大象传媒

The most vivid memory for me during the Second World War was as a four year old being taken by my Grandmother to see the bomb damage in Midland Road, around the County Theatre area. We weren't allowed too near the theatre but I do remember a shop with flowers in the back room and the shop keeper passing packets of cigarettes out through the front. Why I can recall packets of cigarettes I can not imagine now but I am convinced that was what they were.

My father was in the RAF and my mother and I lived with my grandparents in Kilpin Close. It was a terrace of four houses with a central passage and during one air raid, we took shelter in this passage with our next door neighbour. I do remember some discussion as to whether this was a safe place and perhaps we should move to a public shelter but in the end we stayed put.

Some of the slightly older boys in the street used to go to Midland Road railway station to ask the de-training G.I.'s for chewing gum. One day I went with them and saying the magic catchphrase "Got any gum, chum?" I was duly rewarded with a packet of gum. Of course my mother found out and I got a clip around the ear, so that was my begging days over.

Towards the end of the war a fighter aircraft, a Hurricane or Spitfire, was on display in Russell Park. For a small admission fee the public could sit in the cockpit. Again, with the older boys, we hung aroundd the place for such a long time and probably made such a nuisance of ourselves we were allowed to sit in it for free just to get rid of us!

Towards the end of the war I saw a photograph in a newspaper of Mussolini hanging upside down. This made a very vivid impression on me.

At the end of the fighting in Europe we had a street party at the end of the Close. The lampost in the middle of the roundabout had a dummy of Hitler which was later burnt.

I was playing at a friends house one day whenm his mother came out and called to her next door neighbour. "The Japanese have surrendered," she said. So that was the war over. I was almost seven years old then and of course the war was something I had grown up with and it was just the way of life and we did not know anything different. My father came out of the forces and we moved in a council flat in Fenlake Road. There were communal air raid shelters built in the middle of the road and I watched these being demolished from our upstairs flat. There was virtually no traffic so they did not post much of a traffic hazard.

This may not count as it probably occurred after the war. My grandfather was a lorry driver and contracted to London Brick. During the day he would take a lorry load of bricks to London and in the evening he picked up German prisoners of war from the camp in Green Lane, Clapham to work the night shift at Elstow Brick Works. I sometimes went with him, the Germans just sat at the sides of the lorry at the back, no shelter from the elements. To make extra money some prisoners made wooden toys, I do recall my grandfather got me a table tennis bat shape with a hole in the middle, three wooden chickens had string around their necks with a weight at the other end passing through the hole. The nodding chicks kept me amused for hours, such simple pleasures!

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