大象传媒

In 1940 I was six. During the daytime air raids on Swansea which lay across the bay, the germans had set fire to Llandarcy Oil Refinery. The flames lit Swansea by night and the germans returned for three nights to destroy Swansea. Having dropped their bombs, they flew around the curve of the bay. Ship, cardboard cutout silhouettes had been built on the salt marshes to act as decoy targets, rather than ships in Port Talbot. In the evening, with a miner's helmet on my head, my father and I were standing at the back of our house watching the mayhem. One german bomber, with some spare bombs, flew in low to attack a silhouette ship. The twin explosions rocked the house, and covered it, and us in thick, smelly, black mud!

Nearby there was a barrage baloon and gun site. With fathers away from home, I suppose the children grew a little wild. Our major game was WAR! We had wooden shaped guns with which we shot one another.I suppose I would have been eight, when with some older boys we stole some machine gun bullets from the gun site. We took them to a shed and using a vice and pliers, the bullet was pulled from its brass casing.The open end of the cartridge was closed in the vice. We took some of these modified cartridges up the mountain to an abandoned quarry. They were wedged in between the rock strata. Using a long spiked bar, its pointed end was placed on the percussion cap of the cartridge, while the other end of the bar was struck with a hammer! The explosions dislodged the rocks. One larger boulder rolled down the mountain, smashed down a brick wall and demolished a greenhouse!

Towards the end of the war, captured munitions were brought to Briton Ferry, to be dismantled and used in steel making. To make weapons safe, men would burn through the barrel of this gun and through the stock of another. We ten year olds would break in to the scrap yards and steal a collection of guns. We could dismantle them, reassemble them with undamaged parts, and wind up with a pistol in perfect working order. Our enterprise finally reached the police, who came in to Primary School, to tell us how dangerous it was, and give us an amnesty, to hand them in. To the best of my recollection, we all did.

With the VE celebrations, there were 'parades'. A friend of mine was dressed in a white sheet unsaddled,astride and old cob as "Lawrence of Arabia". As he went by, I threw a firecracker under the horse which reared in fright and galloped through; scatterring the parade, and up the mountain side, with my friend still hanging grimly on while his sheet flutterred behind like a huge flag!

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