大象传媒

I was born at Heanor maternity home in Derbyshire on the 9th November 1934. During the war I lived at the Junction Tavern Junction Street Derby with my parents Herbert and Kathleen Booth (nee Steeples)and two sisters Dorothy and Eileen (known as Sally).

Our pub was near to a railway on Slack Lane and I remember hearing the bombs as they dropped onto it. My father brought a huge steel table and me and my sisters spent a lot of nights under the table while the pub was open with our crisps and bottles of pop, toys, pillows and rugs, and of course our gas masks. It was a bit scarry at times especially when we could hear the bombs coming down and the houses shook. My mother would send me to the corner shop when bananas came in and oranges. She would send me down to Derby to queue for bread and cakes and also a civic restaurant on Tenant Street where you could get a good meal for sixpence or a shilling. I ate the meal there.

Customers came into the pub who dealt in the black market, I can always remember people talking about a man who put a pig into a baby's pram for someone to kill it and disguised it as a baby so people could not tell.

We would also get rabbits from customers and I remember my mother made me skin one it was awful, she said I had to learn in case I needed to do it again.

I went to a school on Utoxeter Road called the Practicing School because it was attached to the Teacher Training College, they used to line us up in the morning and give us a spoonful of cod liver oil. We also had a siren suit which was a bit like a tracksuit but an all in one. We had to put on when the sirens went off. One day I went to school already in my siren school and they sent me back home, my mum and dad caused quite a bit of commotion and I was allowed to wear it at school after that.

I remember the American soldiers coming into the pub offering nylons and chewing gum and one of my mothers friends actually married an American, she was Jewish her name was Betty Vidofski and his last name was Kaplan, we still keep in touch today.

Because it was dangerous in Derby I was sent to stay with an aunt, Hilda Steeples, a school teacher who lived on Mill Lane at Codnor, my grandma and grandad, Mary and Matthew Steeples lived with her.

I was sent to the school on Jessop Street at Coodnor where my aunt was a teacher. When the sirens wentwe used to have to walk up in a crocodile to the top school (behind).

I had an uncle at Marehay Matthew Steeples and his wife Mary, he was a butcher and lived on the main Derby Road. He had an Anderson Shelter in his garden with his kettle and pots and blankets, everything for us to survive for a couple of days.

I had an uncle who was a farmer at Hall Farm, Codnor, his name was Bert Parr and his wife Maggie I occasionally stayed with them during wartime.

I had another aunt Dorrie and Uncle Bert Evans who I also stayed with sometimes they had a newsagents on Codnor Gate. They did not have a shelter.

My uncle Bert and Aunt Maggie moved to another Hall Farm at Wessington and me and my sisters stayed there a lot more during war time. We were moved around everyone.

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