All the houses had either blinds or blackout curtains so not a chink of light showed (the wardens soon let you know if any light showed). Streetlights were switched off for the next five years. Cars and bicycles had hoods fitted on their lights.
During those first mouths the evacuees arrived and most people had someone billeted with them. We had a boy from London about thirteen years old, but in common with quite a few, he returned home in 1940, unfortunately before the blitzes stated. Most however stayed and some settled here after the war.
With this large influx of children for a few months the school hours had to be rearranged, one week the local children went to school at eight o鈥檆lock until twelve thirty, the evacuees twelve thirty to five, this was reversed the following week. But after a few months we were back to normal hours, with the evacuees being absorbed into the normal classes.
During these war years we used to have school allotments were the boys did gardening and grew crops that we could buy. In the Autumn we used to go for walks in school time picking Rose Hips from the hedgerows to make Rose Hip Syrup, this was needed as we no longer had foreign fruit, such as oranges, lemons or bananas (it was over five years before they reappeared).
After Dunkirk in 1940 my father joined the army and was away for over five years, with just a few leaves in his time. I remember on these leaves he used to bring either his rifle or Sten gun home with him, my brother and I had great fun playing with a real gun.
In the August of 1940 the air raids started in earnest. We were awakened most nights by the sirens. In the distance we could see the sky lit up from London and Coventry burning. At first when the siren sounded usually about midnight until three am we would go into the Anderson shelter which we had in the back garden. This was a corrugated metal shelter built in a hole three foot deep and covered in sandbags and earth. There were also some eight hundred brick street shelters in the streets of Northampton.
But after a few nights in the shelter we stopped using it. Instead we had a bed put in the gas cupboard, under the stairs, mainly because we had seen bombed houses, and could see that when most places were bombed the stairs remained standing. We could always tell when the German planes were overhead by the sound of their engines, which was different from ours. (Years later when I made the film Battle of Britain I suddenly heard again that unmistakable sound, and overhead flew a squadron of German ME 109s).
The morning after an air raid we were still expected at school on time (it was no excuse to say you were up in an air raid).
After my father went in the army times were hard, my mother only got twenty-eight shillings a week to keep us, from the government, plus seven shillings a week Dad used to allow her. No family allowance in those days. My father could only sent that much because his army pay was only twenty-one shillings a week. Incidentally it was still that amount when I joined the army a few years later.
Our rations were small about 2ozs of cheese, butter, tea, sugar, a small meat ration, one egg a fortnight, soap was rationed and we used sticks of shaving soap as toilet soap. Bread and potatoes weren鈥檛 rationed until after the war. Rationing went on from 1939 to 1954 nine years after the war ended. We only had 2ozs of sweets a week, to replace them we used to chew liquorice twigs, which were the sweet roots of the liquorice tree, and ovaltine tablets.
But we never went hungry; we had a healthy diet with plenty of vegetables. I was fortunate to have a Grandfather who was a poacher, he kept us in rabbits, and an uncle who kept pigs, which we killed at home, and I remember the sides of bacon and hams hanging up in his shed.
We had a large garden, which we grew most of the vegetables we needed, so we had good dinners, rabbit pies, good old-fashioned puddings, and I believe everyone was fit and healthy.
If you had the usual childhood coughs or colds we still used the old fashioned remedies which worked very well. Kayline or bread poultices on your chest (Kayline was like grey clay). Or you had your chest rubbed with goose grease (smelt horrible). Id you had a wound that had festered you either used the Kayline again or yellow bascillicon ointment these all drew the infection away.
Clothing and furniture was rationed, but everybody had their Sunday best, which was always worn on Sunday, and you weren鈥檛 allowed to play in the streets on that day. Shoes were leather, which were repaired, when they needed half-soling and healing. Also metal studs (blackeyes) and metal heal tips were put on the shoes.
Coal was rationed too I believe one hundred weight a week, remember all houses had coal fires. To supplement this ration we used to go to the gas works and fetch a sack of coke. I used to do this on Saturday mornings, pushing an old pram from Kingsthorpe to bring the coke home, a round trip of about six miles.
At harvest times we helped in the fields, pea picking, tying and stacking the sheaves of wheat and barley.
Northampton was like a large army base, with Barracks and the Drill Hall, the Racecourse was one large army camp completely built on with huts and roads except for a narrow strip near barrack road, and by the White Elephant was a fire station. We had soldiers of all nationalities here, Canadian, Australian, American, Free French, Dutch, etc. Also two prisoner of war camps, one for German鈥檚 at the cross roads for Boughton, and one for the Italians at the end of the Avenue Spinney Hill in the Corena soft drinks factory, this is now Ennerdale Close. The Italians were allowed out on their own in their free time after 1943, the Germans in 1945, and there never was any trouble between then and our own people. Many elected to stay here after the war.
An overwhelming memory is the sight in the summer evenings from 1942 (we had a double summer time in those days and it didn鈥檛 dark until midnight) of the bombers of the RAF building up in their formations over Northampton for the thousand bomber raids on Germany. It is impossible to describe the sky full of planes circling around for about an hour or more then off they would go. Next morning as we went to school they would be returning some of them on fire and limping home. During the day the Americans would go on similar raids. Both the RAF and the Americans at times suffering heavy casualties.
By this time German air raids had lessened and didn鈥檛 relay start again until 1944when we had the flying bombs (V1) and Rockets (V2). I only experienced one V1, which exploded at Creaton.
In 1942 the town experienced a miraculous escape. A Stirling four-engined bomber was returning from a raid, it was in trouble and on fire over Kingsthorpe the crew bailed out, the pilot was killed by the Bowling Green on Kingsthorpe recreation ground when his parachute failed. The pilotless plane on fire with the ammunition exploding circled over all the terraced streets finally crashing in George Row by All Saints Church and going down Gold street, causing hardly any damage and no one got hurt. (Bullets from this plane hit my wife鈥檚 house in Green Street).
Along the country roads in 1940 when we were under the threat of invasion were at intervals huts full of ammunition for the use at proposed resistance, also large concrete blocks the size of oil drums to roll into the road to stop army tanks. The country was determined not to surrender as the rest of Europe had done.
Four days after D-day in 1944 my father went to France with his regiment the Royal Artillery he was attached to the Canadian first army, he was in battle at Nijmegan trying to get to our men trapped Arnhem. Christmas 1944 he was in the battle of Bulge in the Ardennes, when the Germans tried to get to Antwerp. Then in March 1945 he was in the crossing of the river Rhine, finally being demobilised at the end of that year.
May 8th 1945 the end of the war in Europe, we all had street parties; the lights came on again. Although the war against Japan went on until the August with many so many getting killed, I remember a friend coming to school saying his father had just been killed, and my old teacher crying in class because his son had died in Borneo.
Looking back one remembers how we had to grow up early; we worked to help our families having to replace the men. But in other ways it was a happy childhood so different from today. Everywhere was so clean, no litter crime was virtually unknown, you could walk the streets in safety even in the blackout, going around to the off licence on Sunday with a jug for a pint of beer and five woodbines. A piece and a pennith from the chip shop, wrapped in your own newspaper (fish was five pence, chips one penny) so for a shilling (five new pence) you had double fish and chips all fried in dripping, no cooking oil in those days. I remember at times delivering blocks of this dripping for a black marketeer to his customers, calling in home on the way and slicing off a chunk for my mother to use (buckshee ration). Then when the first bananas came in, queuing up with my ration book, hoping the shopkeeper would mark the book in pencil, then going to the back of the queue, rubbing it out with a piece of bread, and getting another ration.
So I started this story as a boy of seven, and was a teenager at the end, starting work a few days past my fourteenth birthday.

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