大象传媒

I was 8 at the beginning of the war and I remember going to school, Victoria Road School, one Friday and was given a letter to take home for my parents. It was for them to pack our gas masks to bring with us to school on the Monday as us children were to be evacuated. Middlesborough was a steel town and a prime target so my brother, John, 7 at the time and I were bused to Kerbey Moorside about 30 miles into the country and the two of us ended up staying with a family in a Flour windmill. Three to four months into it, we hadn't seen our parents at all, we decided to run away back home and escaped one morning. We walked about 15 miles until we got on a bus that took us home. We knocked on the door and my parents greeted us with a a good few spankings - the police had notified them of us missing and the spanks were out of concern! They let us stay at home from then on. School was much less strict with the war on, they didn't have a school bobby anymore, as many were conscipted into service, which meant we could get away with bunking school until the next day when we went back to school, before the war the bobbys would go to our homes and tell our parents and when we came home we would get a good spanking. One of our favourite hide-outs when we bunked school were the two underground air raid shelters on the common. We used to remove the escape hatches on the air vents and sneak inside and hide. At that age we made the most of the chaos, after a night bombing we would wake up very early and see what we could pick up in destoyed shops, the Coop was damaged badly one night and we helped ourselves to bandages and plasters. My uncle Thomas Blakeman was an air raid warden and was killed on the roof of the Crowen Hotel one night while looking out for planes. I remember these silly posters "Dig for Victory" that were displayed everywhere with a man and his spade. They wanted us to plant vegetables in our back yard which we did anyway, but by planting cabbage we could win the war! One of our other hangouts was the docks, where the Middlesborough football club is now. It was a no-go area though but because sometimes boxes would fall off the trucks we had to be there to fetch the spoils. We often got caught by bobbys and they beat us with with their waterproof cape which they rolled up and smacked us around the neck with or behind our legs - the worst pain you can imagine. It didn't stop us going back though!

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