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I was a schoolboy living in Penbury Street in Worcester attending St Stephens Junior School during the war years and my friends and I got up to all sorts of mischief and had lots of fun! I enjoyed my war years and have lots of memories.

We had evacuees from Birmingham; a whole school was evacuated to our area from Sparkbrook and they went to our school, we went to lessons in the morning and they went in the afternoon, so we were only at school for half a day. Even though we had a peculiar assortment of teachers, young girls and elderly men I can honestly say that we all did well despite the disruptions!

I had an evacuee friend who was called Froggy - he was put with an elderly couple, the husband was a milkman with Meadows, this couple had never had children and Froggy was a real bright spark — just imagine that! Some of the children went back to Birmingham when the time came but quite a few stayed on in Worcester, many came from very large families and they decided that they would rather stay in Worcester than return to Birmingham, I would imagine this made family life easier for their families. We would have battles with the evacuees using our gas masks, a whole gang of us would go up to the Parish Hall in Penbury Street ready to fight — they would lie in wait and jump out and ambush us, we had some good battles, us and them.

We had 3 air raid shelters in Penbury Street but luckily we never had to use them, they were made of brick with a concrete roof, they would have been alright to shelter from fall out but no good for a direct hit.

We had a garage, which was taken over by the ARP — they had 4 stirrup pumps and buckets and 6 coal shovels attached to broom handles and buckets of sand, which would be used to douse the incendiary fires. Incendiary bombs were quite small and were dropped in their hundreds to set fire, they contained phosphorus so had to be put out with the sand.

We all collected war memorabilia, my father’s brother lived in Croydon — he was a bit of a dandy, he brought me a box of shrapnel and an unexploded incendiary bomb and we emptied the contents! We would collect all sorts of things from the war like German helmets, pieces of shrapnel and bullets, which were often brought back by my friends fathers and traded at school.

We had a ROF (Royal Ordinance Factory) from the First World War, near to our school; it was built to make bullets. After the war the machines were mothballed and it was taken over by Cadburys they used to sort nuts there. They used to bring the chocolate to the factory in white sacks on the canal, horses pulled the barges — one horse pulled two barges, with the wife in the back barge. After school we used to hang about on the bridge and at the locks and ask if we could fill up the their water containers, we used rush off to get the water from a pig farm nearby. If we were lucky we would get a large chunk of raw chocolate which was such a treat as we were on sweet rations, well worth the wait. When the Second World War started the machines were taken out of storage used again and I think that Cadburys still had a part of the factory.

One day word got around our school that a Blenheim bomber had crashed on Rose Hill behind the houses and it had caught fire. The whole school turned out to have a look; those with bikes gave other children a ride to the scene.
As there was live ammunition on the plane there was a man guarding the site with a gun with a bayonet to try to keep us off — I’m not sure whether he was from the RAF or the Army. The fire engine came and put the fire out then all of us kids climbed aboard and managed to get away with some machine gun bullets to add to our collection of war memorabilia! The poor guard didn’t stand a chance.

Another time a German bomber on it’s way back from Birmingham dropped stick bombs by the ROF. Word got around again and after school we all rushed to the scene, again there was just one man guarding, this time it was an auxiliary policeman, he had no chance of stopping us gathering more war memorabilia in the form of shrapnel — pieces of the bomb casing. This shrapnel could be quite dangerous as it was very sharp.

My brother-in-law was in the RAMC — Royal Army Medical Corps, in a field ambulance unit and as such he job was to go on to the battlefield up near to the front line. He told me he was in Normandy at the battle of Falaise Gap. The British were on one side of the Germans and either the Americans or the Canadians on the other, they managed to capture the best part of the army. Many did get away but they were in such a hurry they left lots of their personal possessions behind. My brother-in-law managed to salvage a big box of army badges, many of them officers’ badges, he gave them to me to add to my collection and to take them to school for trading. He also brought back a German Officers lilo (they used them as beds) — we’d never seen one before but we had great fun sailing in it on the River Severn, at the time that we all used to swim in the river.

Perdiswell aerodrome was used for Tiger Moths during the war but one day my friends and I were sitting on the railings along side the Bilford Road watching the planes coming and going and we were surprised when a Blenheim bomber landed, overshot the runway, crashed through the fence right by where we were and carried up and over a five foot bank and on across the road. We were only 30-40 yards away from where it landed. As it came through the fence a piece of the propeller fell off about two foot long with the yellow tip, I jumped down off the fence, picked it up and hid it under my shirt, I remember that it was still warm against my skin. I took this home to add to my collection and had to keep quiet about that find as like all my other memorabilia it would be confiscated if it became public knowledge!

Whilst we were at school (aged about 12 or 13) we used to go potato and onion picking and help with the harvest all around Worcester. All the playing fields were ploughed up and planted with crops. Farmers had to grow food and if they couldn’t the WarAg (War Agriculture) would come and work the land for them. This was part of Dig for Victory. I remember working in a potato field that used to be a playing field, we were given a patch that was marked out with a stick and we had to pick and sort all the potatoes on that patch. My friend and I thought that we could make some cash by hiding the potatoes and coming back later and gathering them up to sell. When we went back we had to dig up a huge area in order to find the hidden spuds as we forgot to mark where we’d hidden them. There were lots of other people doing the same! We would also gather damsons and were given 6d for 12lb skip, hard work for 6d! We would also go pea and blackcurrant picking in Broadheath. We were not allowed to take any home but my mother packed our lunch in blue sugar bags, which we use to smuggle peas and blackcurrants home!

At the top of Penbury Street lived a bookie called Mr Hale; he was a real Worcester character, as there was no racing due to the war Mr Hale became a fruit merchant. His son, who was the same age as me — about 12, and I helped him, we used to go out in his Austin 16 with a trailer full of boxes, we used to sit in the boxes, they wouldn’t allow that now! We would go all over the place including Wales. He would buy up apple orchards, cauliflowers — anything that he could transport and sell. Rabbits were something else that Mr Hale used to collect from mid-Herefordshire, I remember going into a shed and seeing 200-300 rabbits all hanging up waiting for him to take and sell. He would also sell flowers and one day we pulled up outside a big house with a huge lawn, it had four steps all covered in daffodils. He negotiated with the owner to buy all the flowers on one step and we set to picking them, when the owner disappeared we very quickly gathered the daffs from another step and made our getaway! Once Mr Hale bought a cherry orchard and we would go to scare the birds away using 12 bore shotguns, we would each have a gun and a huge basket of cartridges, quite something for 12 year olds.

My school, St Stephens, backed on to the A449 — the Ombersley Road, as D-Day approached we would have large convoys of American soldiers making their way along the road. At dinnertime we would all cheer as they passed along the road and in return they would throw us sweets and gum — ‘Got any gum chum?’ Sometimes we would cycle along the road with the soldiers and sometimes find that they had stopped for a break and we would see what we could scrounge from them.

I remember being in Worcester with my mother when the trains came into Foregate Street station with the survivors from Dunkirk, I will never forget them, they were all tired, ragged and many didn’t even have shoes. I think they were on their way to Norton Barracks (the headquarters of the Worcester Regiment). I remember my mother going into a tobacconist and buying them cigarettes.

This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Diana Wilkinson of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Mr J Wilce and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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