大象传媒

AS a schoolboy I usually had to wend my way to school past large noisy American tanks which were based in fields locally waiting for D-Day.

I had not been at school long and starting out on school life was not a particularly welcome experience for me.

I can remember my mum Freda, who accompanied me on the one mile walk to Colton Church of England village school, having great difficulty to get me to go.

I clung onto posts and various objects on my way to school on that first morning.

Then as the months went by and I became accustomed to going to school there were these extremely large tanks roaming about.

I remember my mum telling me one day as we put on gas masks for a trial experience that if it was not for such soldiers in the fields around us, the Germans would probably be winning the war and that gas might be used as it was in the First World War.

One day I remember standing at the front lounge window of the agricultural smallholding, which my family used to occupy, and seeing queues and queues of soldiers waiting to board a train at the local Rugeley Trent Valley station.

They were in a long line along the road between Colton and Rugeley and some of them were black men. They were mostly friendly and my mum said to me that she had been upset by a neighbour who had suggested black men would not be allowed to fight in the war.

My mum remarked: "He said it with the implication that they were not good enough to fight which I greatly resented as their lives are as precious as anyone else's."

There was one black man who visited the area who to me was above everyone else as he was world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis.

But it would not be until at least two decades later and the efforts of Dr Martin Luther King came to fruition that such people gained their true recognition.

We later heard about D-Day and the great victory and the German bombing raids became a distant memory for me.

As a baby I used to be disturbed by the bombers as they followed the London-Manchester rail line near our homes on their ways to blitz places like Coventry.

But it was ironic that at one later stage in my boyhood I had a greater fear of the tanks that came to save us than I had of the German bombers.

Had I lived in Coventry or London instead of in a pleasant rural spot this would probably have not been the case!

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