大象传媒

Del Prince鈥檚 War story
By Del Prince

I was born in Birmingham nine months before the war began. My father was a dustman, my mother a seamstress in poor health. At the outbreak of war my father enlisted in the army and things for me went from bad to worse. We moved out of Birmingham to Cannock to stay with my aunt Lily. I鈥檝e been told that I was a very thin baby, the bones sticking out and the skin stretched tight over a tiny frame. Lily fed me and wiped me all over with oil then wrapped me in cotton wool and put me in a drawer to sleep.
My father only got home if he had a twenty-four hour pass, which was not very often. He was in the Royal Artillery attached to the North Atlantic Convoys. After one of his visits my mum got pregnant again and I was two and a half when Terry was born.
Terry died when he was six months old but nobody told me why. My Mam was very sick again so I went to live with my father鈥檚 parents. Even though it was during the war I walked every day to visit my Mam at my aunt鈥檚 house about a mile away. Then one day I was told I couldn鈥檛 visit her any more because she had gone away. In fact she had died.
My dad came home on leave in his soldier鈥檚 uniform. He took me for my first haircut because he said I looked like a cissy with my Shirley Temple curls. I cried as the barber cut off my curls which made my dad angry. My dad returned to the war and I stayed with my granny and granddad but they must have got tired of me because soon after that I was sent to a workhouse. I was still only three and a half and it was just another place to me because I had been moved around so often. But my Mam鈥檚 sister heard about it and she took me out. I was covered in boils and sores and my hands and legs were all chapped. Aunt Lily bathed me in hot water and Dettol. It really stung. Once my sores had cleared up I was shunted between my mother鈥檚 sisters. Then one day my Dad鈥檚 mother came and took me away again.
Nobody there wanted me really. My Aunt Sally, who, I think, had TB, was always shouting at me. There was lodger called Dick who had only one leg. He used to go to bombed out houses and come back with bags of nails which he spent hours straightening. I helped to sort them into boxes. There was a gang in the street and to get in the gang you had to have something to swap. The prize swaps were little silver stars that boys scrounged off the Italian prisoners of war who swept the streets and emptied the bins. And there was chewing gum cadged off the Americans who were stationed at the nearby air base.
At some point I was sent across town to live with my dad鈥檚 oldest brother Jack who was a coal miner and lived in a cottage on the edge of the common. There were air raids nearly every day. I didn鈥檛 mind because I was too young to be afraid. I loved going into the air raid shelter which was dug into the side of the hill at the bottom of the garden. Corrugated tin had been bent over to make a roof and the soil was piled on top of it. All the kids put on our Mickey Mouse gas masks and pretended to frighten the older folk. After the air raid was over we would stand in the back yard and watch the American planes go over. They were called Flying Fortresses and there seemed to be hundreds of them.
Soon I was on the move again, back to my dad鈥檚 Mam. Things there were not so happy. They didn鈥檛 have a shelter, they went down to the cellar instead. It was no fun with aunt Sally coughing and spitting and saying that I wasn鈥檛 wanted there. Then towards the end of the war my dad arrived home with a woman. He sat me down beside him and introduced her as my new mam. A few weeks later he brought her back again and very soon we all moved to Alcester to a big house where my dad and his new wife were going to work for a rich lady. Although the war was now over my dad was waiting to be demobbed so he was still in the army and had to go back the day after we moved to Alcester. He said it would be after Christmas before he would be home for good.
The next day his new wife and my new mam sat me down and laid out the rules for my behaviour. I knew it wasn鈥檛 going to be easy.

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