大象传媒

Picture the scene. Wartime Britain, a London suburb, and a 13-year-old lad setting off at 7am to do his paper round.

I lived in Chadwell Heath, Dagenham, on the outskirts of London. I was quite tall for my age and, like most youngsters of that time, and indeed today, eager to supplement the ill-spared pocket money from my parents.

I quite liked the early mornings in the summer, but the winter was a totally different tale. In spite of wearing a pair of lovingly knitted mittens, which were meant to keep the hands warm while leaving the fingers free to handle the newspapers, I often came home all but crying with the cold. It was especially painful as the fingers started warming up and the blood started flowing again.

But I digress. I wanted to tell you a little about my wartime hobby - not that it was unique, in fact most of the kids of that time, especially the boys, collected shrapnel. It came mostly not from bombs dropped on us by the Nazis during the Blitz, but from the exploded anti-aircraft shells that our boys were sending up to greet them.

There was a surfeit of small jagged pieces if iron shrapnel, and most boys had a box of it. We would swap pieces and admire each other's collections. My prize exhibit was a nose cone with three fuse band rings still attached. Yes, that's right, THREE! There were a few about in the various collections with two, but THREE! I had it because it came down in our back garden, narrowly missing my father, and I was the envy of many of my friends.

That valued prize was to be eclipsed on one particularly cold morning. Although there had been an air raid the night before, the papers were there and ready for us. They were often delayed and we would have to go back at lunchtime or even after school to deliver the morning papers.

On this particularly frosty morning, I was wearing an old but warm, long overcoat, along with the trusty mittens, with my paper bag slung across my shoulder. The bag wasn't too heavy - the publishers were very economical with that precious commodity, paper, during the war. The coat had seen better days and the linings of the pockets were more holey than righteous, but I still tended to stick things in them so that they fell down into the lining to inside the hem of the coat.

Onward then in pursuit of the objective - getting the right papers through the right letterboxes, a seemingly simple task, but more complicated than you would suppose at that early hour, especially if one of the customers had cancelled their paper, and I delivered one as usual, then all that followed were wrong. It didn't happen often, but it happened!

As always I kept a lookout for bits of shrapnel, after all this was the best time to find some, before the streets were aired and the rest of the world was up and about. On this morning, quite unexpectedly, I came across an unexploded incendiary bomb. About 18 inches long, looking like an aluminium cylinder with a tail fin of another metal and painted in a drab khaki colour. WOW! A prize indeed. The bomb was carefully picked up and slipped into my pocket, where it went through the holes into the lining of the coat. As I walked it was a bit uncomfortable banging against my knee, but still, it was worth it, there weren't any such bombs in any of the collections I had seen.

I finished the round and made my way back to the newsagent's shop to hand in my bag, but more importantly, to show him my new treasure. I thought there would be a reaction, but instead of a glow of envy, he almost shouted, 'Get that out of the shop!'

A little taken aback, I retreated to the sound of my employer ordering me to take it to the police station, some 80 yards along the road. I reluctantly complied with his 'request', but strangely I received a similar welcome in the police station. 'Give that here,' said the sergeant, who took the bomb from me, deposited it in a bucket of sand that was by the wall and took it out to the yard.

Sadly, that was the last I saw of what I thought was destined to be the crowning exhibit of my collection.

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