大象传媒

THE ATOM BOMB

Winifred Barber

When they announced that we couldn鈥檛 have any more petrol, they also announced that the distributor arm in the car must be taken out. Every car that was laid up in the garage must be absolutely immobile and the distributor arm had to be taken to the police station. They were sent away, but nobody knew where.

They gave us two cards to sign each with a number on. One had to be tied to the distributor arm and the other one was for us to keep, and we had to look after it because it would be the only way we could get our distributor arm back after the war.

When the war in Europe ended we were allowed to have our four gallons of petrol each month, back. We went to the police station and my husband produced our card and he asked the policeman where our distributor had been all that time and they said it had been top Stoke on Trent.

We began to think about holidays so we saved the petrol. My husband was told that there was a good inn at Much Wenlock and as it was in the country we wrote and booked up. It was very comfortable and the landlady was very pleasant. The first day we were finding our way around and the landlord came and asked my husband if he could help because the pigs had got out.

They gave him a stick and he started to get one of the pigs when suddenly it turned on him and started to chase him, so it ended up with my husband running down the yard with the pig chasing him. We laughed for many years about that. They eventually got the pigs back into the sty and the landlord offered my husband some petrol for his help. My husband was delighted and he offered my husband four gallons, and we were able to go all around Shropshire. We had a lovely holiday.

One day about the middle of the holiday, we went down to breakfast and there was a doctor and his wife also eating breakfast. The doctor asked us if we had seen the paper and passed his to us. The headlines said the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and had demolished the whole town. The doctor said that although it was terrible he thought it would be the end of the Japanese war.

The doctor took what looked like a pencil out of his top pocket and offered it to my husband to write on the newspaper with it, which he did. The doctor then told him to wipe his finger across what he had written and it wouldn鈥檛 smudge. We couldn鈥檛 believe it, but it was the birth of the Biro pen. Whenever I hear anything about Hiroshima it always reminds me of the day we first saw a Biro pen!

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at 大象传媒 Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Winifred Barber (author) 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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