大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Simon Harris and has been added to the website on behalf of Jean Chedgey with her permission and they fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

My father who started the war in the ARP, seeing some terrible things during the blitz before being called up into the 8th Army, wanted my mother and me out of London away from the bombings. We went to live in a cottage acquired by my grandmother in Willesborough.

I well remember British troops marching down the road past our cottage on their way to the camps at Hinxhill, and my grandmother taking them large jugs of tea if they stopped for some reason. I also remember the Willsborough bypass being built nearby and the prisoners of war working on it. As the grass was cleared, the sandy banks made lovely slides for us children! Later I would encounter more POWs. We had lost our house by the end of the war and were re-housed in a Nissan Hut on Nothfield Common. At the time there were still some German prisoners there and I well remember my dad, now returned from fighting Germans, befriending them. They used to come to our home and one of them even painted two oil paintings and gave them to my father. Regretfully the paintings have disappeared now.

My memories of the war are generally happy ones, since being so young I didn鈥檛 experience the hardships and loss that so many went through. But my father did experience dreadful and terrifying times and nearly died in Solerno.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.