大象传媒

At about the beginning of April 1942, I came home with a sore throat. My father blew some flowers of sulphur down to relieve the soreness. This had little effect and the next morning my mother sent out for the local GP, which cost half a crown (12.5 pence). He diagnosed that me with Diphtheria, and I was taken into Mill Lane hospital with fever. It was only at the top of the road I used to live in, Waldgrave Place, but they still took me there in a green ambulance.

My father worked on ship repairs during the war and became good friends with a sailor named 'Percy Jones'. He often came to our house for tea as his fiance lived a short tram journey away in Penny Lane. He was on a Corvette called the Periwinkle that escorted convoys in and out of Liverpool, so his ship was in port very often.

My tenth birthday was on April 12th, and the nurse came down the ward with two bananas and put them on my locker. She said that I must know someone special to bring me bananas as no one had seen them for years. As I was in the isolation ward, where visiting was not allowed, I did not find out who had sent them. I could only guess that one of the ships in a convoy had given them to Percy Jones and he had passed them on to my father. I remember eating the bananas and keeping the skins until they turned black, just to have the smell! My overrall stay in hospital was fifteen weeks.

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