大象传媒

MEMORIES OF WORLD WAR TWO
Our house has a tippler toilet, a flagged back yard and no inside loo.
My father was a bleachworks greyroom foreman. His place of employment: The Star Bleaching Company, Vale Works, Blackrod, just on the border with Horwich. I well remember father being on 鈥渟hort-time鈥� i.e. not much work available due to the slump in the bleaching industry in the 1930s. He would often go into work in a morning and come back home within two or three hours. As he walked back home up the back street wearing his flat cap, he would hold his hands up as he approached my sister and I and say: 鈥渘o grey today again鈥�.
Milk was delivered by a horse-drawn milk float, the butcher鈥檚 van was horse-drawn and the paraffin man came round in a van. Dustbins were emptied into a motorised bin wagon in the back street.
This was the background of my life prior to WW2.

I was aged between 8 and 13 during WW2. As we lived on a slight hill, the road outside our house was used for tank-testing. They were repaired locally and tested and their tracks sometimes came off the wheels. They wee very noisy too.
I well remember powdered eggs, spam, and no bananas. My father had to do important war work after 1939, and in the early part of the War he was a member of the AFS and drove the fire-car with a trailer pump. The car was a Humber. I remember him telling me that it was difficult to start-up from cold, the battery was usually 鈥渇lat鈥� . This meant the car would not be able to get the crew to the fire point. He left bleaching and moved to the De Havilland Aircraft Company at Lostock for most of the War years. He worked long hours including weekends as an inspector checking aircraft constant speed units known as CSUs. These were the geared hub portions of the propeller blades.
We went into a neighbour鈥檚 Anderson air-raid shelter during the Black-outs when the sirens sounded in the night-time. This got a fag, so later on we used to manage under the house stairs. The lack of sleep and poor food caused me to have small boils (powkes) on my eye-lids.
My school mate鈥檚 parents had a garage, his mother used to sell rationed pool petrol. She used to sit in a little office, with plenty time to do knitting.
My schooling days were affected by the War. In the early War years we could not attend at all as there were no air-raid shelters. As these were built, we were allowed to attend part-time at first, then as more shelters became available we went back full-time. But a lot of valuable schooling was lost. Part way through the War I moved to the Senior School when I reached 11. There was a shortage of timber for the woodwork classes so we had to do gardening as an alternative. We had a lady teacher on the teaching staff who was substituting for a male who had been called up to the armed services.
There was little social life apart from what the local church organised. We had pantomimes and concert parties and used to go round the district giving concerts. We walked home in the black-out in all weathers, carrying costumes and musical instruments. Frugal times! Taxis were in short supply and expensive.

The War had just finished when I started work at 14. Some of my workmates had held back their VE day holiday and took the time off later.

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