大象传媒

Our holidays in the war years were not the same sort of pattern as before the war. We had to spend time in Bedfordshire primarily. We had school camps as I got into the upper part of the (Bedford) school and we had a very enjoyable time harvesting one summer, about 1942 or 1943, in Stewartby at the brickworks. In their model village at Stewartby they had a few spare empty houses and we were accommodated there and well fed in the London Brick Works canteen. These were all very new buildings at that time because the estate was only built in the 1930s. We were taken out by trucks to help bring in the harvest, stooking and so on in the farms nearby which were in fact in the ownership of the Brick Company.
Another year, in 1944, we went to a much more interesting place in many ways, which was Ledbury in Herefordshire where we were again harvesting. But this time plum harvesting and apple harvesting from the fruit crops in the area. These were school parties that we taken out and we camped and had a wonderful time working in the orchards during the day and trying not to get too badly stung by wasps and relaxing in the evenings going out for walks in the beautiful countryside there.
As I reached the age of about 15 or 16 we used our cycles a great deal. All our day boys in Bedford had cycles because it was very much a town full of cyclists, far more than today. We used to go on holiday with tents and on one occasion, the first time in September 1944, we, I and a friend in the
upper school, cycled from Bedford up through the Fens to Kings Lynn and then round the Norfolk coast down into Suffolk, as far as Aldeburgh. I remember the joy of having our first swim in the sea after five years, in Cromer and another at Happisburgh, a few miles down the coast where you could bathe on a hundred yard stretch between the mined sections of the beach; as long as you didn't stray you were alright!
On the way back through the beautiful Suffolk countryside we saw the most remarkable sight which was hosts and hosts of gliders being towed for the Arnhem landings in Holland. We didn't know where they were going but it was obvious that there was an extraordinarily large operation taking place. We cycled along with our heads in the air, likely to bump into other things because we were constantly looking up to see another team of planes with gliders behind them, hundreds and hundreds of gliders over this Sunday morning. The whole session took three or four hours to pass and it really was an extremely memorable sight.

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