大象传媒

This story is submitted by a volunteer on behalf of Radio Bristol Action Desk of City of Bristol College.
I (Keith) was born in Fishponds in 1937, my father went off to London and repaired Bomb damage to properties we were left at home. During the war we had Morrisson shelter in the dining room about 8ft by about 5ft we used to sleep in there because the garden wasn't big enough for an Anderson shelter. It was made of metal with mesh around it (like a rabbit hutch) so if the house fell down it wouldn't crush us or let in any debris. If the air raid went off my mother would take us down to the shelter and I kept hitting my head on the shelter because it wasn't very high. I (Fran) was born in 1938. I can remember I had a mickey mouse gas mask and when we were bigger we had a gas mask with a little box with holes in which we put over our heads.

We didn't have many sweets a quarter of a pound of sweets for a week so if you bought a bag of toffees you would have one a day. Instead of sweets we would have liquorice strips and chew something like arrow root like a twig which was sweet.
We had cocoa and sugar in a little bag and wet our finger and licked it. You couldn't get fresh eggs so my (Keith) father sent an egg from London wrapped all up because we never had eggs. Everything was rationed and it was hard to get dairy products like butter and eggs. We had ration books. My cousin was getting married and the whole family had to save up coupons so she could have a wedding dress. You could get two dish clothes and put them side to side and put use ribbon over the top to make a vest. With our winter coats and after a few years we'd unpick it and resew it up turn it inside out and it was like a new coat because we couldn't get a new coat because a new coat would cost a lot of coupons. We would knit jumpers and unpick them and make it into somthing different.

It's all a different world. My father drove a model T Ford. We used to play out doors a lot because there was no traffic. We would go skipping on the roads and play marbles. Not many people had cars and the rag and bone man had a horse and cart and the coalman did too. The milkman came around with a horse and cart and we'd take our jugs to the milk van and he'd dip in a pint measure into the churn and put it in the jug.

When my (Fran) dad was sent to africa by the government he went on his own to set up the firestation as he was a Chief fireman but my mum wanted to go as well and at that time Africa was called the white man's grave so I stayed in England with my aunty and my two cousins. My uncle was a fire man as well although he was older than my dad he had to salute him because my dad was his company officer. He set up the firestation because there was nothing there before. They were all black personell and he was the only white one.

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