大象传媒

When I was a child I used to play in the little boy park in Thornaby, and this particular day it went very dark. Then there was thunder and lightning, and in the area surrounding us, was all the works etc and there were barrage balloons set up. There was fork lightning which was striking the balloons, which were all coming down in flames. It was quite a remarkable sight to see.
Living during the war was a hard time, due to the rationing of everything. When you watch these modern day films or documentaries on television, these people have to live the way we did during the war, they are wimps because we had to do without most things, we never saw any fruit, for example bananas and oranges and such like; the only fruit we saw was local grown fruit. We only had a few ounces of tea, butter, bread, which makes you wonder how it did last, which it did. But everyone then was healthier and you didn鈥檛 really see obese people then, like today. Also, bread seemed to taste nicer then, than it does now and lots of things appear to change.
I was going to school during the war, and I spent most of the time in the shelters, so I ended up missing a lot of my schooling during the war. My father used to be the caretaker at the school in Thornaby, so everybody knew me, and the headmaster used to send me if someone had been poorly, to go and get some saw dust from my dad. Also, we used to have huge water tanks in the school yard, as an emergency, if there had been no water, we would rely on the tanks. As kids, we used to have quite a time squirting water on each other.
I left school before the end of the war, and I was semi-time apprentice joiner, and I was working on the bomb at that moment actually, and I was at Thornaby and there was quite a lot of disruption there with the bombs. I remember standing in Covent street, Thornaby and there used to be an Old Scott鈥檚 Chapel and I was inquisitive and I鈥檇 come over to see what was going on, because guns were going off and it was an adventure when you鈥檙e a kid. They dropped a land mine on Edrisen鈥檚 work and the vibrations were very strong, everything shook, windows came out and it was rather a frightening experience. As kids we used to go round after raids the next day and look for shrops from the guns or anything for a souvenir.

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