大象传媒

I can鈥檛 remember the exact date but it must have been along this time when we had notification to say that we al had to report to a local country house to be fitted with our gas masks. After a few months we had to take them back for another green filter to be fitted, this was taped on to the existing filter. After the war the bad lads found another use for the filters. They used to filter red agriculture petrol through them to remove the red dye. This appeared to work to the eye but I doubt if it would have fooled a lab test. To us children, gas masks were the bane of our life, everywhere you went you had to take them with you.

Our home stood on an acre of ground which pre-war my parents had full of strawberry plants, but in 1940 the man from the ministry came and ordered that the ground be ploughed up and planted out with potatoes. Not long after this, we had another man from the ministry arrive to check on how many rooms we had and he informed my mother that we would have to take a lodger shortly. That was when the front room, as we called the lounge, became another bedroom.

It was shortly after that there was a lot of activity in the lane with lorries up and down, that was when we heard that a large woodland that extended to several thousand acres that ran down to the banks of the River Hamble was being taken over by ministry of defence to build a large naval base. That was the start of the naval shore base HMS Cricket and shortly afterwards Mr Jones, a foreman builder, became our lodger for the next nine months.
It鈥檚 strange how it鈥檚 the odd things that one remembers from childhood, but about all that I remember of the man, he was a wizard at solving the Daily Mirror cross word puzzle and this used to annoy my father because he would always do it before Dad got the chance to get his hands on his newspaper!

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