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Interview with Eric Murket by Henriette Wood Grossenbacher.
Eric is a longstanding friend of my husband, a mate from work at the London Electricity board. He spent the wartime as a primary school boy in London. He kindly gave permission to add his stories to the Peoples’ War website. The interview took place in late September 2005 at his house in Hunstanton, Norfolk..
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I am sure this is a very familiar one. You made tanks with a cotton reel. A piece of elastic band and a piece of candle, a stick, and you wind it up. You cut grooves into the actual reel, so it gripped I’m not sure how many children played with that, I don’t know.

There was a boat we made, but I can’t remember how, from a Coleman’s mustard tin with methelated spirits. The chassis of the boat was another tin, I think the word is Fray Bentos. A pipe went underneath the boat into the mustard container, which held water and then it was lit underneath by a tray of this meth, and it would boil. And as it boiled the heat would come out of the tube at the back of the boat and push the boat along, and I believe we made a rudder with a small piece of tin that somehow we shaped to direct the boat.

With a matchbox we made guns. It had to be a Swan Vesta, because they were quite large. You had to take the box inner out, an elastic band went through the top. There was a loop at the front and the loop at the back had a peg, half of a wooden peg that went through it. Then you could make up matches, pull the leaver, which was the wooden peg put matches in, you would loop it over the front to bring it to the back and then release the rear and then the matchstick came out. That was a matchstick gun.

In the playground there were 4 poplar trees and we used to climb those trees and had little camping places up there with sandwiches and just played there. On Saturday nights there was a cinema that was adjacent to this wall where the trees were. The grown ups used to go to the pictures, whacking big queues, very popular. Us tormentors, we had peashooters and we used to sit up there and hit at various people. I would say these 4 trees were all manned with children to torment these people waiting going to the pictures. And the peashooter hit them but the secret was we had to all keep quiet for the sheer fun of annoyance. Whether the grown ups were pretending or not but we didn’t laugh till we were finished So they looked round and couldn’t see where they were coming from.
There were in fact two cinemas, one either end of the school, the Palace, where we used the peashooters and the other one was called the Odeon. So we had wonderful times. We used to have Saturday morning films, all the children went to films, I can’t think, perhaps six pence, what we paid but it was very small money. All the children used to go to Saturday morning pictures, Laurel and Hardy or whatever it was, Flash Gordon. Obviously Tarzan was very popular at the time. Tarzan at that time was Johnnie Wallsmiller, which we had seen. . We had ropes swinging from the trees. So we would swing from tree to tree as best as we could. They were really, really good times.

Those were happy days. I think most children would have liked the pleasure of having a German bomber crash so that they could cut off the swastika or the marking and put the on their bedroom wall. That was the hope, but it never happened, fortunately.

Going back to the school again, I can remember what they incendiary bombs. All I remember there was a canister and inside the canister was a number of incendiary bombs, the Germans dropped them, I can remember the canisters, we found a canister that dropped into the school. These incendiary bombs were everywhere. Also I remember reading the approach to these, that you had to hold a sandbag in front of your face and place them over the bombs.

I remember the children knew the sounds of the airplanes, obviously you could tell that they were German bombers just by the sound of their engines, and most children knew, what type of bombers they were. I believe there were images on paper on pamphlets that explained what type of bombers they were. I think the children knew all the bombers, the clever ones could anyway.

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