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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Rosemarie Grundon of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Alfred Gould and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Bombed 11 days later

I was born in Ipswich in 1929, one of 5 children and my father was in the RAF during the war. Despite having all these children, my mother still had a soldier billeted with her by the army for a few nights, and that was the first time I had seen a man shave with a cut throat razor — it looked very dangerous.
On my 11th birthday, 2 things happened.
I was given a brand new bike, shiny and gleaming and something that I had always dreamed of.
The second thing was that because of the threat of bombing that was the day our family were evacuated from Ipswich and I never saw my bike again.
Taken by train, and carrying our gas masks, we arrived at Leicester station and were taken to a cinema to sleep overnight, It was already half full of other families in a similar plight to ourselves.
Local people had been asked to accommodate evacuated people like us, but large families were usually split up as there was not enough room for everyone.
My mother and the young baby went to one family, my brother and I to a second and my sisters to another. Being split from the family was horrible, but worse was to follow.
11 days after we had left Ipswich, according to the letter that I still have from my grandmother who had stayed behind in Ipswich, our family home was bombed to such an extent that it was uninhabitable. My mother was extremely upset.
The couple who took my brother and me in eventually found room for all of us, which was so much better.
I spent a lot of time down by the canal at Thurmaston where we were living, fishing out bits of old wood to dry for firewood.
We would keep rabbits in hutches in the garden for eating and saved potato peelings to feed the chickens. I was often sent out to collect dandelions to feed the rabbits, and although I had cared for them, eating them was still a treat.
One of my favourite games was with an old pram wheel. We used to put a stick through the spindle and race it along the streets, a bit of home made fun.

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