大象传媒

A girl a couple of doors down the street from where we lived went down with Scarlet fever and had to be taken to hospital by an army ambulance which had a great big red cross on both sides and its back doors, then my sister Joan developed the fever and was taken into hospital, Terry and I were fascinated by the action and by the two men dressed in white boiler suits and masks. They fumigated the bedrooms with DDT and sealed the doors with masking tape. How long the doors were sealed for is anybodies guess.

While my mother was visiting at the hospital, mothers side of the family brought our great grandma from Creswell by taxi and left here for mother to look after when she came back home, she was not very pleased with the situation, granny had a hole in her leg, she also had a tube inserted to drain the fluid from her leg, the smell was vile. She would rattle the fireguard in the mornings for the smelly leg to be dressed, she wore a long black dress down to the floor, if she had put her Welsh hat on and a broom between her legs I鈥檓 sure she would have flown through the air casting her magic spells. Mother got a taxi to have her taken back home, one hell of a row broke out, they accused mother of being very ungrateful as her grandmother had reared here from being a young girl. It did not seem to matter to them that my sister Joan had been taken into hospital for Scarlet fever, so long as their ends had been satisfied.

As a sweetener they brought my little sister Valerie a new free wheel bike, I would take my sister out on it, her stood on the back holding onto my shoulders and we would go to fetch the ration from the Co-Operative on Gateford Road, I can still remember the number for the dividends 2590. On our way we would come across men cutting down beautiful ornamental iron railings on tops of walls for the war effort, this was supposed to boost morale up. I have only learnt this year, that the metal was useless for the war effort, just think of the cost involved in removing it, it was done all over the country.
If school children look on the top of old walls they will see where the iron railings came from.

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