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From TonySusanG

This is the outline story from Tony. Childhood in Derby

I was born in 1937 and two years later my father’s job was moved back, due to the threat of war, to Derby (he worked in the administration of LMS Carriage and Wagon) where he and my mother had grown up and married. Our new home was in Allestree — then a separate community to the North of Derby — but connected to it by a trolley bus route which my father used four times a day (he always came home for lunch).

My earliest war time memory was of my gas mask — a Mickey Mouse one with ears — and of my father helping to build our air raid shelter between ours and the next house — with separate stairs down. It was buried in the ground and had a roof mainly of railway sleepers. Fortunately we were about three miles away from the railway and Rolls Royce — the main bomber targets in Derby - and so we only used the shelter a few times — relying more on makeshift shelters indoors.

I slept in the front bedroom which had a two bar electric fire and I can still remember how mortified my parents were when someone walked from a neighbouring village to say that we were breaking blackout regulations and my electric fire could be seen through a crack in the blackout curtains. I should say that only on the very coldest nights would this fire be left on.

My father was in a reserved occupation and could not belong to the home guard due to his deafness — he had to leave on failing to hear the instructor shout to throw his Mills Bomb (a grenade). But my Uncle Bob came back from Dunkirk (he arrived back without money or clothes and my father sent money to Dover for him) and visited us with his uniform and a Sten gun — I can remember lying down and aiming it down our garden.

Although there was a hill between us and Derby we could see the Barrage Balloons and I can still see one bursting into a flash of flame when struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. And hear the sinister oscillating note of the engines of a German plane high up — due to the engines not being synchronised as were ‘ours’. The sound of the air raid siren.

My prized souvenirs were a sharp jagged heavy piece of bomb splinter and a piece of aircraft aluminium with rivets and which had obviously had the paint burned off.

Later in the war I can clearly remember my parents waking me up — it must have been about 9pm — to see the sky full of hundreds of aircraft all high up at about 15,000 feet and assembling for a night raid (it must have been rare for them to assemble so far east). They must have been Lancasters as the British did the night raids. My parents must have felt that I would never forget the sight and they were right.

My parents sheltered me from the emotional stress that they must have felt — but at some stage my mother told me of an aircrew member from our village who on his one night of leave was found collapsed drunk at the front door by his wife — and who was killed shortly after. My mother was obviously critical of him — which I couldn’t fully understand.

Memories of ordinary family life must be common to many — my father’s long working hours organising rolling stock for the war effort and my mothers constant work — shopping every day, shovelling coal from the coal bunker to keep the fire made up and the water hot; cooking constantly. Washing all the clothes, sheets etc in the kitchen with a ‘poncher’ in a wash tub and a hand wringer. Feeding the hens and laying eggs up for the winter in buckets full of ‘water glass’. The magical feel of collecting eggs warm from the nest.

Stamp collecting was an obsession — with my Uncle Bob in a South African convalescent home (he caught TB in India) and my Uncle Howard (on my mother’s side) in the Royal Engineers in India. The exotic stamps and cigarette cards and later the very occasional food parcel from South Africa gave me an acute sense of Empire.

VE day is a faint memory. But the failed attempt by me and neighbouring children to make fireworks is easy to recall. We mixed balsa cement from aircraft model making with iron filings and expected it to burn with a shower of sparks — it didn’t.

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