大象传媒

My story
My war was spent at my home in Sheffield in Yorkshire.
Sheffield was famous for manufacturing steel, one of the cities that received massive bombing attacks. Fortunately we lived on the hilly outskirts and, although we could see the bombs and the fires, we ourselves were hardly touched.

I remember odd incidents:
Towards the end of the war I met a young boy who had been shopping for his mother. He had bought a bottle of some flavouring and asked me if I knew what it was.
I smelt it and said "banana"!
He was incredulous there were no bananas in Britain during the war and he had never seen or smelt one in his life.

My greatest memory is when, as a boy of seven, I was playing in our garden one warm September Sunday morning and my father called me inside the house. The radio was on, my father told me to sit down, listen and never forget. It was a posh gentleman who was talking and he said that, "we are now at war with Germany".
I never, never forgot.

Well, that's how it all began.

Bill Ibbotson

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