大象传媒

We moved here, to Kidderminster, in about 1939, when I was 8. My sister also moved to Kidderminster from London, with her baby boy, and he had a Mickey Mouse respirator instead of a gas mask. Later he had a child鈥檚 Mickey Mouse gas mask 鈥� I always had to fetch them from a warehouse in Green Street. Free orange juice and milk were supplied from a clinic that was, I think, in Coventry Street. Locals could get a meal from a place off Prospect Hill, it was a shilling for the meal and six pence for the pudding. You could even go and fetch a meal to take home for the family. There was a clinic there for the school children if they got ill.

I was at the junior school in Coventry Street. They sold milk at the school at a ha鈥檖enny for a quarter pint, so we took 2-陆 d a week to pay for it. In winter they warmed it for us by the fire. They also sold Horlicks and Ovaltine tablets, which we used to buy as treats because sweets were rationed.

When I moved on to Sladen School we used to walk the 3 miles to school to save the bus fare for treats. At the school the girls did the flowerbeds. The playing fields had been dug up for vegetables, and the boys tended them. Each day, the boys from one class were taken on a lorry to work on a farm. As the playing field was all vegetables, we had to walk up to the Land Oak to use a field at the back of the Land Oak pub as our playing field. Later, when I had one, I used to take my bike, so I could go straight home afterwards. There was a pony in the field, and one day it kicked my brother and knocked him out.

The girls started cooking at 11 o鈥檆lock, and two of us had to do the shopping at Lipton鈥檚 and George Mason鈥檚 in the town, to get the ingredients for the cooking. I think the school must have had special ration books or vouchers of their own. When my Mum used to send me to get the meat ration for the family she used to say 鈥淟ook pathetic鈥�, so that perhaps the butcher would take pity on me and give us a bit extra. Trouble was I never could 鈥渓ook pathetic鈥�.

The girls used also to have to make their own school uniforms - the summer dresses and sports blouses and shorts, not the gymslips. I learned how to knit socks at primary school and of course how to darn them. We also had to knit blanket squares. They always had to be exactly six inches square, and if ours were not quite right we used to try and pull and stretch them into shape, but it didn鈥檛 work. We used to think that four-inch squares would have been much easier, but they were always six-inch. They were sewn together to make blankets for people who had been bombed, or hospitals, or prisoners of war 鈥� wherever they were needed.

I remember collecting shrapnel near where the Texaco Garage is now in the Birmingham Road. Some German planes had jettisoned their bombs in the woods on Hurcot Lane. The shrapnel was shiny, almost like gold. We used to hunt for the biggest piece, which would be much admired at school next day.

My sister鈥檚 house was in George Street, where all the houses had cellars. All the cellars had a piece of wall, to the next door cellar, loosened, ready to just push out if needed, in the event of being bombed, to escape along the street. The bombers were probably aiming at aircraft production in the old carpet factory.

Father was a stockman on a farm, and they had, first German, and later Italian, prisoners of war there, six or so at a time. They wore their own uniforms (the Italian uniform was brown, and the German green, more green than ours) with an armband. The Germans worked very hard, but all of them were always very nice to us kids. They used to show us photos of their children, and we would give them sweets. They always used to come to the kitchen door at dinnertime to hear the news on the wireless. Mum gave them a cup of tea and a rock cake 鈥� and they really were hard as rocks.

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Joe Taylor for the CSV Action Desk at 大象传媒 Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Sylvia Bishop and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

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