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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Graham Black of the People's War project on behalf of John Chapman and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

When my brother was being born in July 1939, I was farmed out to a friend of my mother, Kath Braithwaite. She had just taken in an Austrian 8 year old girl refugee named Liesel and although she spoke hardly any English and I no German we got along very well and caused havoc. My brother was baptised at Leicester when we were staying with my grandparents and while we were there the National registration officer came around and I received my Identity Card and my new number which later became my National Health number.

I was just 5 when war broke out and living in Birmingham. For a short while in early 1940 we went to stay in Llanrug at the foot of Snowdon with a family called Robinson. I greatly enjoyed it there but my mother found the language barrier and isolation too much so we soon moved back to Birmingham. During the summer of 1940 I would take off on my tricycle and explore the local streets much to my mother’s concern. I well recollect having to lift my trike over hosepipes and rubble but usually someone would recognise me and I was carted home.

In September 1940 I was sent to school at Alston Road Primary School but was a late arrival which meant that my name was at the bottom of the register. Here I learned my first big lesson in life that life was not fair. Every so often a load of toys arrived for us poor city children and they were always distributed by getting the first on the register to choose first and then the second and so on. On one occasion there was a lovely red fire engine and all sorts of desirable objects — but when it came to my turn I got a picture of a monkey.

My father was an air raid warden and was out most nights. We had a bomb drop outside the house which created a small hole in the road and quite often when he came in he was helping someone who had cycled into the hole in the pitch dark. I acquired an army helmet of which I was inordinately proud and one day a German reconnaissance plane flew very low over the street and the pilot waved at me — I dashed back into the house to my helmet on only to find my father had given it away to another warden down the street.

We were given an Anderson shelter but it was used only to keep plants in as it always flooded and was quite useless. My father shored up the staircase and put a bed under it and I slept with my mother and baby brother there. In November 1940 a bomb dropped quite close to the front of the house and blew the front wall in — although there were quite a number of people in the house noone was seriously injured and I was carried down the street to the church hall for the rest of the night. Next morning a neighbour drove us to the Bull Ring to catch the Midland Red bus for Gloucester but it had left when we arrived so we drove through Coventry and eventually caught up with it at Kenilworth. It was the night of Coventry’s big raid and I have an abiding memory of driving down streets littered with hosepipes along a pathway within the rubble bulldozed clear. I am sure I can recollect an icecream van in the middle of all of this.

At Gloucester we changed buses to a Red and White service for Stroud and we ended up in the railway station yard which was the terminus for buses. We changed again, this time to a Western National ‘flying pig’ (Bedford) which took us to the Golden Cross and a short walk down Dudbridge hill to my mother’s Uncle George with whom we stayed for a couple of years. My father got a job at Tylers factory in Thrupp making Horsa gliders and other airplane bits and pieces and I was packed off to Rodborough School. Here I learned another lesson. — in Winter be early and you get a place near the fire — the heating was a large wood burning stove by the door which needed to be fuelled on a regular basis and whose heat barely reaching more than five feet away.

We could not believe how dedicated the wardens were in Stroud. Within a few hours of arrival Mr Phillips, one of our neighbours came around with ear plugs. On a regular basis we were cajoled into carrying our gas mask, taping up the windows and being ready to meet German paratroopers. One day a stick of bombs fell on Selsley Common and Western National ran an emergency bus service so people could get up to see the damage. Having experienced the worst of the Blitz in Birmingham and become quite blaze about the ARP this all seemed a little over the top. At school we had regular bomb drills where we had to don our gas masks and crouch under the desks. We were invited to go out in the highways and hedgerows to pick rose hips from which they made a disgusting concoction called rose hip syrup — I think it substituted for syrup of figs but I never tried it. We had been promised about 2d a pound for these hips and a pound took a lot of collecting. When it came time to receive our rewards the teacher announced that we had all made a valuable contribution to the Spitfire Fund.

The rationing did not affect me very much as I was too young to remember anything different but I was acutely aware that I had a green ration book and that meant that when a shipment of bananas arrived in town the news spread very rapidly and only a few shops were supplied. Soon huge queues formed outside them and with a green ration book you could get just one banana — to be honest I cannot remember ever getting to eat one; but later in the war we used to get packets of dried bananas which were lovely and sticky and I adored them. I also recall the dried egg powder from which you could make a small pancake which again I found delicious and much better than the real thing.

In 1942 we were offered a Council house in Cashes Green as our Uncle George had another family of evacuees, the Addingtons, staying with him and the house was declared overcrowded. Mr Addington was a fisherman from Eastbourne and he tried, without much success, to interest me in fishing. So one day we loaded our meagre possessions on to the local carter’s cart and off we trotted to our new home. I moved to Cainscross school where again I found myself at the bottom of the register with all it implied. But generally it was a very happy time and I was shielded from the horrors of the war. We kept chickens and rabbits in the garden, which was quite large and my father had two allotments so we were never short of food although it was never plentiful. We always bought a cockerel chick in the spring and fattened it up for Christmas. They usually became household pets and we cried our eyes out when Mr Farmiloe came around to kill it. But the tears soon vanished as we had the fun of plucking it while the blood ran into the bath and the eager expectation of Christmas to come.

We saw very little of the war although I have many memories of Italian former prisoners of war who were released when Italy changed sides. They used to roam around town wearing a yellow diamond on their backs and were always jolly and cheerful and great favourites with the ladies although I was little too young to understand this. Occasionally troops would be camped in the fields above us and we used to see them marching about. We couldn’t tell who was who but we always called out ‘got any gum chum’ in case they were Americans however, usually they were British and all we ever got was a pebble or a old button.

When I heard the announcement of the end of the war in Europe on the radio I dashed out on my bicycle to spread the good news but there was no one about and I waited at the end of our road, where there was a huge circular water tank, for some time and then went home to await my mother’s return so I could tell her — but she had already heard. We had a large brick air-raid shelter just around the corner and I was cajoled into giving up one of my prize possessions — a doll of Adolf Hitler which was hung from a scaffold built on top of the shelter beneath a bonfire and all the neighbours gave a great cheer as the flames consumed him.

John Chapman
9/7/05

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