大象传媒

Born near Lahore when it was part of British India, Mohamed Sharif came to England via Venice in the 1930s, In later years he lived in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire and recalled vivid memories of wartime life.

In 1936 I was working in a customs office near the Indian Ocean in I used to see the boats coming in and going out and I got "wanderlust". There used to be two Italian boats; one was the Comte Russo but I boarded the Comte Verde, an Italian cargo ship with some passengers. On arriving in Venice, I took a continental train to Switzerland, France and came to England.

I stopped in Glasgow for a couple of years. One day I was travelling to Chelmsford to visit friends, when I heard that war had been declared on Germany.
The minute the war started I left for Birmingham with just a few pounds in my pocket. There were no Indian families at that time - it was men only until the 1950s and 1960s. I had to stay with other men at a lodging house in the city.

The first job I did when I got to Birmingham was loading a goods train for British Railways. I did two nights work at the goods station and then got a series of engineering jobs before ending up at BSA (British Small Arms) - a very old firm that used to make bicycles.

The factory was bombed one month before I went there. There were heavy casualties and they couldn't get some of them out of the ground. The victims are still buried at the site. No one wanted to work there after that but I spent the rest of the war years there.

When the war started, it was all raids. The Germans used to come with 200-300 planes every night. Either they went to Coventry or Birmingham or the docks in London, Liverpool or Plymouth. They suffered heavy damages.

You couldn't show your lights on the car - you had shaded lights. Anybody who wanted to drive could do so without passing a driving test. The driving test started in 1935. I passed my test in 1937 in Glasgow.

During the war, things were very bad. Everything was scarce. Food was rationed and we had clothing coupons. When the coupons in the book were finished, you couldn't buy any more, except on the black market. If people didn't have any coupons left, they'd buy coupons from the people with big families who didn't need as much. You had to fill forms to get everything. I used to keep two chickens at my house, so I had to get a permit to get chicken-food!

The war was a trying time for the British people but they were very good. They were my best years in England. Everybody was friendly because they all had their backs to the wall. There was no colour bar - nobody mentioned colour. We respected each other and we carried on.

During the war, I volunteered for service in civil defence. After brief training, I was stationed at Birchfield Road in Birmingham and two nights a week I was on duty as a fireman. In addition, I made friends with a man from Cardiff and I volunteered with him to be a firewatcher. We slept in a church in Hockley, so that in the event of a bomb, we could immediately go to help until the arrival of the main fire fighters.

I was never injured in the war. I used to travel four or five miles in the morning on my bike to work. While in the foundry I narrowly missed a bomb once. Otherwise I was lucky. When the first time Birmingham got bombed, everybody went to the shelters.
They used to call them Anderson shelters, after the Home Secretary. He was a former governor of Bengal and he was a bad man there.

I went the first night to the shelter and never went again. People would say, "If it's going to happen, it's going to happen". A lot of people just carried on and stayed in their own houses.

At the end of the war, I was sent off to the other BSA branch in Montgomery Street. I remember they had a good canteen. A meal cost one shilling with a cup of tea.
However I soon decided to start a business on my own and in 1947 I started a market.

During the war, the British people were all working to make items for the war - consumer goods were not made. As the war finished, the production of consumer goods began again. Because during the war the country was bankrupted, they were trying to export as much as they could.
As a result is was almost impossible to get consumable goods here. They were trying to starve the home market at the expense of the exports. You couldn't buy anything. You couldn't buy even a comb, toothpaste or soap. You couldn't buy babies' bottle teats and you couldn't buy babies' ribbons. Nothing at all.
If I could buy those things and take them to a shop or market, I could sell it in a day. There was so much short supply; you could only buy a bit here and a bit there. The business couldn't flourish with nothing to sell.
In addition there were no new goods to be cast away. People wore and used goods longer than they will do now. They mended their clothes. The younger sister had the elder sister's clothes and so on. They saved and skimped.

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