大象传媒

Henry Goodson (Peter) - Born 4 July 1937

I was only 2 years of age when the Second World War began. I do not remember the earlier years of the War but my parents have told me that in late 1939 my mother, brother, myself and an aunt were evacuated to Colchester and as the bombing raids that everyone expected did not materialise, we returned to London after six months.

A few months after our return, the blitz on London began and we were then evacuated to Chorley Wood, Buchinghamshire where we stayed for a number of months.

My first recollection of the War was when we moved to Filton, Bristol in 1942 when my father began working at the Bristol Aeroplane factory. We lived very near to the factory and in the early part of the War we saw quite a lot of raids, mostly at night. Air raid warning sirens were always going off and hence it was down to the shelter most nights. Sometimes the shelter was flooded because the base was below ground. These were known as Anderson shelters and were built with corrugated roofs. Because of this situation we would then have to proceed to my grandmother鈥檚 house, which was about one hundred yards across the road. My father would escort my brother and I across the road as the searchlights scanned the skies looking for the bombers. The sound of bombs crashing and banging in the distance could be heard as the aircraft factory was being targeted. It became very scary for a young child but as we were very young, we did not realise the dangers, and so we were up the next morning walking in the fields not realising that we could come across many dangers like unexploded bombs or incendiary devices. One hobby was to collect shrapnel. One thing that there were many of was bomb craters, which incidentally, when the rains came, there were ready made swimming pools and havens for wild life.

With the food shortage, we had to be very self reliant so everyone grew their own vegetables. The source of manure came from the cowpats that we collected and mixed with water to pour around the vegetables. Another source of food was mushroom picking, which was done very early in the morning walking through the dewy grass. We also kept chickens for our supply of eggs, feeding them on recycled potato peelings and bran and every morning we went excitedly to the hen house hoping for breakfast. Things in the shops were very scarce and I remember every Tuesday after school we would wait at the local sweet shop hoping for the weekly ice cream to arrive, which did not always happen. We very rarely saw any oranges and bananas were non-existent. One morning, a parcel arrived by post from my uncle who was in the Air Force stationed in Algiers. He heard that some planes were returning to England so he asked the pilot if he would take some parcels back to England to post, which they gladly did. Quite a few relations also received parcels and to our surprise, they were full of oranges!

One afternoon, a lad arrived at school with half of a banana sliced up which is uncle, who was in the Navy, had brought back from abroad. He was continually chased around the playground all afternoon, as nobody had ever tasted a banana!

When the War ended, we went to Bedford in the summer of 1946 and finally came to live in Southend on Sea in Essex in July 1947.

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