大象传媒

Father is arrested.

I have fond memories of a brief period the family鈥擬um, Dad and Grandma鈥攕pent in Wanstead, in Belgrave Road near the Flats. It was during the late 1930s and Dad said they were the Good Years when the country was neither at war nor in a slump. He was a butcher, following a family tradition brought to England from Germany by Grandpa Gustav who lived nearby in Stork Road Forest Gate.

We had enough money to rent the ground floor of an upscale house, or so it appeared after spending all those years nearer the docks in Canning Town and Forest Gate. There was even enough money for a new tricycle for me on my 3rd birthday in 1939.

Our house had french doors which gave onto a fair-sized garden where I kept a pet tortoise. There was also an aquarium full of goldfish, one of Dad's interests.

The first sign of trouble came when Dad or Charlie as he preferred to called, had his brothers-in-law round one Sunday to dig a big hole in the garden, where they installed an Anderson air raid shelter which the Council had dumped in front of the house.

Then one summer's morning in 1940 two detectives in plain clothes arrived and searched the house. They found Charlie's Blackshirt uniform including the belt with the fasces on the buckle, the arm band and gramophone record with the flash-and-circle and other evidence of his participation in Sir Oswald Mosley's movement. At lunchtime Charlie came home from work on his his bicycle, was arrested and imprisoned without trial under Regulation 18b (^{About links} ).
He was sent to Brixton Prison and later transferred to an internment camp in Ascot.

This was a heavy burden for Angela, my mother, who was now about 6 months pregnant with my sister Erica and with the serious bombing of East London about to begin.

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