大象传媒

The city seemed strange when I returned after nearly three years away. After the fresh clean air of the East Yorkshire coutryside the city smelt strange, smells I had fogetten during my enforced exile. It was a mixture of fish from the fishdock, the sour smell of Hull Brewery and the heavy industrial smells from the mills along the river Hull, all of this overhung by the acrid smell of bombed buildings of which there were many. But I was excited to be back home again and looked forward to joining my new school. In the meantime I explored bomb damaged buildings, especially the dockside, though naturally my mother knew nothing of my wanderings. The city was still being bombed but the worse we hoped was over, although there were now daylight raids as well. My mother was working at Amstrongs in Beverley doing a three week-cycle shift pattern: 6-2; 2-10 and 10-6 making war material. Her hours meant she had some free time two weeks out of three so we could go out together occasionally (when she wasn't catching up on her sleep) Sometimes I went to Beverley with her on the train, returning with her at the end of the shift, having spent the day with mutual friends. Everybody looked like ghosts in the blue lighting of the carriages at night.

Came the day when I joined the new school only a few
minutes from our house; I was full of expectations. The first (of many) disappointments was that the masters (not teachers!) didn't wear gowns or mortar boards like the schools in my comics - I was heavily influenced by stories set in public schools - I loved Tom Brown's Schooldays! We all had to do German during the first year which was a surpprise. We used to sing hymns in German during morning assembly. When we'd been doing it for a few months some of us used to hold conversations in German on the top of the bus, hoping that everybody would think we were spies. The second year I began to study French but it was to be many years in later life before I mastered it. The war was still going on all this time; some mornings we heard about pupils who had been killed in the raids. A few of us used to scavenge in the bombed buildings, sometimes climbing up to the roofs in spite of dodgy staircases and missing floors. We regularly picked up shrapnel and what they called 'radar clutter' in the streets after a raid. After D-day I kept a large scale map in my bedroom and marked the positions of the respective armies. We saw in the newsreels some of the concentration camps being taken over by the allied troops and the dreadful images of the starving inmates wearing striped clothing like pyjamas. I found these pictures disturbing. When it finally arrived VE day was exciting; there were bonfires in the streets and street parties for us kids. The blackout was a thing of the past and some buildings had neon signs again. Then came the atom bomb followed by the surrender of Japan. At school somehow we found out what went into making an atom bomb - it must have been the science master - and we all drew our own versions of it. Although we'd seen it on the newsreels none of us realized the extent of the devastation nor its deadly side-effects.

Even though the war was over rationing became even more severe and there were lots of shortages. When I went shopping with my mother we saw queues everywhere. Many people queued without knowing what they were queuing for. Unless you took some newpaper with you often you wouldn't be served. One day we heard a rumour that some bananas were coming; I queued up for several hours and managed to get some in the end. A photographer took a picture of the queue, including me, which appeared in the Hull Daily Mail. Meanwhile, at school I was becoming more and more disillusioned - I seemed always to be in the bottom three of the class in my reports. In the end I decided by myself without consulting my mother that I would leave school when I was 14, which was the earliest you could leave school then. I knew I wouldn't get my school certificate (similar to O level). So a few days before my birthday, at the end of the autumn term I walked out of the hated building for the last time. My childhood was over, though innocence had gone while still an evacuee. In spite of my belief and acceptance of the fact that I was not clever (some might say it was stupid ending my formal education so early in life) I began the road which would eventually lead me to heights I had never dreamed of, things which had never crossed my mind. But that is another story; this one ends in 1946.

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