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This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by Kyle Spooner, for Three Counties Action, on behalf of David Chapman, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was born in the village of Hermitage, near Newbury, Berkshire in August 1942. Although only after the war ended, I have very vivid memories of this period. My father was the manager of an engineering department, due to polio at the age of four, he was not in the armies. However, he joined the Home Guard, and I have memories of him being in ‘Dad’s Army’ kit, complete with gas mask. His customers, farmers engaged in the vital task of food production, often came in with rabbits they had shot (a useful addition to the rations) Also, I can remember American airmen from Gresham Common bomber base, probably interested in the machines identical to ones on their father’s farms, and bearing familiar names like Minneapolis — Moline, Massey — Harris, Allis — Chalmers. How many of these boys returned to their homes, I wonder?

I can remember fleets of bombs in the blue sky; I can remember a huge concentration of aircraft gliders (Arnhem?) and large conveys of military vechicles (D-Day and its follow-up I assume) and trains full of soldiers on the line which ran past the cornfield opposite our house. I have fond memories of the smell of petrol in the little utility buses. These had simple bodywork garden bench type wooden seats, and were built on Bedford chassis which I assume were made in Luton. Cars had a strong distinctive smell too but only for people who could get petrol at that time, so the road past our house was normally empty of anything except military vehicles or trucks going to a cold storage depot built to improve food distribution.

Tractors had a special smell of the vapourising oil paraffin, which was used as fuel.

At the end of the war, I was surprised, on my first time outside when lights were allowed (they’d been blacked out for six years) to realise that flowers kept the colours at night. My three year old logic had suggested that everything outside went black at sundown.

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