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This story has been added to the People's War website by Helen Jubb on behalf of Gordon Rees with his permission.
When I was 2 years old in 1937 I contracted bovine tuberculosis as a result of drinking raw unpateurised milk. I was taken by my parents to a West Wales children’s sanatorium at Kensington Hospital, St. Brides, Haverfordwest, Penbrokeshire where I remained throughout the war. In fact I did not leave that sanatorium until May 1947 when I was 12 years old.

Inevitably at the sanatorium, food was rationed and of poor quality. The days and months were long and stretched into years for many of us but we quickly became institutionalised. Victorian attitudes still prevailed in those years and family visits were limited to just one per fortnight though we were frequently visited by kind people from the country town of Haverfordwest, many of whom were Rotarians, church people etc…Just a mile from the hospital was an RAF base at Talbenny and how those splendid airmen looked after us. At any given time there were between 80 and a hundred children at the hospital and every single day child was visited by an airman with a present on that child’s birthday. The RAF never let down a single child. The visiting airmen usually arrived on a bicycle and no matter how bad the weather that airman with that birthday present always arrived.

In 1944 the RAF put on a wonderful Christmas pantomime for the children. They made and painted the scenery, wrote the words and music, made the costumes and I still after all these years remember that 1944 Cinderella with sheer wonderment.

In 1943 we started to receive German prisoners of war at the hospital. They were brought in to work at the hospital, home farm and gardens. Now we children were very, very apprehensive at the thought of having Germans around us as all our comic stories depicted Germans or ‘The Hun,’ as the very lowest form of life. After all wasn’t the nation in a life and death struggle with Germany? Our fears proved to be unfounded as these soldiers of Rommel’s Afrika Korps were kindness personified. They would regularly bring us raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries etc, from the hospital gardens and made wooden toys for many children.

In the spring of 1944 I first clapped eyes on an American. He was 19,20 or 21 years old at the most and was stone cold dead. This was just prior to the D-Day invasion of Europe and realistic manoeuvres were taking place on many beaches in Britain using live ammunition and sometimes tragedies occurred. On this particular May afternoon the hospital mini-bus had taken a number of we children and accompanying nurses for some sea air to a long beach known as Newgale Sands. Suddenly a nurse started screaming saying a body was being washed ashore. We children were fascinated and yet horrified as we had never seen a dead body. The body was that of a young American soldier who had been training in attacking beaches and was accidentally shot dead by a bullet. I particularly was struck by the fact that he had bright natural blonde hair and we later learned that he was from Bismark, the state capital of North Dakota which was settled by many people from Scandinavia hence the fair yellow hair. Now I was 4 years older when the war started in 1939 and for a while all the war news was bad as the German army overran Western Europe and Britain stood alone. Bad news seemed to follow bad news until the nation received a massive uplift when the news came through that the Royal Navy had sunk the mighty German battleship ‘Bismark.’ As a consequence I will never forget the sight of that young brave American body being washed up on a foreign shore and that he came from Bismark, North Dakota.

I could write much more, about high courage amongst children who knew they were seriously ill with at the time no known cure for tuberculosis. I could write about hospital staff whose devotion to their duty surpassed the expected, I could write about the death of a child and we all knew the significance of a hearse coming up that long hospital drive. But you will have many more stories to read and I only hope these few words are of some help to you with your worthwhile project.

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