大象传媒

This is not really a story merely a recollection of things my parents told me about their war experiences. This wasn't much as they preferred to forget, particularly my father who was a tank driver with the Queens Bays.

At the start of WW2 my mother was in service in Leicester. She remembered that on one of the air-raids her boss bundled the family and her into the car and took them out to Oadby (then a small village outside Leicester) where they remained until the all clear sounded. On one occasion they saw someone signalling to the planes from the roadside - the person had a bicycle and rode off afterwards. On another occasion they arrived back to find a bomb had landed further down the street and all the windows had blown in, and the dining room table (a large one) was sitting in the middle of the lawn.

Shortly after she was told she was in non-essential work and had to go on the buses as a conductress out of Mountsorrell.
The story I remember of those times was: one summers evening she was on the last bus back to Leicester from Swithland Woods. It had been a lovely day and when the bus arrived in Swithland village there was an enormous queue of people, men, women and children all waiting to get on. Now Mum knew that there wouldn't be another along that night. She couldn't leave anyone there as it was an 8 mile plus walk back to Leicester and the people wouldn't be able to walk there with small children. She spoke to her driver and this is what she did. She spoke to the people in the queue and said. "I want every man to sit on a seat, every woman to sit on a man's lap (even if you don't know him) and every child to sit on a woman's lap." In this way and with people crammed inside standing up, she got everyone home. Just as well they weren't stopped.

In 1942 my Dad was called up. My parents were not married then so the wedding was quickly arranged and when Dad came home on embarkation leave they got married - they had 2 days together before he left for the desert and didn't see one another again for 4 years almost to the day.

My Dad preferred not to talk too much about his experiences. He did say that he had been very lucky, on two occasions he had been moved from either the front tank to the back or vice versa and each time, shortly after he had moved, the tank he had been driving was hit and everyone killed. He always said that the bullet didn't have his name on it. Another tale he told, although I am not sure where this happened now, is of them being lost and coming across this walled farm. They stopped and upon investigation found a lot of Turkeys and loads of turkey eggs. They tethered some of the turkeys to the back of the tank and took a basket of turkey eggs with them - he said the tank was so hot you could fry an egg on it. After the war he never ate spam or corned beef again until the day he died in 1977.

Later he was in Italy (Solerno and Monte Cassino)and he told me that he used to put on films for the troops as he had been a projectionist at one time. He did say more but unfortunately I cannot recall further.

A memory passed to me by my grandparents was of my Uncle Derek, who was about 12 at the time. He and his friends were playing in Rippingale village street when a German plane swooped down and strafed the street causing them all to jump into the ditch at the side of the road, but I am sure this happened to many people.

Also my Aunt grew and sold tomatoes in Rippingale and after her death I found a piece of paper which was a licence to grow and sell tomatoes - I didn't realise you had to get a licence for such things.

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