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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of Barry Smith and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was living in Kingston-Upon-Hull on the East coast. Hull was blitzed many times and because of its small size it had a huge number of casualties per head of population. At the time I was a schoolboy and I grew up believing that we would always be at war and that life was always like that. Each morning us youngsters would go and see what damage had been done the night before. In bombed out houses we would see flapping paper, ornaments on mantelpieces, roof timbers and fallen slates. We always had lots of stuff to throw around!

I was brought up by my Grandparents on an old farm which had had the town expand to grow up around it. A landmine fell on our old outhouse where Granddad kept pigs. He was most upset about the pigs, and went into the building to get them out while the large cylindrical land mine hung there.

In the field at the bottom of our garden there was a barrage balloon. Every time a new balloon went up we would see a different one of our names on it as we had made friends with the RAF men. A balloon would sometimes break away and the cables would get caught up in all sorts of things. We would chase them with great glee and see where they ended up. I remember them, half deflated, flapping around in the wind.

We gradually realised there was a war on, and the Germans became the ‘baddies’ in all our games. There was a Prisoner of War camp nearby with German and Italian prisoners, and I found it really difficult to understand how these ordinary men could be our enemies. On Sundays some of them would come and visit us for a meal, and bring us wooden toys that they had made and painted. Then they would make their way back to the camp. I couldn’t imagine British PoW’s doing the same in Germany.

At night we would hear the drone of the planes. There were search lights, which we enjoyed. We would watch them light them up, and the power of the beam was really strong. They passed an electric current through a filament thicker than your finger, and they would only be pointed up into the air after they were lit up.

In 1944 I was at Scarborough and the place was chock-a-block with invasion vehicles waiting to go over on D-Day. There were lines and lines of trucks and military equipment, all ready to go onto landing barges. We used to watch them practicing landing on the beach, although at the time I didn’t realise what it was for.

We really treasured bullets and would go up to North Bay where machine guns fired at targets. When the tide went out we would collect the spent bullets. They had a lovely golden bronze appearance, and some of them would be bent double from where they had hit the rocks.
I never suffered much with the rationing as my Grandma used to bake some lovely baps and we would put jam and margarine on them.

One night Jerry was over and a car had been left with its lights on. The plane put a whole magazine into the car and everything around it. The road around it was left all damaged and cracked. This was just outside Woolworth’s, which had been damaged as well.

Eventually I was evacuated to 30 miles outside Hull. We were able to see the orange glow of Hull burning at night. It was taking quite a battering because they were trying to bomb the docks. Evacuation was not a good experience for me. We were staying with people I didn’t like and I had a horrible time. There were five of us in one bed in a half derelict room which had a hole through the ceiling. They would lock us in there if we did anything wrong, and we would be made to stay in there for hours. It was in a village called Fishlake. I have visited the house since, and although most of the house has been restored, the room where we slept was still a dump. We were eventually taken away from there after my Dad visited us and the man came out after him with a shot gun.

I didn’t think the war was ever going to end but it began to dawn on me that it might when I went to the Pictures and saw pictures of Belsen with heaps of bodies. I just couldn’t comprehend how they could be picking them up with bulldozers. Soon afterwards, someone gave me a bit of coconut and I didn’t know what it was.

At the end of the war, me and my sister were ever so skinny. We had to go to a convalescent home, and were given sun ray light treatment. We had lots of spots and were malnourished. I had nightmares, and the first night at the convalescent home I had a nightmare that a big cat was coming after me. I could see these two eyes staring at me, and fell out of bed. A nurse came in and I realised that the ‘eyes’ were just slits at the bottom of the curtains letting light in.

After the war I still felt inspired o join the Forces and joined the RAF as soon as I was old enough in the early 1950’s. My first squadron was based at Stradishall, and I found that I loved East Anglia.

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