大象传媒

To begin with I was born in 1931. My father had a small farm in those years, before the War farms would only sell if they had their own milk round. When the threat of war came, people would pay a lot of money to put their sons into a farm, as farming was a reserved occupation and so their sons would not be called up. My father who lost part of his leg in the First World War did not think a lot of this.

I also remember how just before the war a German air ship photographed the Bristol Channel it looked very threatening to me, all black with spike like things sticking out of it. Though later I understood the engines were on the end of them because of the danger of the gas in the gasbag catching fire.

When war started I was in Minehead cottage hospital with double pneumonia, and my bed was next to a big window. One day a man started putting up sand bags around the window, and as I was looking up at this wall of sandbags, he looked down at me and said ,鈥� there鈥檚 a poor little boy鈥�. After he had gone all I could see was a small patch of sky.

When I went home they were building defences because of the first threat of invasion, and I can remember how they put a real roof on pillar-boxes to hide them from the air , us children used to play in the sandbag bunkers that were put up and on the seashore there were thousands of posts stuck into the sand as defences. We were issued with gasmasks and when we had a gasmask drill we used to blow through them, which made a lovely noise. Our teacher was not very pleased and a lot of teachers were called out of retirement as the younger ones had to join up, as these teachers were older they did not have much patience. We had a French teacher at our school and they said that she cried each day because of her country been invaded by the Germans.

We had a shortage of petrol and as my father was a farmer he got extra fuel. To make sure petrol was not used for pleasure or other purposes it was coloured red and the police would stop you, to see if you were on red or white petrol.

One day a Younkers 88 plane came down in Porloch bay, the tide was in and the German crew came ashore in a rubber boat, when they landed some men who were hay making, surrounded them with pitchforks, and were relieved to see our army officers arrive; we went to look at the plane but all we could see was the body of the swastika in place.

We had evacuees arrive it was a culture clash as both lots of people us and them lived different lives. A friend of ours took two boys in and when it was time for them to go to bed, our friends could not find them. In the end we found them sleeping under the bed instead of on it, when asked why they said that their mother and father slept on the bed and they always slept under it. When the two boys were given a nice dinner of meat and two portions of vegetables they said that they wanted fish and chips. I think a lot of evacuees felt unwanted and that鈥檚 why we heard of them returning to London etc.

One of my fathers fields was next to an American camp and I went there to fetch our cows, on the hedges were little white socks. I thought my friends thought they were balloons as in our day we had no sex education.

The American鈥檚 used to have lots of food, much of it seemed to go to waste. I once saw a whole tin of bully beef thrown on the floor of the lorry. As we were on rationing, remembering old ladies only having half a pint of milk to live on each day.

People used to keep pigs during the war and all those who gave their waste food for pig food to the owner when he killed the pig everyone who had contributed got a share. (Half the pig also had to go to the Government.

In 1958 I went to work at Somerdale and the floor that I worked on was where in the War they had made powdered eggs and also Rolls Royce made plane parts there in other parts of the factory.

My mother used to knit for the Arctic convoys and I still have the badge they gave her. I am seventy four years of age.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.