大象传媒

My brother was in the army, a Captain. One day he sent us a coconut covered in stamps. I was just a little lad, maybe 9 or 10 years old, and I don鈥檛 know what excited me more; the coconut or the stamps.

I collected rose hips from Holywells Park, and took them to a little shop which was in 鈥淭he Wash鈥�, a nickname for Lower Orwell Street, which they paid us a few pence.

We lived in Myrtle Road. My sister lived over the road from us with her two children (her husband had died the previous year). Her garden was too small for an air-raid shelter, and as we lived near the gasworks and there was severe bombing, she asked if she could use our shelter. If they had stayed in their house they would have all been killed.

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