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Born Sept 1938 in Newcastle, moved to Isle of Wight that was father’s home, he was a serving soldier in the Coldstream Guards. Mother moved back to Tyneside in 1941. Dad who had survived Dunkirk reckoned it would be safer, he was probably correct.

We moved in with Mothers family in the west end of Newcastle. row upon row of terraced houses running down to Scotswood Road. The houses by today’s standards were basic, gaslights, cold-water tap, outside toilets, coal houses, backyards. They were mainly occupied by the workers in the factories south of Scotswood Road, Armstrong Whitworths, Vickers, Mitchell Bearings, making tanks, guns, warships, parts for aircraft all very essential to the war effort and thus very well defended. The workers were skilled in fitting, turning, milling, drilling, welding, riveting, blacksmithing, whitesmithing, tool making, pattern making, boiler makers and joiners. Along with them were pockets of miners. There were hard working, hard drinking, and nearly always skint! The women swilled their front pavements; yellow stoned their front steps, the women were hugely self sufficient, they baked bread, plucked chickens, skinned rabbits, gutted fish, made brawn, pressed tongue and if needed delivered babies no matter what Hitler was planning.

Fleeting image one, I am taken from my bed wrapped in a blanket, and someone with a candle is leading the way. The siren is sounding, Nana shepherds everyone under the stairs, from the front door Granddad is standing on the front step giving a running commentary telling us about the searchlights hunting for the bombers, the sound of gunfire, especially one that is louder than all the rest, granddad calls it ‘big bertha’ and it is across the river at Lobley Hill a heavy ack-ack battery. The family never used the air raid shelters. Nana said if you were going to die it was better to do it in your own home!

Fleeting image two. Mum is missing, the family keep telling me porky pies that she will only be away a few hours. Days pass, then Nana tells me to stay at the top of Clara St. and I may see Mam. I wait for what seems an eternity, and there she is coming up the back lane wearing her best coat with the velvet collar and her little pillbox hat, carrying a small case. I flew down that lane to greet her. She told me she had been to see Dad, who was stationed in the London area. I had no memories of Dad; he was a photo Mam kept showing me, along with photos of other men in the family. Jimmy was in the Med, John in North Africa, Les & John were marines serving on some aircraft carrier (illustrious). Only my Uncle Eddy was at home serving an apprenticeship at Vickers. If you were unlucky enough to have a Father serving in the Far East then the chances of seeing and knowing him were virtually zero. The family task was to make him/them real.

Fleeting Image three: Mam has found a flat; it is a two bedroom upstairs, like all the others. Mam and her sisters hire a handcart, about the only form of transport available, to move what furniture Mam has managed to collect, and it is all second hand stuff. The handcart is huge with steel rimmed wheels my aunts make many trips loading and unloading beds, sofas, sideboard table and chairs. I am given small things to carry, I must be about four. I remember that it must have been a Monday as we moved through the front streets as all the back lanes had washing stretched out to dry, if the Germans had flown over Tyneside on Mondays, it may have looked that the population were surrendering en masse. That night Mam is exhausted, she is struggling to put up a black out curtain in the kitchen, I want the toilet but am to frightened to use the outside toilet as it is a pitch black winter night. At that moment there are angry shouts and blowing of whistles, Mam has shown a light and the wardens are not happy. They bang on the door and start to give Mam a telling off, I am really scared, then one of them picks me up takes me to the loo, and they both stay to fix the curtain and leave with the warning ‘yer knaa the regulations yer canna be too careful hinny, divvent let it happen agin’

Fleeting images four: I wake up in the lap of a rough hairy brown bear. It is my Dad, this is my first memory of him. He had arrived in the middle of the night, and taken me from my bed. Mam had stoked up the fire it and we all sat in front of it on Mams new second hand sofa. It was for me the first time we had all been together. From his uniform pocket Dad extracted a bar on Fry’s Chocolate Cream I can remember to this day that bar of chocolate, and Fry’s is still a favourite! On his uniform he wore a shoulder flash. Dad told me it was the ever open eye and it would look out for me.

Fleeting image five: At Nanas, my aunts are doing their legs, music is blasting from the radio is it Glenn Miller, or Joe Loss I remember in that house Vera Lynn came second to Ann Shelton. Back to the legs, each aunt took a turn standing on the kitchen chair where they would hitch their frocks up and rubbed some brown solution over their legs then very carefully one of them would draw a seam down each leg. They would swirl around to the music, laughing and singing, showing off their ‘nyloned legs’ A favourite was putting on some tattered old fur and doing Flanagan and Allen, ‘Underneath the Arches’

Fleeting Image six: There is a knock at the door Mam answers. I am standing on the landing looking down. A telegraph boy is handing Mam a telegram, his red bike is leaning against the door. Mam signs for the telegram comes back upstairs, scooping me up on the way and we sit together on the sofa. Mam is crying even before she opens the telegram, I of course was to young to understand the implication of a telegram during the war. The telegram stated that Dad had been seriously wounded and was in hospital, the War Office would notify Mam when further information became available. That telegram is in the loft, it is unbelievably terse and impersonal, and that’s how it had to be I suppose.

Fleeting images seven: A hospital in the middle of the Yorkshire countryside it looks huge to my eyes, and it has taken forever to get there on the bus. We enter Dads ward there are row upon row of beds seemingly stretching on forever. I remember the whiteness of the place and the men in the beds; many beds have pulleys and cages over them. Dad is about two thirds of the way down on the right and he has a cage over his legs. He had been shot in the upper thigh and at one stage there was a fear he may lose the leg. Dad rarely spoke of the war; it was many years later when he told me what had happened the day he had been wounded. It was around the Ardennes and a sniper got him, a German patrol found him and took him their regimental first aid station where a German doctor patched him up, the aid station was overrun the following day and dad was casevaced. The British doctors told him that the treatment the German doctor gave him probably saved his leg. Dad looked OK to me, especially when he told me to look in his bedside locker and take out a leather pouch. Which I did, what could it be? It be a bunch of foreign coins, and this child was not impressed, my disappointment showed, you hide nothing at that age. In a bed opposite a small man was sitting by his bed and he beckoned me over and gave me a ten inch high doll in the form of a clown, it had a porcelain traditional clown head, a red tail coat, blue trousers, dress shirt and white bow tie, it was the most beautiful doll I had ever seen. Not sure whether to accept I looked towards my parents who said OK. Dad told me later that the man was Polish. The doll is also in the loft very faded and sawdust leaks out at some of the seams. Which grand child will treasure it?

Fleeting images: South Benwell primary school. A huge stone, soot stained building, Charles Dickens would have loved it. The kids are at a special assembly, the head mistress is flanked by local dignitaries one of whom is the Canadian Consul (at five years of age none of us knew what a Canadian was) and on behalf of the people of Canada he presents the school with boxes of apples and drinking chocolate. We all get two of the biggest, reddest apples ever seen in Newcastle also a packet of drinking chocolate; this was not the cocoa we were used to. This was an elixir; you could eat this straight from the packet, and we did.

Fleeting images nine: It is victory night, at the top of Edward Gardens there is a huge static water tank and next to it the biggest bonfire ever made. People are dancing, singing, kissing and drinking, many people in uniform. This has to be the most exciting night in my young life. Aunt Eleanor has put some potatoes on a shovel to bake in the fire. I had never had a potato baked in a fire before; it was charred black and raw in the middle. It was delicious. I was six going seven the war was over and everything was good. Little did we realise that the next few years would in some ways be worse.

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