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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Ann Redgrave of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of George Twiddle and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was born on the Humber bank in a two up, two down. I remember right back to the First World War and seeing the Zeppelins come over in north Lincolnshire. My father served in the Royal Artillery, looking after horses. He was killed on 9th September 1918 when I was three. Mother got a telegram and just laid on the couch and sobbed her heart out. I didn’t know what was wrong with her but I tried to comfort her.

There was a shipbuilding yard near my home and part of my work involved driving a steam engine for a sawmill. I had to take it home every evening because they weren’t covered by insurance. They were sawing oak trees into two and a half inch thick planks for cladding the ships. The insides of the captain’s cabin were fitted out like a palace in teak. They made a really good job of it. I remember the first one that sailed. It went down the Humber to the North Sea on its maiden voyage and it was blown up by a submarine. I knew the shipwrights and one of them burst into tears when he heard.

The area I lived in, Barton, was a comparatively small town but across the river was a larger town, Hove, towards the mouth of the Humber, where all the docks were. These docks were the principal target and I can remember two nights in May. You would have thought that they had blown the whole city up — it was terrible. We had an air raid shelter cut into the quarry. I stood on top of it with a rifle, and the bombers were coming right overhead, droning, and going very slowly because they were loaded with bombs. They went up the Humber and turned round back into Hove and dropped the bombs.

One night we brought one of the planes down and it landed in the city. You could hear folks shouting. The biggest tragedy was that the city hall had a deep basement. Several hundred people used to shelter there. It was considered bomb proof but it got a direct hit and everybody was killed. They never excavated it; they just sealed it.

Just before one Christmas they bombed a cargo ship bringing a load of Jaffa oranges and these great big beautiful fruit floated up the Humber and we gathered loads of them. The water did not penetrate their skin and they were absolutely delicious — especially as they couldn’t be bought at that time.

I got married in 1938. We had four children — the three oldest were born during the war, but we never went hungry. We grew our own wheat and had a mill to grind it. We would sift it through a silk stocking. Nice brown flour to make our own bread with. We had a big garden and I was farming 100 acres of land. It was an arable farm, but we also had good grazing land. The spray from the Humber would go half way across the field and every year we got a big crop of mushrooms from the salt water. We always had a pig for bacon, sausages and pork pies. Life was different then than it is now — you weren’t sitting behind a desk all day, so I kept fit.

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