大象传媒

I was four years old when war broke out and one year later, started my education at Gorleston Road School Oulton Broad. My brother Geoffrey was three years my senior and I looked to him for guidance and protection.
As I recall, only a few months after starting school, the headmaster, Mr Pinder, called all the school into the playground and told us that some of us would be going to live away from Lowestoft for our safety during the war.Of course we didn`t understand at that time that Lowestoft was very vulnerable to invasion by Germany, and that we all were in grave danger.
My next recollection is of standing on Lowestoft Central station with my mother and brother awaiting a train which was to take us to Derbyshire.
All around us were other children with their Mums, and all carrying their gas masks in the little square cardboard boxes.How innocent we were of the enormous emotional turmoil our parents were going through.
We finally arrived at a house in a crescent in Barlborough, Derbyshire. The occupants were Mr and Mrs Hibbard and their son Geoffrey who was the same age as my brother. Mr Hibbard was a miner;a tall gaunt man with a large moustache who seemed to be older than Mrs Hibbard. Mrs Hibbard wore her hair in a bun which reminded me of Miss Godbold, one of the teachers at Gorleston Road school.
I have little or no memory of my time there as it was curtailed by mother taking me back home together with my brother. Her reason for this early withdrawal, she was to tell me much later, was because Mr Hibbard would take off his thick leather belt and belabour his son on the backside for any misdemeanour reported to him by Mrs Hibbard.
Mother was afraid that he would do the same to my brother and me.
Sadly my brother Geoff died some years ago and I am unable to relate his much clearer recollections of this period in our lives. I wonder if Geoffrey Hibbard is still alive? He would be 71-72 years old now.
The next period of our lives began when mother arranged for us both to go and live with a distant couin of her mothers who lived at Arminghall,a tiny hamlet near Norwich
Aunt Julia, as we came to know her,was a widow with two grow up children, both unmarried and living at home. Their names were George and Mary. All three were the kindest and nicest people one would ever hope to meet and our time their was among the happiest of our childhood. We both went to Poringland school about a mile away and it was there that I learned to read. Geoff had a bike and he would cycle to school with me on the carrier at the back.
Mother would visit us when father could spare the time and find the petrol for his motorcycle combination. Father was a diesel and steam engineer employed at a local shipyard and working long hours to keep our minesweepers and other boats on war service,going.
Aunt Julia had a small holding which included a pond where we would swim and fish in the summer. Strangely I remember nothing of any war activity during this time.
One day ,I was playing in the orchard when I saw some strange hooded figures lurking at the other end of a line of trees. I rushed back to aunt Julias and breathlessly reported that there were German spies in the orchard. George was dispatched to investigate, carrying his loaded 12 bore at the ready. To my dying day I`ll remember his words on returning. "You fule boy Davy,they aren`t spies, they`re beekeepers.

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