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This is Adam Hutchinson entering Raymond Davison and George Prince's story onto the website and they fully understand the website terms and condition of use.
Raymond Davison and George Prince have kindly shared their memories of World War II with me. At the beginning of the war Raymond was seven years old and George six.
Raymond and George both remember how they had to wait for hours in a queue to get a single portion of fish and chips because although fish and chips was not rationed so many people wanted it that you had to queue for hours. You also had to bring your own paper to wrap the meal up in because paper at the time was rationed. Another thing that were severely rationed were bananas. You were lucky if you could get a bunch of bananas every month and again you had to queue hours on end to get just this one bunch of bananas. Raymond and George also remember that sweets were also on ration and gobstoppers became a favourite as they lasted a couple of hours. George told me that when in the war he wanted some football shorts but clothing was on ration so his mother made him some out of blackout curtains, he never did like to wear them though because they looked more like jodhpurs. One thing that wasn鈥檛 on ration was, apart from bananas, fruit and vegetables. There were plenty of these and therefore both agreed that generally the diet in the war was much healthier than now. Two things that weren鈥檛 available full stop were bacon and egg. Instead they had spam and dried egg which was a powdery form that you had to fry. When I asked Raymond and George if they had a choice of either a fresh egg or dried egg which would they pick Raymond said he would still prefer dried egg but George admitted he would pick a fresh egg. Nylon at the time was also not available so women used tealeaves to dye their legs so it looked like they were wearing tights.
Now I will tell you about Raymond and George鈥檚 most scary memories of the war.
Firstly Raymond told me about how one night because his grandmother was feeling ill his whole family, except his father who was checking everything was alright, went under the stairs when the bomb warning alarm went of instead of going into the air raid shelter. That night at around ten past twelve a land mine fell on where Valley Road School is now, a few hundred yards away from Raymond鈥檚 house. That meant Raymond was right in the area of the explosion. He said the weirdest thing was that you couldn鈥檛 hear the explosion, people five miles away would hear a tremendous explosion but when you鈥檙e right next to it all you hear is a massive rushing sound like a hurricane. Ten at the time Raymond was interested in what happened so he popped his head out from under the stairs and all he could see was slowly the house silently apart from the rushing sound falling in on its self, all the windows shattering and the walking canes his family left in the hallway floating along the hall and out of the window. Raymond then rapidly shut the cupboard and sat tight with his family until suddenly there was silence, apart from the screams of trapped people. Raymond was lucky one street away all the house had totally been wiped out and funnily enough the only one hurt of his family was his dad who had been blown from one side of the shelter to the other from the wind, he wasn鈥檛 to badly injured.
George remembered how when he was nine one of the biggest bombings in Sunderland took place with a direct hit Victoria Hall, George only lived a few hundred yards away from there in the Garths in the Eastend. So when the sirens went of for the bomb warning his family and all their neighbours gathered on the ground floor in the hall. It ended up that the bomb blew the door inwards and hit his mother right in the chest, no one in the building was seriously injured though only covered from head to toe in dust and soot.
I would just like to thank Raymond Davison and George Prince for telling me about their youth in the war and letting me share it with people for many years to come. THANK YOU.

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