大象传媒

This story has been written onto the 大象传媒 People's War site by CSV Storygatherer Alison Lear on behalf of Gerald Frankpitt. The story has been added to the site with his permission. And Gerald Frankpitt fully understands the terms and conditions of the site.

I was eleven at the start of the war. My father was a farmer and I had one brother and three sisters. My father owned a field which was nearly twenty four acres in size. It was used as a horse racing field in Victorian times. In the war it was requsitioned as a POW camp.

Firstly there were Italians and later on Germans as well as displaced people eg Yugoslavians. The POWs worked on the land - they were all hardworking except the Italians!

I remenber the Italians used to catch wild birds in a trap and eat them.

The Germans were so well disciplined they almost ran the camp themselves.

I don't remember ever being short of food, particularly as we lived on a farm. My father was a cattle dealer. He was too old to join up.

We had a bomb which dropped on one of our fields - it was an unexploded bomb and I believe it is there to this day! My son now runs the farm.

The only other experience we had of bombing as a family was my sister's school in Exeter being bombed.

I also remember a broadcast from Lord Haw Haw when he said the Germans would bomb Tiverton!

I also remember being pulled up by the guards of the POW camp one day because they thought I might be a spy.

The other interesting story in Tiverton was the arrival of the Americans in town. One of them wanted to marry my sister but she resisted his advances!

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