大象传媒

This story was gathered at the Bedfordshire County Show and submitted to the People鈥檚 war site by Gillian Ridley for Three Counties Action on behalf of Mr Keith Frank Coleman and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

Everything was in short supply, like cycle tyres and tubes and batteries for our cycle lights. Bicycles were our only means of transport, we had no bus to go to school on, sometimes on the way home from school we would stop for a fag in one of the ammunition huts that lined the country lanes, it鈥檚 a wonder we didn鈥檛 get blown to bits.

In 1944 most of the evacuees had gone home, but some families stayed here and became part of our community.
It was also the time I left school at the age of fourteen. I got a job on the Farm and did a lot of work with the farm horses. I would be out in the fields in the morning and dozens of American Flying Fortress Bombers would circle around and get into formation, then head off on another daylight bombing raid, vapour trails would be left by higher flying aircraft.

Lads of my age had spent most of our growing up years with a war raging around us, so we thought that ultimately we would have to go to War and get killed. So to prepare for this we all joined the army cadets, this entailed going to a local village of Akeley and marching in the Village Square and do the sort of things soldiers have to do.
On Sunday we went to Buckingham with lads from other places and did the same kind of things. We had a firing range in an old sand pit where houses now stand. We were known as the Oxford and Buckinghamshire army cadets and it was on the sleeves of our uniform along with the Buckingham Swan.

We went on an Army exercise for a week at Southwold on the coast. It was the first time many of us had seen the sea.
We were under canvas but it rained so much and the wind was so strong that they had to take us to the empty Hotels in the town.
A part of the beach had been cleared of barbed wire and tank traps and it was possible to go into the sea although it was bitterly cold.

A Rumour went round that Ice cream would be on sale later on in the day and a queue formed expectantly, but the machine that was making it wasn鈥檛 working properly and the girl serving behind the counter said it would be a bit sloppy, but it didn鈥檛 matter to us for it was the first Ice cream we had seen for years. There were no cones so it was served on a piece of paper about six inches square, as I went out of the doorway my Ice cream slipped off the paper onto the floor.

While we were at Southwold two young boys were blown up by land mines on the beach and the following day the Atom Bomb was dropped on Japan, within a day or two the war was over and not a plane in the sky at last all was silent.

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