大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website at Surrey History Centre on behalf of Michael Hookey. It has been added to the site with the author's permission and he fully understands the site's terms and condidtions.

I was born in Wimbledon, which was in Surrey at the time, in 1937. In September 1939, I was evacuated with my mother and sister (she was only a few months old) to Petersfield, Hampshire. We stayed there no more than a couple of weeks and then moved down to the Isle of Wight, to my grandmother's house, near Norris Castle.

My father worked on boat building at East Cowes. We didn't stay at Petersfield for very long because my sister had to sleep in a drawer and we weren't really wanted (I have no idea who we stayed with!).

I enjoyed the Isle of Wight. It was known as the 'land of plenty'. We had a very big garden and all our food was grown there. People disappeared off the island at the end of August and so locals were left with the leftover food for the holiday makers.

We got quite badly bombed on the Isle of Wight. I went to school down there and quite often had to sit on the stairs in my grandmother's house while the bombs were going off.

Dad's boatyard (called Groves and Gutridges) got bombed. Before and after the bombing, he was building air sea rescue launchers. It wasn't the largest firm down there, but there were quite a few firms, and it stayed in business until 10 - 15 years ago.

I can remember the build-up to VE day (June 1944). From the garden you could see across the Solent. It was crowded with boats and suddenly the army disappeared from Norris Castle (the Canadians were there). My mother took a portable radio out to some men building a shelter outside the house in our road's turning space (there were no shelters before then!) so they could hear about VE day.

During the autumn half term or Christmas 1944, we moved back to Wimbledon. There were V1s and V2s still landing near where we lived in Wimbledon. We had to go back to Wimbledon because people wanted to requisition the house.

I used to come up occasionally from the Isle of Wight and I can remember policemen on the gangways of boats with ID cards. The Isle of Wight was fairly restricted and Portsmouth and Southhampton got badly bombed.

Coming across from Portsmouth to West Cowes, my mother and father looked in telephone directories for my father's uncle, but I have found out since that he died soon after the war.

I went to Whippenham School on the Isle of Wight, which was opened by Queen Victoria. It was not a big school but had a huge playground, which hasn't really changed, except for the fact that a couple of new classrooms have been built on it. On the way to school, we had to walk further than the bus actually took us; we had to walk to Osbourne Gates to get the bus. The bus ride was about a mile and the walk was about an mile and quarter. We had a dug-out air raid shelter at school which was always flooded!

I didn't really ever feel scared during the war. We'd occasionally go down to the sea front at East Cowes but we couldn't go all the way along it because it was barricaded off.

My mother used to get rabbits from across the road. My grandmother's house was very primitive - we had gas lights eventually and all cooking was done on a coal fire range. We had stews. Our toilet was up the garden - it was freezing in winter, and our water supply wasn't very good either.

The garden was 200 ft by 25 ft and we grew vegetables, apples, gooseberries, but not blackberries, because we could get them from hedgerows. I used to collect conkers and rosehips for the war effort - the rosehips were made into rosehip syrup and acetone was extracted from the conkers to be used in explosives.

In autumn, we used to go into the fields and pick corn ears to feed the half dozen chicken we had in our back garden. Next door, our neighbours kept a couple of pigs. We got locked in the house when they were killed in the garden but we did get a share of the pork! We didn't get eggs on ration but got mill for our chickens and our neighbour got extra for their pigs. The pigs also ate the scraps of kitchen waste - nothing was wasted!

After my father's boatyard got bombed, it only took a couple of weeks before my father was back at work as the yard was made of corrogated iron etc. He didn't come back to Wimbledon until some time after the war when he was released from war work.

There was not much damage at our house in Wimbledon while we were away - the odd window was cracked and the ceiling, but generally the house was okay. When I went back to Wimbledon, I went back to Wimbledon Park school.

Transport was quite good during the war, probably better than it is now! Cars were very rare and I can remember German planes flying over quite low, machine gunning the big house on Osbourne Estate.

At the bottom of the garden there was a concrete tower with an anti aircraft gun on it, which was taken down 5 or 6 years ago. It was built while we were there and we used to watch it and could hear guns fire occasionally. There was also an anti aircraft camp opposite Whippenham school and we used to be able to hear it going off when we were at school. We would also hear air raid sirens at school and during them we'd go to the shelter.

At school, I got the cane (or a rap across the knuckles with a ruler) for throwing stones at wood pigeons. The pigeons were considered a pest by the farmer so I think he would have thanked me!

There was a little cinema at East Cowes and I can remember that an air raid siren once went off when we were there. On hearing it, we had walked home because there were no buses then. Buses didn't come up to my grandmother's until well after the war.

We used to play in the grounds of East Cowes castle which was hidden by trees back then. It was demolished in 1960 and is now a housing estate.

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