大象传媒

I was born in 1942 so I was 3 years old when the war ended. I have no recollection of any events which took place during the war, yet its effects were very evident in the life of my family and in the world I was growing up in. There was rationing and shortages of food and fuel, days when I didn't go to school because there was no coal for the boilers. There were no toys for children. I had hand me downs from relatives. My father made dollies cots for me and my cousins and pull along dogs on wheels cut out of plywood and painted.

I recall the air-raid shelters, our next door neighbour had an Anderson shelter while in a friend's garden there was a more robust structure built from concrete reinforced with steel rods. This frightful building was accessed through a heavy metal door and steps leading down into a claustrophobic, dark room which smelt of dust. The village school had air-raid shelters too, these were long buildings with flat concrete roofs and with a narrow opening at either end and long wooden benches on either side.

The school stood next to the shell of the church which had been gutted by incendiary bombs. It's roof and windows gone it stood open to the elements. I saw inside once, there were holes in the floor and heaps of rubble and the walls were blackened by smoke. I remember I found it disturbing and I was frightened. There was another house too that had been destroyed by a bomb, all that remained was the chimney stack.

We lived close to Bristol which had been badly damaged during the air-raids. I can remember a wasteland of ruins, cellars and broken walls softened by the Budleia and Willow Herb which grew there. The ruins were inhabited by cats who emerged with tribes of kittens in the hope of being given food. There were three ruined churches St Nicholas, St Peter and St Maryleport quite near to one another. Only the towers of the latter two remained with the cockerel weather vane on top of St Peters still preserved. In Park St there were gaps between the buildings like missing teeth where bombs had fallen and some of the buildings were buttressed with large baulks of timber to prevent them from falling down. The Tramway Centre which was later laid out as gardens was a car park with ashes under foot.

I recall going to a "British restaurant", at Castle Green I believe it was. I don't remember if there was any meat to eat but there was mashed potato and dark geen cabbage.

people talked about events during the war in a factual way, I don't recall that they spoke much about their feelings. I think people took the view that you had to get on with life and that it was best not to dwell on things that were shocking or sad. To me the war seemed very exciting, much more so than the dreary times afterwards. I enjoyed listening to the stories that my parents, uncles and aunts told about those times. My aunt had joined the Queen Alexandra's nursing service and was at a field hospital in Eastern France in the early part of the war. She had to escape the advancing German forces in an ambulance which went off the road into a ditch resulting in her dislocating her neck. She also spent some time travelling on a dirty train overcrowded with refugees before reaching Cherbourg. She was so exhausted that she refused to leave her bed on the top floor of a hospital there to go to the shelter when an air-raid began, prefering instead to take her chances in relative comfort. She was evacuated from Cherbourg about 10 days after the Dunkirk evacuation.

My father was a Bristol Channel pilot so was in a reserved occupation. He remembered being on board the pilot cutter in the Channel when Bristol was being heavily bombed. The glow of fires could be seen in the sky and he wondered what would be left of Bristol. He also recalled seeing enemy bombers heading for the aircraft works at Filton and the fighters engaging them and the ensueing dog-fight.

There were poignant memories too, of one ship that he piloted several times after she had safely completed the journey in convoy across the Atlantic, then she came no more. She was called the Naraganset, I think although I'm not sure of the spelling. On another occasion the captain of a ship told him in some distress of how he was unable to pick up survivors from torpedoed ships as he was under orders to keep going.

One event particularly raised his spirits. This was when he saw looming out of the mist the first "Liberty Ships" arriving from the USA bound for Bristol. At that moment he felt convinced that the Allies would win the war. These feelings must have contrasted sharply with those experienced by the villagers a few years earlier when the threat of invasion was imminent and very real. They gathered spontaneously in the middle of the village and held hands and sang the old music hall song "Just like the ivy on the old garden wall" which expressed their need to cling together for mutual support.

As I grew older I, of course came to realise that it wasn't the exciting adventure that I imagined as a small child, that behind the factual reporting and the use of euphemisms such as "mopping up operations" was a lot of pain suffering and loss.

A few years ago I stood with my father who was then aged about 94 in front of our village war memorial. He read the names recorded there and could remember the circumstances in which all those men lost their lives in WW2. I hope the collective memory of the nation will endure as well as his.

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