大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Holly Fuller of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Mr Terry Holder and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I remember in the early 1940s when I was six or seven years old and attending Wood Street School in Earl Shilton, we had to take our gas masks everywhere with us. Infact I still have mine in my garage at home.

I remember a bomb dropping on Everard鈥檚 Field (where Prospect Way is now), in Earl Shilton. It didn鈥檛 go off so the army had to come and blow it up. When they blew it up we were all taken into the School Hall, as it was felt to be the safest place. It caused lots of damage, as we sat there and heard the explosion plaster started falling from the ceiling of the hall and we later saw how it caused shop windows to break like at Alfie Edwards TV shop. It even killed a prize bull!

I also remember when Coventry was blitzed. My dad was working in a munitions factory in Coventry building Spitfires and weaponry. When he went to work after the very worse air raids on Coventry he told me about a dog he saw which was going berserk and was so petrified that it was running around the streets still tied to its kennel. My Dad took me to Coventry the weekend after the worst bombings to see the devastation.

My dad was also a member of the Homeguard, he was too old to be called up. One night the troop with their leader J T L Lesley Baxter (a man who later became my first boss) found a crew of Germans who had been dropped by an aeroplane. They were no older than seventeen years old.

We could often tell at school when there was going to be some big news that an offensive had been launched, we would watch the planes flying over our school playground at Breech Lane. On one occasion we saw many planes and later heard about the Battle of Arnhem.

My family decided to take in an evacuee, as there was only me to look after. We got a boy of about my age called Barry Newman. All the evacuees came from Saltley grammar School in Birmingham. It was organised by Mrs Etoff, the local shoe factory owner鈥檚 wife; she was the head of the WRVS. Us local kids never got on with the evacuees from Birmingham and there was a lot of rivalry and fighting. Barry did not stay with our family for very long, unfortunately he contracted a disease that meant he couldn鈥檛 keep still and twitched all the time, he had to be taken away to hospital and never came back to stay with us again.

We didn鈥檛 have an air raid shelter in our house but if my Dad was worried about us getting bombed he would make me sleep next to the chimney breast in a cot he made of chicken wire. He did this because whenever you saw a bombed house the only structure remaining upright would be the chimney breast.

One of the worst experiences of the war that I can remember was the rationing. There were no sweets and very limited supplies of sugar. I stopped having sugar in my tea and would save my ration for my Mum to occasionally make me home-made sweets like Fudge or Treacle toffee. I can remember the toffee being very thin and having to break it with a little hammer.

We of course had an allotment and we grew lots of our own produce. We also pickled eggs so they would last longer. My mum used icing glass to seal the porous shell of the egg. We had no fridges or freezers to keep food in, we relied on the coldness of the larder to keep most foods from going off. We would often bottle fruit to store it for longer, it was important not to waste anything.

We had one chicken to eat per year and this was saved for Christmas. Every house generally kept chickens and when you wanted to eat one someone would need to go and ring its neck. In our house this was my uncles job. Some houses would also keep a pig. When fat enough the butcher would come to kill it at the bottom of the garden. It was cheap to keep animals like this they were fed on scraps and could be killed for nutritional meat that was scarcely available and rationed.

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