大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Sue Sutton on behalf of Vian Curtis, the author and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Wartime experiences were not all that much in my area of Indian Queens. I was 4 years old at the outbreak of war in 1939, but the things that I do remember were watching the aircraft taking off and landing in the distance from St Eval and surrounding airfields and we lived at Higher Fraddon (my grandmothers house was called Atlantic View) - pity we never had binoculars in those days.

I do remember one particular night in 1942, aircraft were overhead and we heard the whistling noises of the bombs dropping and the explosions that followed - my brother and I were huddled under our dining room table in a wood and asbestos built bungalow - I cannot remember where our parents were (certainly not under the table). The next day I went down to the village where at least three bombs had been dropped on a farm owned by Viv Smale - all the village were out "sightseeing" - one bomb had been a direct hit on the tractor house where the tractors were obliterated into small bits - two other bombs had dropped in fields making large craters. One lady had been extremely lucky across the road from the farm as she had sought refuge under the stairs and her house had been destroyed with only the stairs surviving. Our school was only a few 100 yards away and survived the bombs, luckily for us as we had a "foreign" teacher from "up-country" (Mr Rumble) who was very good and he was given the credit for getting myself and quite a few others into the Newquay Grammar School.

Other memories of the war were going out with friends on our bicycles to the scene of crashes and crawling through the fuselage of Flying Fortresses (american) and others and bringing home souvenirs. I also remember the "Yanks" in a field in Fraddon near the electric grid station and being given sweets and cigarettes, (Camel, Luck Strike etc) - I used to fill a drawer at home for my father. The main roads had large concrete buttresses staggered across the roads to prevent tank movements in the event of an invasion and the Yanks were always hitting them in their jeeps. We also had the Homeguard made up from local farmers etc - I am sure that they treated it as a good laugh as there were many tales of their exploits on exercise.

During the war we did not seem to be short of food or anything - we used to eat a lot of rabbits caught locally. I also remember my father killing a pig and cutting it up - the sections of meat then rubbed with salt and stored in linen bags between the ceiling beams in my Auntie's house and the pigs head boiled and made into brawn - it was delicious. We also had two evacuees from London - George and Peggy Jago and a few years ago I visited Peggy in Sussex. When they came to us my mother would put cakes etc on the table at teatime and they thought that they had to eat it all as presumably in London they had very little to put on the table. My father did go into the war and was with the RAF Regiment in Carlisle and Dumfries - he was invalided out with a back injury and suffered for many years until having his spine "fixed" with a stainless steel fixture at Ministry Hospital in Taunton at the end of the war.

Another as a delivery boy on the local Co-Op Bread Vans in the RNAS St Merryn area meeting the avalanche of "Pussers Reds" (bicycles) at mealbreak or finish times - I later joined the Royal Navy as an Artificer Apprentice in 1951 (thats another story).

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