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Throughout the war my grandmother, mother, uncle Brian and I lived in Rochdale, on the edge of the Pennines in south-east Lancashire (as was!). It was the family's habit to go for long walks at the weekends and one Sunday, after the fall of Holland in the summer of 1940, when I was eight, my mother and I went for a walk on Rooley Moor, to the north of the town. We had heard of the effective use the Germans had made of paratroops in their invasions. The Home Guard unit my uncle Brian was in had had to go up to Rooley Moor and dig trenches just outside the village of Catley Lane Head, at the edge of the moor. It was perhaps optimistic of somebody to think that a twenty foot trench on either side of a road, little more than a moorland track, would provide much opportunity to defeat an invasion, but the Home Guard were determined to offer whatever resistance they could.
My mother fancied a walk, and enticed me to go by saying we could look for paratroopers, so we took the bus to Lane Head and set off. As sustenance, I took two bananas in a brown paper bag, bought at the village shop. Part way into the walk, I ate one of my bananas, then put the other back into my shorts pocket for eating later on. My mother said, if we met any paratroops, I could take it out and pretend it was a revolver.
I never knew where I lost it, but when I eventually got hungry again and reached into my pocket for the second banana, it wasn’t there. The pocket — both pockets — were empty! The banana had fallen out, and was lost for ever.
I used to dream about that lost banana for years afterwards, because it was the last banana I ever had until well after the war was over.

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