大象传媒

One of the pastimes for boys like myself was collecting shrapnel, I had a real collectors piece that my father gave to me, a piece of a bomb with a red swastika in a red circle, and I also had incendiary bomb fins, which were plentiful, but when an ammunition train was bombed in Clubmoor which was about two miles from us, it devastated the area and left bombs and ammunition all over the place, we went to Broadway which was about half a mile from the scene, a lot of the bombs had been blown into this area, and there were landmines hanging in their nets, from the little hooks which were common on the corner of roofs on these houses, and a few harassed Homeguard were trying to prevent us kids from getting one of these landmines, we were not that particular whether they were British of German as long as we could take one to school and say 鈥渉ey I bet you haven鈥檛 got one of these鈥� prestige was everthing, fortunately we were prevented from achieving our aim.

Another pastime was collecting scrap metal for the ware effort, supposedly to make weapons and ships etc, iron railings were cut down, old lawnmowers dragged out of sheds, and mothers could be seen chasing after children trying to retrieve their pots and pans, we put out heart and souls into it, but years later after the war was over, I read that it was mostly poor grade metal unsuitable for armaments.
I also recall barrage balloons, these gas filled balloons were allowed to rise to a great height and anchored by wire cables, the idea was to foul the planes which could not see the cables, I don鈥檛 know what gas they were filled with, but we had a big storm one night with thunder and lightning, and lots of balloons were being struck, it was a spectacular sight, during the lightning flashes, the blazing balloons were hurtling across the sky like comets, but the next morning the balloon cables were strewn across the streets and houses, as we made our way to school it was left again to the harassed ARP-Homeguard to try to prevent children from touching them, as people has been electrocuted, in other places were the cables lay across live overhead elec鈥� supplies. We got to hear of a German plane that had crashed into the Museum, (conveniently for exhibition purposes) so we got the tram to town, or as far into town as it could get, and we walked the rest, it was devastation on a large scale, there was not more than thirty yards between bombed buildings, municipal buildings, theatres, shops were all in ruins, craters everywhere, burst water mains, elec鈥� supplies off, they had tried to clear the roads were possible, for traffic, but it was utter chaos. I think the despondency even got to us children, I was six maybe seven but I can remember the black cloud that hung over us, we made our way to the museum, which had opened just so people could see the plane, I also recall being disappointed that there wasn鈥檛 a dead pilot inside. Back at home each night we could see the glow in the sky were the docks burnt for weeks, even though we were five miles away from the docks.

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