大象传媒

I was born in the local pub called The Barrel in Thornbury during September 1938.

In September 1940, when I was about two years old, being woken by my mother and being carried downstairs and being put back to bed again under the stairs.

My next memory is doing shelter drill at school at the age of four years old.

My Father was up all night doing Home Guard duty which meant that he was always tired when he came home; so I had to eat my breakfast in the morning without speaking to him.

We used to eat what I considered was horrible school meals; spam, thick green cabbage, with a pudding of semolina or tapioca. Rationing of food meant that we used to eat plenty of wild rabbit caught in snares by the pub locals, very little sugar, whale meat was supplied and snoek which was revolting 鈥� can anyone remember what it was?

In the pub we had a hayloft and people that were bombed out in Filton came and left their furniture in it. Tommy Ashcroft had a cycle shop opposite the pub and he whitened its windows so that these people could live there.

VE (Victory in Europe) night was a cause for excitement when we held a bonfire
鈥淒own the Plain鈥� 鈥� the main street at the bottom of Thornbury. I can remember the flames, the next day I found that the bonfire had melted the tarmac.

There was the POW camp which housed Italians, this was situated opposite Thornbury hospital on the Gloucester road. They used to wear dark brown battledress with yellow patches indicating that they were prisoners. They were picked up every morning by a 鈥淲arag鈥� war agricultural lorry and taken around local farms to work.

I can also remember my father holding me astride his shoulders and seeing one day hundreds of aircraft towing gliders out over Thornbury, these could have been on their way to Arnhem.

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