大象传媒

MY WORLD WAR 2 Memories
I am now 73 years old; in September 1939 I was 7 and a half and on a camping holiday at Tal-y-bont near Barmouth, West Wales, with my elder brother, Stan, and our Dad. Mother was at home in Walsall, West Midlands, running the family Fish and Chip business in George Street. Our home was No: 1, Earl Street, Walsall, now demolished to provide space for a petrol station.
Such was the fear of German bombs falling on the Midlands that Mum persuaded Dad, who was already retired, to keep us camping by the sea until things "Quietened down a bit", so we lived in our two-room ridge tent a couple of hundred yards from the sea, until mid-December when the farmer let us use the attic rooms in his farmhouse. Dad had put a wood floor into the bedroom section of the tent, but the winter gales coming off the sea put an end to our camping after 17 weeks under canvas! During this time our schooling was catered for by the small village school at Dyffryn just a walk along the coast road from Tal-y-bont. I have never forgotten the joys experienced by an English schoolboy being taught French by a Welsh-speaking teacher!
Early in 1940 my Brother and I were "evacuated" by our parents to Adams Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire as boarders. It is difficult to imagine a worse school than this was at the time - the war had taken most of the younger teachers and because of rationing meals provided little in the way of real sustenance. I especially remember the so-called "stew" - it was virtually impossible to find a piece of meat, the body of the stew being pearl barley, a commodity that I still cannot face to this day! Life in the school was very disciplined indeed; Dickens' Dotheboys Hall was heaven compared!
Our parents could not have known that in removing us from home in Walsall, where only a few late-jettisoned bombs fell from enemy aircraft finishing bombing runs over Coventry and Birmingham, and sending us to Newport in the rural Shropshire countryside that we were living just a few miles from one of the largest ammunition dumps in England! Thankfully, the Germans never realized this either!
Happily during 1943 we were removed from the boarding school and allowed to return home to become day-boys at Wednesbury Boys High School, just a couple of miles south of our home. It was still wartime and many of the teachers were what we would now call "past their sell-by date" - but there was a strong tradition of education at the school and we both soon recovered from the effects of our enforced evacuation! Soon younger teachers who had survived the war returned and peacetime education standards thrived again.
The culmination of my schooldays at 16 was a visit to France in 1948 with fifteen of my schoolmates supervised, at our request, by two teachers spending two weeks exploring Paris and central France, sightseeing the effects of war-time devastation and the many areas of Paris left entirely untouched throughout the war! Visits to foreign lands arranged by education authorities were unheard of at that time; the students themselves arranged any such trips; we were fortunate to have teachers willing to give-up part of their summer holidays for the benefit of their pupils.
Wilfred Wagg.
5th. June 2005.

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