大象传媒

I left school at thirteen, during the war, to be a farm labourer. We were living with my aunt and uncle at Trimley, near Felixstowe. There was no gas, electricity or tap water in our house. There were parrafin lamps, water was taken from the well and heated for our tin bath. Cooking was on a coal-fired range. We also had a Dutch Oven for bread, but we didn't use it.

There were, in the early part of the war, evacuees from Dagenham staying in the area.

The farmer rented from Trinity College Cambridge. We ploughed and harrowed with horses. The landgirls helped with the sugarbeet crop - they were fantastic. A neat pile of the beet would be ready for us to cart away in a horse-drawn tumbril. Later there were POWs, Italians and Germans, set to work on the land.

There was a big radar station at Trimley. It worked with Bawdsey. After the war it was demolished and there's just a wall left, by Morston Hall. I liked meeting the RAF and WRAFs while waiting for the gas cylinder powered bus.

Felixstowe was the base of the torpedo boats that patrolled the North Sea.

Reproduced with Premission by Ipswich Museum.

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