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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Helen Churchill from Three Counties Action on behalf of Alan Hancock, and has been added to the site with his permission. Alan Hancock fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was only one year old when the war started, and just seven when it came to an end.

My brother and I lived throughout the war with my mother at my mother’s parent’s house in Newbury, as my father was in the army doing various interesting things for the Intelligence Corps, in which he was a Captain. I believe he was stationed in Bermuda for a while, interrogating German prisoners of war, as he was a fairly fluent German speaker. There were probably worse jobs!

Gas masks Not sure where they came from, but I distinctly remember that my baby brother Terry had a very amusing one bearing a sort of resemblance to the Mickey Mouse character. I think it was coloured red. Mine was of course a grown up version, boring and black. They all seemed to fog up immediately one put them on, and made wonderful wheezing noises as one strove to breathe. And talking sounded a bit like Darth Vader in the Star Wars films. That’s probably where they got the idea from.

Sweets Everyone tells us that we were all terribly deprived during the war, but because I had never known anything different, I was blissfully unaware that I was deprived. I do however, remember that my grandmother made sweets! I don’t think we knew what sweets were except for these wonderful confections that she conjured up from Golden Syrup, which she boiled up, rolled into long strips and cut up into sort of lozenges, which were absolute heaven for little boys to suck. She used to dish out her golden syrup sweet rations to the other small boys in Chandos Road from her front gate. Drew quite a crowd as I remember. People were always generous with what little they had in those days. A bit different today!

Awareness of the war As we lived very close to the U.S airbase at Greenham Common, we were certainly aware of plenty of military activity. My mother even to this day rather coyly refers to her one big night out with a girl friend — they went to a dance at the Newbury Corn Exchange, an event apparently made particularly memorable because of the presence of hundreds of American servicemen!

Down the lane from my Grandparents house was a small track leading to a field, which of course was a great place for all the local youngsters to play. Suddenly we found that a group of German prisoners of war, based I know not where, had been pressed into service building a big barn (it was called a Tabernacle). We youngsters made particular friends with a couple of young German P.O.W soldiers called Hans and Fritz, and I remember we used to sit on their knees while they showed us photos of their families and told us stories of their homeland. They didn’t seem to be under any pressure there, and I cannot even remember them being guarded, so I guess they had a pretty cushy number compared with other P.O.W situations one reads about. We children liked them a lot.

Action stations! My mother and I were upstairs in the back bedroom (mother was probably making the bed or involved in some such domestic chore at the time). Suddenly we heard a deafening roaring sound, far more threatening than the constant aeroplane sounds we were accustomed to hearing due to our proximity to the Greenham Common air base. We both rushed to the window and saw a huge aeroplane flying towards us, barely skimming the rooftops, literally just a few feet above the chimneys. It was flying directly at us, and I’m sure in the split second we must have believed it was going to crash right through the window on top of us. Then inexplicably, when this monster was probably only about 50 yards away, it started shooting at us! Yes, shot straight at my mother and me, as we stood presumably silhouetted and making an interesting target, in the window! Happily for this memoir, he missed and the bullets entered the roof of our house, about a foot above the window where we had been standing. (The damage was of course inspected with great interest afterwards). As one does, my mother bundled herself and me on the floor beside the bed, but of course this was well after the plane had passed a few feet over our heads — deafeningly noisily, I might add.

As I recall, a stray German raider had supposedly flown over Newbury and bombed the alms houses and the church, about a mile away from where we lived, to the great shock, horror and indignation of the locals, and I believe this was the same pilot who decided to finish up his day by taking a few pot shots at me and my mother. He was shot down very soon afterwards and crashed in a field nearby.

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