大象传媒

I am, James Hepplewhite .When World War Two started I was seven years old. I remember the day it started as if it was yesterday. It was a beautiful September Sunday morning. I was playing with friends in the street,when at eleven o鈥檆lock all the women came out into the street , a lot of them crying, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had announced on the radio that we were at war with Germany .
Now the story I want to tell you about is about my cousin, her name, Evelyn Price.
In 1941 one Saturday I attended my cousin鈥檚 wedding to a Mr Billy Holt.They were married in the afternoon. On the next morning, Sunday, after only a few hours of marriage, Billy had to return to his ship. It was the HMS Hood. Billy went down with the ship. The last I heard of my cousin was she was living in a home and is 100 years old.

The war years took up the part of my life when children are at their most impressionable years. We couldn鈥檛 have the sort of things children do today.
Sweets were a rare sight and they were on ration as most things were.
People stood in queues often not knowing what they were queuing for. Bit of a laugh but it鈥檚 true. Queues for bananas, oranges, cigarettes and lots of other things. Never saw an ice-cream till after the war. Not a lot to do for young people , so you did what was going at the time. A. young lady started a ballet school so a few of my friends and I went and joined, just for a laugh .Our teacher decided that we should have a uniform of sorts. It was to be sort of a tee shirt and short trousers.Well that gave our mothers something to think about - material was hard to come by. However as had happened a short while earlier a barrage balloon had been shot down and came down next to our street ,well all the people were out with their scissors and the whole thing disappeared in no time as it was a silver material. When the police arrived there was nothing for them to see. If the police had gone into anyone鈥檚 house they would have smelt it as there was a terrific smell of gas, but they just turned a blind eye and went on their way. And so that is where our uniforms came from. Can you imagine what we looked like in those, about a dozen of us boys and girls dressed in silver shirt and trousers dancing about like fairies.

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