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"This story was submitted to the site by the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Peoples War Team in the East Midlands with Grenville Keys permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

At the beginning of the war I was in hospital having my tonsils taken out. I went in one day and came out the other minus my tonsils.

Trent Bridge was blocked with upside down cars and I can remember trenches dug around the embankment and up Wilford road. A lot of these things happened in the first few months but were then filled in – it was like initially there’d been scared.

I lived down the Meadows area and outside the terraced houses was a smoke screen. This was like a 40 gallon drum cut in half with a chimney and it used to burn oil and was looked after by soldiers, one every 30 foot down the street on the pavement. At night they used to light the oil burners and it used to cover the meadowside in a huge cloud of smoke. At the end of the street was the tip, power station, the good engine shed and the Royal Ordanance factory. They used to try and cover these up with the black smoke.

The Royal Ordanance factory was known locally as the gun factory. The factory had two twelve hour shifts and when it was dark all the streets turned into a hug bus station as the buses came to change the shifts. Although it was a total blackout the men had torches to find the buses – the people living there got scared because of the light showing.

There was a warehouse near the side of the canal. It had a lewis gun on top of it, near the side of the Clifton Colliery.

The council house too was sandbagged.

At school there were no male teachers, just old ladies, many fetched out of retirement. As children we didn’t have fathers either as they were away at war. When war first broke out we didn’t have to go to school which was great. We soon had to start though, one hour at first and then half a day and then a full day. We soon got back to normal. The big thing every week was a cup of cocoa from American in the middle of the day.

As time went on the Americans came into the war. The black soldiers went to the Towers pub, the white to the Denman. There was a lot of friction and fighting between the two groups.

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