大象传媒

David Nicholls was three and a half when World War II started. David鈥檚 parents didn鈥檛 shelter him from what was happening, he understood what was going on because he read the newspapers, and listened to the radio. David lived in London with his older brother, mother and father. He also had a cousin that lived near him, and he used to get him into trouble.

He was evacuated to Cookham in Berkshire where he had to share a bed with his brother. When he was four and a half he started school there.

One morning David woke up and his brother started telling him that

planes had been flying over head, and bombs had been dropped. But during this time David had been asleep. Where the bombs had been dropped were big craters, and they were filled with water. In David鈥檚 London home, they had a bomb shelter in the garden. It wouldn鈥檛 have protected the family from a direct hit from a bomb. It had a bed with a wire mesh underneath, with a very thin mattress on top, so it was uncomfortable. The shelter was also damp and smelly, they weren鈥檛 free either.

David and his family then moved to Derbyshire, where David and his friends used to make catapults. They also used to get six inch nails, put them on the railway track and wait for the trains to squash them. Then they would make them into knives. David and his friends would go and play in the local quarry to give them something to do.

His school in Derbyshire was quite a long walk from his house, so sometimes he would be able to get a lift back to school at the end of lunch time with a lorry driver that lived near his street. He had gas mask training at school incase there was a gas attack.

His father worked with tanks and also owned a little shop that he had to close during the war due to shortage of supplies.

When London had been bombed, David鈥檚 house was slightly damaged from the effects of the bombs in the street that his house was in. Workers that had come to repair the houses in the street found a land mine hanging by the parachute on a branch of a tree.

When David was up in Derbyshire, he and his friend found a fruit garden, they went in, gathered some of the fruit and took it home to their families. Also he and his family would go out picking blackberries.

When David was fourteen his father passed away and at the time his mother was ill in hospital with cancer. David was doing exams at the time, so some days David would come home from school and be so depressed that he wouldn鈥檛 want to revise, but David failed the couple of exams that he revised for and passed the ones he didn鈥檛 revise for. Then, when David was fifteen his mother died.

When David was sixteen, he wanted a job. He went to three interviews and got turned down by all of them, he then went for a fourth interview and rowed with the interviewer. He finally found a company that would accept him, so then he started work at Shell International. He worked there for thirty five years.

David met his wife in 1956. It was at the twenty first birthday of his old next door neighbor from London.

Interviewed and written by: Michelle Diane Nicolson

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