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Typed by UCN Volunteer

My name is Hazel and I was 9 years old when the war broke out. When the war broke out, I was on holiday at Jawywick near Clacton (east coast), I was with my mother father and younger brother and we were sharing a bungalow (holiday) with Mr and Mrs Norman and their two sons. The children went to the uncle peters show. We also spent a great deal of out time roller-skating and when the war broke out we had to come home before we had our full holiday. When we arrived home my father made our coal seller into an air raid shelter he propped up the roof with great pieces of wood and made two bunks for my brother and myself. My mother and my father arranged to sleep under the dining room table during an air raid. We practiced what to do if there was an air raid by always taking our gas masks down with us and we had lots of winter clothes hanging in the hall which we then took down with us, then we gathered together all of our plastercine which my father taught us to use if the water or gas pipes burst we also were taught to turn the stop gap off and he also made a ladder so that we could escape through the coal hole and we had a few practice runs. We also took our bicycle lamps down as well as a stock of candles. We took a number of precautions that luckily we didn’t have to use.

Later, we had two evacuees, billeted on us, one was called Jim Bowler and the other was Ian Semple who came from Kimble Grammar in London and they then slept in my bedroom, I moved into my brothers and my brother had to sleep on a camp bed in my parents bedroom. Great many people took in evacuees in the war.
Mr and Mrs Duke (our neighbours) took in a boy called Richard Baker and he has since become a radio television personality.
Mother became salvage officer, she took in all old books, newspapers and magazines when we had what was called salvage drives and then I used to borrow some of the books before they were sent off. Looking back there was some dreadful destruction of lovely books, I kept some of those books under my bed until I had read them!

My father joined the home guard. There was a funny story, one weekend there were manoeuvres taking place on the golf course on the Kettering road, one section were to pretend to be German parachutists and the other section were to defend the town and capture them. There was a terrible fog that weekend and by chance ‘one of the Germans’ happened to be a grounds man of the golf course who of course found his was around and so the Germans captured the club house while the defenders got lost!

Then my father had a shock, he was called up into the army at the age of 39 which meant that he was around twenty years older than the other service men that he was with and at times older than the commanding officers. He first went to Butlin’s Holiday Camp at Rhyl in Wales and after basic training he was sent out to India then Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then to Burma where he was in the twentieth Indian division of the fourteenth army. He saw a great deal of action and was given compassionate leave and came home in time for V.E Day, then to our amazement was sent back to Burma where he arrived for V.J Day and then had to come all the way home again on a ship the Neahellas where the conditions were so bad the men called it ‘the near as hell as possible. He docked at Liverpool and was told that his demob point was Northampton on the old racecourse a few hundred yards from where he lived. He then had a spot of bother because besides his demob suit etc he had to have a travel permit which of course he didn’t need because he could walk home as his home was two minutes away but he was told to think of something to use the travel card permit for and he came home with a railway travel permit from Northampton Castle Station to Northampton Bridge St Station a distance of about four hundred yards and since both stations were at the other end of town he never did use it and carried it around for years as a war time souvenir.

I can remember the Dunkirk survivors coming into Northampton and they were marched from the railway station to St Michaels church rooms where I was told they had to sleep on the floor, many of the neighbours who lived in that area took them in, gave them baths, washed some of their clothes and enabled them to have a shave and help them to feel a bit more like a human being! One evening when my mother and her friends were playing tennis on the racecourse (I was the ball girl) the French and Belgium soldiers were sitting around the bowling green watching the bowlers nearby my mother said to me, take these cigarettes and a few matches and give them to the soldiers. I had never met foreigners so I was most surprised when they broke the cigarettes in half (as cigarettes were in very short supply and this enabled the men to share them between them) and then they said to me ‘Merci’ and I not understanding French said to them ‘you don’t have to ask for mercy your in England now! One of them understood and explained to the others what I had said.
Another survivor I met, whom I’ve never been able to forget was wandering by himself with great staring eyes in a yellowy whitish face. He was wearing an army great coat which was far to big for him, underneath he had pyjamas and on one foot was a white tennis shoe and the other a slipper and I didn’t realise at the time that he must have suffered a dreadful shock. Later, when I was older I realised what war could do to people.

Northampton was a safe town, we had a great many evacuees and refugees one of the most terrible things we shall always remember the air raids on Coventry. The German planes flew over our town because the fire station and St Mathews church spire acted as a signpost. At one time, people talked of camouflaging the fire station but the R.A.F and the American Air force always benefited form these easily identifiable buildings.

Coventry received some of the worst air raids in the Midlands, we would see the bombers going overhead from our bedroom windows and we could also see the fires when Coventry burned and Coventry was over thirty miles away. People nowadays find it difficult to believe that those fires lit up the sky.

My uncle Chris and aunty Florie took in a German — Jewish boy as their evacuee and treated him as their own son as they had no children. His name was Walter Frank. After the war he and his family then went to the United States and kept in touch for years. Walter actually came to my uncles ninetieth birthday party. We all had a great time talking over our wartime memories.
At school we all had air raid practices we had to take our gas masks with us everyday and were sent home to collect them if we forgot them. We had a great air raid shelter built by the side of the school playground and we had a number of practices in case of daylight air raids. The head mistress would ring the school bell, lessons would stop immediately, Miss Agutter’s favourite word was immediately!
We would pick up our gas masks and walk slowly into the cloakrooms, get our coats and then go into the air raid shelters. Sometimes we had spelling lessons while the practice was going on and sometimes singing. One of the disadvantages of school during the war was that we had to share the school with the evacuees so we would have lessons at school I the morning, the evacuees in the afternoon one week and then change the following week and some of our lessons we had in church halls. In the summer we had a great many nature rambles and games in Abington Park which was near our school, Barry Rd Junior.

Towards the end of the war I became a St Johns ambulance cadet and I was allowed to go to the railway station in my uniform and help with the refreshments which were mostly mugs of tea with condensed milk and ‘wads’ which were great thick sandwiches with very little filling, mostly either spam, bully beef or plum and apple jam. I remember the soldiers being seen off by either their wives or girlfriends who would stand on the platform, crying and waving handkerchiefs until the train was out of sight and the men would lean out the windows until the very last minute. I also remember the trains coming in with survivors, firemen, A.R.P workers from London during the V1 and V2 raids, the trains were packed with people standing as well as sitting and often the firemen were still covered with soot and dust, more asleep than awake. Our neighbour Mrs. Lackston who was a great St Johns Ambulance worker took one foreman in and slept for three days, as he was so exhausted.

Northampton was ‘invaded’ by men of the eighth United States Air force, known to us all as Yanks. They had airfields all round the northern part of the county. In Grafton Underwood Village (population about two hundred), they had an airfield with over two thousand men stationed there. These mostly flew in flying fortresses in daylight raids and we would see them flying by overhead like migrating geese. We would count them flying out and again coming home and the losses were colossal. In some of our village churches there are memorials to these men. There is a stained glass window in Bozeat depicting a plane on fire avoiding the village which saved peoples lives. The pilot flew away form the village before crashing. There are a great many stories in that part of Northamptonshire.

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