大象传媒

The day before the war started, we were evacuated. I was forteen years old. When we arrived in Skegness we were taken to our billets. If I remember right, the lady I was billeted to was a Mrs Shaw of Edward Crescent. When my friend George Taylor and I had got settled in we went to the cinema on the seafront to see "Wuthering Heights" starring Laurence Olivier. When we got back we discovered they'd had a search party out looking for us. On September 3rd, we were in Butlin's amusement arcade playing on the slot machines, when a fella came round saying "We're closing up, war's been declared". That September/October was beautiful. For a month we didn't go to school. We played football on the beach and went round the various amusements, thoroughally enjoying ourselves. (It's funny what comes into your mind, but they were beginning to pool petrol and the price of petrol was 1/6d a gallon). After about a month we started school. As time went on and nothing happened, we all began to drift back home. I was home around about Christmas time. Everybody was in some organisation and I was in the ATC for the best part of two years. We used to go to North Cotes every Sunday and also for weekly periods at a time for a preview of what it was going to be like when we got called up. We hoped to get flights, that's what we used to look forward to. That's what we liked. We used to learn the drill, morse code, aircraft recognition and all that sort of stuff. But instead of going in the airforce like a lot of the others, I was called up as a Bevin boy. We were sent to Cresswell colliery for a months training underground, after which we were all allocated certain pits to go to. As we weren't acquainted with any, (as they aren't any in the Grimsby area), we chose the ones nearest to home, which were in Nottinghamshire, and I finished up at Bentinck. They put you on the pit top for a few weeks. As the coal comes up from the pit it goes on conveyors and is washed, we had to sort out the rock from the coal. After about 2 or 3 weeks of that we went down the mine and worked in the pit bottom. Then came the first summer holiday after which I went on the coal face. The coal face is a 3' seam of soft coal where a round-the-clock three shift system was worked. I did nearly every job at one time or another (conveyor; erecting; actually getting the coal - this is called a "stint" which was 8 yards in our seam; also packing; cutting etc).

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