大象传媒

My dad, George Wright, was five years old when the war started in 1939. His father, Arthur Wright, died that year and my dad also ended up in hospital with an infection in a bone in his ear. Back then there was no penicillin, and my dad had to have an operation to cut the infected bone out of his skull. It worked, and he survived against all odds. Years later he asked his mother, Frances Wright, what she would have done if her only child had died as well and she said "kill myself".

Whilst he was in hospital, possibly dying, he had his fifth birthday. My grandma begged the means test man to let her have a few pennies to buy him a present and a card, but he refused saying "he has all he needs in there". Years later my dad found out about this and was so angry he found the man's grave and danced on it.

Because my grandma had to look after my dad as well as work in a factory, he ended up being shipped off to Doncaster to stay with the Hunt family. It wasn't official organised evacuation, but he spent a long time with them during the war.

When he got back home to his mother, they lived in a house in a large field close to where she worked. They were both terrified that an invading German would parachute down and come into the house and kill them.

My father remembered being moved all over the place and going to many different schools because his mother couldn't provide him with a stable home as well as work in the factory. Because of this he had little education. In the schools, there were few teachers because they were all in the army so he never really learnt how to spell properly.

As a child he remembered harassing American soldiers for sweets with other kids, shouting "got any gum, chum?" at them. He said that the Americans always had food and other supplies whereas everyone else often didn't.

He remembered people breeding pigs on allotments and lying to the authorities about how many piglets were produced. The extra piglets were kept in secret and fed on table scraps, which the neighbours contributed in return for a bit of meat when the pig was slaughtered. He remembers playing football with pig bladders.

He said that there were few sweets in wartime so they had to make do with something called "chewing wood", which is now known as liquorice root, a substance which does indeed look like a twig.

All food was rationed, and they didn't get very much. When the ration coupons ran out he and his mum used to go to the British Restaurant, a place selling cheap basic meals which didn't need coupons. He remembered that the food there was very good.

He seemed to have been very poor as a young child - I don't know if this was because of his family circumstances or because of the war. I suspect a bit of both. One day he wanted to go swimming in the local stream but he didn't have a costume. He made himself one out of wool, but it sagged alarmingly and he had to get out, everyone laughing at him.

My dad remembered going to the cinema all the time because it was warm. Some nights his mum would make sandwiches and take him to the cinema and they would stay for hours, watching the same program over and over.

His cousin Percy died in the war. He was a 17 year old boy who was called up. During basic training in England he broke his neck in a motorbike crash and died. I still have his picture in my house to this day - a heartbreakingly young boy in army uniform, who didn't look as if he had even started shaving yet.

My dad remembered being in air -raid shelters, terrified the Germans would "drop a bomb on me 'ead" as he said as a child. He said they were damp and nasty places for a small child and hated going down into them.

He was ten when the war finished and throughout the rest of his life my dad followed the principle of "make do and mend" and he always tried to do without - for example he grew his own veg and almost never bought new clothes, preferring charity shops. Similarly he never learnt to spell properly! I believe that an entire generation of children were profoundly affected by their experiences, the effects of which never really left them.

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