大象传媒

I am volunteer working for the 大象传媒's Peoples War Project and I am writing this story on behalf of James Edward Taylor.
The house I was evacuated to fronted the main street of Ashby and we could look out and see what was going on. The RAF rescue teams used to come through, and this day there was a Dornier on it (a German plane) and as young boys are inveterate collectors we all poured out and collected souveniers.
The men transporting the plane were in the cafe.

Another thing I remember, one of my friends called Dish Dillon kept two young magpies in the loft above the stables. Magpies are easy birds to tame and it was just before we left Ashby in 1944 and we decided to let them free. A couple of days later the cook came rushing in from the kitchen at lunch time screaming, there was a bird on the kitchen table eating the meat which was of course one of our magpies.

I can remember when the Yanks came, there were not any at Ashby, but Yanks, being Yanks used to come into the town ocassionally in a truck load and of course they were always very kind to the kids, they used to chuck us chocolate bars.

Just before D Day I can remember seeing as many as 50 planes in the sky at once. We were all keen aeroplane spotters and every day we chalked up on an old door the list of planes we had seen that day. We knew afterwards they were coming back from a raid on Germany.

In 1990 we had a 50 year reunion at the Manor House which was still being used as a school and it had changed very little.
The people who now owned it were just moving in and they were kind enough to open up the place for us to have a look round.
I saw the old shelf in the dromitary where I used to keep my birds eggs still there, that impressed me no end.

For a dare in the middle of the night we used to get up, go to the castle, and go into an underground passage about 75 yards long in the pitch dark.

There was the ruins of an old house called
Willersly just ouside the town and we used to go over there and there was a big ornamental lake, and we used to pinch the boat and go over to the island birds nesting. We were coming back with some Canada Geese eggs early in the morning when a police car pulled up. We were feeling guilty about having these eggs, but they pulled up because they thought we were homeless refugees from Birmingham.

In the latter part of the time I used to come home on my bike to Birmingham. There was no traffic, only military on the road so it was quite safe.

I played with various rugby teams but we were short of opponents and we play a team called Coalville about four times a year.

The school packed up at Ashby in July 1944 just after D.Day and I spent the last year of my schooling back at Aston, which, after Ashby it was very tame.

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