大象传媒

1931
I was born in the village of Anstey,Leicestershire in a Church Lane cottage behind the church, to the best of my knowledge my father was a drover, hedge cutter or helped my grandfather "old Tom" grave digging and scavenging the village (clearing the night soil). He left school at the age of 9 at the beginning of WW 1 to help on the land, thus he was barely literate and numerate at that time.The village was traditional with the addition of a shoe factory where my fathers brother Tom was,even then, a Trade Union firebrand and up and coming as assistant secretary of the Working Mens Club. The male members of the family included my fathers younger brother George who rose to the giddy heights of village milkman, no bottles just a small pony cart, milk churn and pint/half pint dipper.
The female members were my grandmother, Emma a staunch Congregationalist,daughters Emma, Annie and latecomer Marjorie born in 1921.
I understand that my father and brothers were the bain of the village policeman鈥檚 life, taking my grandfather as an example, nothing outright criminal but drinking,scrapes and fights. The pub across the road, "The Plough" was a bit down at heel in 1931, reflecting the general mood of depression and fear that things could and would get worse. The shoe factories worked fitfully, shedding more workers than they took on, cutting costs and wages to the bone. The farms were in hardly better state and rumour had it that the major earthquake, centered on Yarmouth, but affecting most of the country, was signifying Gods displeasure at all things British.
On the Parish boundary on fields known as Anstey Pastures "Old Hall" had been abandoned as the owner went bankrupt, later I heard he committed suicide and as the Hall became more and more derelict stories of his ghost were circulating. These events together with recall of a previous winter when snow covered the hedge tops gave a palpable air of alarm and despondency to the village. There were a number of suicides about that time, of significance is Thomas? or William? Moore who had a small shoe factory in Church Lane, it was up a yard behind the Plough Inn, it is reputed to have caught fire and its owner made bankrupt.
I was born 5 days before Christmas Day and I am told there was snow and the Christmas "Waits" came and sang a carol for me. It seems I was surrounded by birds and whippets as we had a caged singing Linnet in a cage outside the back door and racing pigeons in the yard. My father had a job of sorts driving cattle to Leicester Cattle Market on foot helped by his whippet dog.
1936
By 1936 things had become more even more difficult and my father looked for better employment prospects in Leicester City. We moved into a one up/one down slum in Park Street,up a yard, next to the palatial buildings of the New Walk, not far from the Museum. My father got a job digging trenches with the Electricity Board which he was to keep until retirement.
We were lucky for my first school was the Sacred Heart in New Walk which had a liason with the "Ragged Mission" so I was on the crest of a wave, a father in employment, clothes and boots and to crown it all every Friday night my father brought home "saveloys" as a treat before he went to the pub.
There are two, no three specific events I remember from that period the first is "Guy Fawkes" sitting in New Walk with a "guy" waiting for pennies, the second, "carnival" creatures with huge heads coming down New Walk and being consciously terrified for the first time in my life, unfortunately it was not to be the last, the third was doing a moonlight flit sitting on the handcart my father and mother were pushing the 4 or 5 miles to Braunstone where we had become part of the "Slum Clearance Project,Phase ? 1938. My father was laying the electricity cables for this huge piece of social engineering and was considered a priority to move in.
Apart from using the cable drum as a roundabout when the "gang" pulled cable through nothing much happened until August 1939, sometime during that month I was taken on a trip to Braunstone Aerodrome where Tiger Moths and an ancient passenger plane was inviting people to take a trip around the airfield for half a crown. I suppose they must have looked very modern at the time for it stuck in a seven and a half year olds memory.
There was a Siemens factory near the airfield which was approached by a footbridge over the railway line, I was left to roam while my father went into the "Airman's Rest" for a pint and I was attracted by soldiers putting barbed wire to block the bridge and more around the factory. One officious looking squaddie told me to "piss off" but my curiousity was aroused and this was my territory. I circumvented the obstacle via the line and saw more soldiers leaving a hedgerow across a field, when they had gone I scouted the area and found an underground cavity had been concealed by a thicket, but more of this later.
September the 3rd 1939 was a Sunday morning and the wireless unusually seemed to be permanently switched on. This was odd as it used heavy accumulators which I had to lug for miles to get recharged, eventually the message came over that we were at war, so serious was this news that my sister got up and made a cup of tea, within weeks she had enlisted in the ATS (Auxilliary Territorial Service) where she was trained as a driver, became a policewoman and reverted to driving armoured vehicles to the coastal holding area before "D- Day", we knew this because she parked one outside our house on the way and came in for another cup of tea. This was quite an event and I proudly showed all my mates over it. Soon after I gave a false age to join the Leicestershire Regiment Cadet Corps and one thing led to another. But that will have to wait. My father meanwhile had been told there was something wrong with his lungs and he was unfit for military service, I think it must have been quite serious because in 1948/49 one of his lungs was removed. The Electricity Board made him a "ganger" in charge of a group of labourers but he still kept digging, in fact his output increased with a hole for the "Anderson Shelter", the garden turned over to vegetables plus an allotment. We ate his racing pigeons, as I believe they were a banned species in wartime and they were followed by rabbit hutches for a continuing meat supply.
I did my bit for the war effort and stopped attending school, or rather a constant battle developed between the "Truant Man" and me, as he was rather elderly there was really no contest. Each time I returned I got a couple of stripes with the cane but as I could read, write and count and absorbed any book I could lay my hands on eventually everyone gave up and I came and went pretty much as I pleased. I suppose that sentence encapsulates my life story. I extended my territory by about 10 miles to my old home in Anstey, then further afield to Bradgate Park. These trips always proved fruitful by season, the railway cutting provided wild strawberries and rabbits were easy to snare if you set the trap downwind, horses in a field provided large flat mushrooms and the hole the soldiers dug in the hedgerow was eventually stocked with tinned corn beef, tins of hard biscuits and more of black chocolate. In time I saw petrol, ammunition torch batteries and other goodies but never weapons. I presume whoever it was for used their own. The whole area was of course sealed with barbed wire and concrete bocks but I knew a number of ways in and out and was never caught. All of that went on by a south and then west route to Anstey.
There was however another way due west which was equally lucrative, both were bisected by the railway line which lay north to south, over a more northerly bridge, on the edge of Western Park was an anti aircraft gun site that guarded the railway and northern boundary of the airfield, they liked eggs, ducks,geese plover etc were in plentiful supply part of the year and their cook pickled them for the lean months, they were provided with a never ending supply of tinned cigarettes which they happily exchanged.
Further west through the park were ponds full of watercress followed by rows and rows of orchards, cherry, pear, apple were all there for the picking if you worked out, the best time of day, usually when the pubs were open, and the best of all Anstey Brook for a float on the reeds in summer and the acres and acres of Bradgate Park now an infantry training ground, which did the deer no good at all. From my point of view it was ideal if training took place they had a red flag and guards but certain areas were off limits to protect at least some of the wild life. I got to know some of the older soldiers who maintained it and they seem to have lost out on the cigarette issue. The odd tin now and then and I could get to the brook where trout and crayfish seemed to think they were safe, they would have been had my father not taught me to tickle trout and the net end of a tiddler fishing stick easily got crayfish if you knew where to look.
It was about this time that the war became serious, May 1941 we became familiar with the monotonous repeat of a Junkers aircraft engine and the continuous high note of fighter aircraft in combat, on the 17th of May it became personal. I seem to remember my sister was on leave from the ATS and the moan of an air raid siren was the prelude to a number of explosions that seemed closer than usual. My sister made a pot of tea and we all moved to the Anderson shelter in the garden, I am not sure why but for some reason the decision was made to move to a deeper shelter behind the school some 500 yards away, I have a most vivid recollection of my baby brother complaining bitterly as we ran to the better protection, not long after we arrived my father went to report for duty as an ARP warden. Not long after that there were massive explosions and the shelter shook violently and then everything was quiet, no anti aircraft fire, no engine noise just dust and darkness lit by flames from a dropped hurricane lamp, some time later the continuous whine of the "all clear" siren.
We emerged from the shelter into a cloud of dust and a bitter acrid smell, just across a road houses had been destroyed and flames were flickering in the ruins, I heard later that an elderly lady had been killed. On the other side of the school boundary there was a large crater in the road a couple of hundred yards from where I lived, it was strange there wasn't a window broken in the row of buildings but a large lump of concrete road surface had gone through the roof of one of them.
In another incident sometime between the incendiary raids starting in November 1940 and May 1941 two incidents of note happened, my father assisted a bomb disposal squad to remove an unexploded "landmine" from near an electricity sub station or cable junction supplying power to a vital installation by steering them clear of live underground cables, years later I discovered that despite his lack of education he was one of the few people that knew with some accuracy where cable lines lay in and around parts of the City. The other dangerous and hilarious which is often the case in such situations, I have said before that the railway line between the airfield and anti-aircraft gun site ran parallel to the school and a machine gun strike from a German plane ran the length of the school boundary with remarkably no casualties, the incident did not rate highly in the scheme of things but all the children in assembly were told to be true "Britons" and we all sang "The Yeoman Of England".

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