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During one August holiday this old man, he was just a tramp, came down Lairgate, and sat outside the shop opposite ours. I can see him now; he had bright ginger hair and a long ginger beard, and me mother thought — poor man he won’t have eaten for ages — and took him a cup of tea and a sandwich across. This happened regularly for 2 or 3 days, he came down for his cup of tea and his bit of pie and a sandwich.
Then one night we’d gone to bed, and about 10 or 11 o’clock we were woken up by the air raid sirens. My father was a special constable so he was on duty. My brother got out of bed ‘cos he heard this plane coming over and he saw it drop a parachute with this big box on the end. And then there was an almighty crash! Our shopfront had about 6 wooden shutters with a bar across to hold them up — they were sucked out into the middle of the road. Father came in the next morning and told us the barracks had been hit by a landmine.
So we were on school holiday and one of our main things was going out fishing. This particular morning we were going up to Anti Mill fishing, it was quite a good fishing pond up there. As we got to the end of Admiral Walkers Road there was this convoy coming down escorted by the police. Looking in the back of this wagon was this poor old man, he recognised us — he was waving to us.
When we got home me father was playing hell with me mother ‘cos she’d been feeding this guy and he was a German spy. At the bottom of his tansad (little carriage that they used to put children so they could sit up), he’d got a radio and they picked his signal up, and he was in Lime Kiln Quarry, where Hodgson’s used to dump a lot of their waste. With this radio in his tansad he’d guided this plane in to bomb the barracks. So after that we were a little bit wary.

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