大象传媒

Part 3
In July 1941 my father was posted to the RAF School of Technical Training, Squires Gate, Blackpool as a Corporal Instructor and found lodgings there for us so once again the Rich family were on the move. Blackpool brought me back into the urban environment, but added another dimension to my life as now I was living permanently at the seaside. The sea and sand are wonderful in the summer time, but take on a different perspective in the depths of winter. I was placed into another junior school called Roseacre. Blackpool Education Service had many features from which today many other local education authorities could learn a lesson. Roseacre School had pleasant light airy classrooms. The children's clinic was integral with the school, so visits there required only a short break out of lesson time. Unlike our present day dreary clinics with their ghastly posters warning of frightful ailments, stuck onto drably painted walls. Those clinics were furnished with uncomfortable wooden benches, along which one slid in progression to the end with the person in the nearest seat being the next in to see the doctor or dentist. A sort of seated queuing system, which was as heavy on the backside as standing around, could be on the feet. A system that time has done little to improve, the benches having been replaced by uncomfortable plastic chairs.
Blackpool even during the war was still very much a holiday town, despite playing host to the Royal Air Force, with many of the boarding houses being taken over as airmen鈥檚 billets accommodating the large numbers of young men being called up to serve in the RAF. In towns like Blackpool where there were such high numbers of new recruits to be trained there was a serious shortage of RAF camp accommodation so airmen were sent to live in the homes of the civilian population. With so many holiday boarding houses and a wartime reduction in the number of holidaymakers the boarding houses were a gift from heaven to the RAF Billeting Officer.
The young airmen and women were to be seen almost every day both drilling on the promenade and doing physical training on the sands at low tide.
One of the perks for us children living out at Squires Gate on the southern extremity of the town, was that it was the last of the railway stations on leaving Blackpool. The train would start its journey from Central Station passing through South Shore station. At this point we would line the railway embankment in full view of the passing train. Those holidaymakers who were returning home after their 鈥淲akes Week鈥� would throw their loose change out of the train window. We kids would delight in scrambling for the penny coins thrown in our direction. Wakes week was a Lancashire cotton mill town tradition when the whole town would go on holiday en mass very often 70% - 80% of them going to Blackpool. Families used to arrive on a Saturday and spend that day organising their week鈥檚 holiday. It was like a military operation. Dad was dispatched to join the queue for seats for the summer show at the Opera House. Mother headed in the direction of the Circus. Sons and/or daughters would clamber for the other attractions, such as the shows on either Central or North Pier. By the time they sat down for dinner at their 鈥榙igs鈥� (boarding house) they had the whole week arranged.
During my stay I was introduced to a new venture. This was sea fishing. Firstly, we had to dig up lugworms for bait. This we did at low tide looking for worm casts. I used to collect these in my sister鈥檚 sand castle bucket. When the tide was in my father and I would go onto one of the piers and fish for small flat fish called Dabs using a hand line. We usually caught about three or four, which was enough to take home to supplement our meagre wartime rations. A few homemade chips were a choice accompaniment especially as potatoes were plentiful and not rationed at that time. Although, after the war for a year or two even potatoes were rationed.
Another memory I have of this period of my life in Blackpool was that of Friday nights in the winter when my father would take me to Blackpool Tower to watch the Boxing. We used to sit up in the gallery and as the evening wore on my eyes would sting from the cigarette and cigar smoke rising from the ringside seats. During the previous summer I had been to Blackpool Tower to see the famous Bertram Mills Blackpool Tower Circus from the same vantage point. Seaside towns can be so different, changing with the seasons. Blackpool did not die in the winter as some seaside towns do, but many of the attractions like the Tower and Winter Gardens stayed open for the locals and the theatres had pre London try outs of plays and musicals. Sometimes in winter I would venture onto the beach in search of treasure blown up onto the beach by the winter gales. The wind would whip up the sand and blow it around so that it stung as it hit any exposed part of the body.
One Sunday morning in the spring of 1942 as I was riding the tram along Lytham Road to South Shore I noticed adults reading the Sunday papers with greater intensity than usual. The focus of their attention was the publication of Sir William Beverage鈥檚 Report on State Welfare which Winston Churchill the Prime Minister had commissioned him to produce. This reform was finally implemented in 1948 after hostilities had finished, and government had changed.
I later returned to Blackpool after the second bombardment of these islands by the Germans with the terror weapons of the buzz bombs and V2 rockets. It was during this second stay that I appreciated just how much this seaside town had to offer.
My father having been promoted to sergeant was posted from Blackpool to No 24 Maintenance Unit RAF Turnhill, at Market Drayton in Shropshire. Here they rebuilt crashed aircraft that could be brought back into active service. For a while after my father left we stayed on at Blackpool and during this time I went to the Victoria Hospital for my second surgical operation, the first having been a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, when I was five, at the newly built Sutton General Hospital. My Mother ever vigilant of her children found a speck in my right eye, which had worried her. So I was taken to see an Eye Specialist who confirmed her suspicions that there maybe something wrong. So off I went to Victoria Hospital full of fear again, a victim of the urban myth. This time I had been informed on several occasions that during the operation the surgeon would take my eye from its socket and lay it on my cheek, carry out the necessary surgery and then replace it from whence it came. Needless to say, I entered the hospital shaking with fear. The power of this old wives tale caused me more pain that the surgical procedure itself. Within a couple of days I returned to Kingston Avenue, Squires Gate, sporting an eye patch like Nelson himself.
Continued in Part 4

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