大象传媒

At the time of this story I was 30 years of age, and I was working in the building trade.

When the war was declared the authority realised that they had taken too many up into the army. I did register to be in the army but I never got to be called up, due to too many people being in there.

I remember that at the beginning of the war, there were more nightly bombs, and these lasted approximately two years.

Being in the building trade I worked at Crewdan Hospital, London, putting fireproof roof covers onto the hospital's roofs. We were expecting fire bombs and we therefore needed to make sure that the hospital was ready for every eventuality. We also had to repair a lot of post offices due to the amount of bombs. It was hard to get timber due to rationing at that time.

The government issued a notice to local governments to repair all buildings, and due to my experience in the building trade, they passed all work onto me, and the government would look after the financial side of it.

I got married in 1939, to my wife Alice. We had a simple wedding, we had our meal at home and we couldn't afford anything big, due to rations. I remember that night that there were bombs going off in the East End of London which gave light work for Higgs and Hills which was the main building company at that time. I was sent to a block of flats which had elderly people in and I can still remember the smell, it was awful.

I never once got a good nights sleep as I was constantly being rang to go to various places, and my wife never got any sleep either as she was always waiting for my return.

Due to my heavy work I was given extra rations, so rationing was never too much of a problem for me.

My worst experience of the war was the fact that I had to stay where I was in London, but this didn't matter as everywhere was the same, as we were all being bombed, but never the less I found it tough during those days.

During the war we had a baby girl, and she was born in St James' Road Maternity Hospital in London. Two years later we had our son.

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Christina Cazalet of CSV Action Desk Leicester on behalf of John Hoy and has been added with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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