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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of derek Thorpe, and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr. Thorpe fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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Continued from Part One:

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Then I got diphtheria and I was taken to Bradford in the middle of the night. I collapsed with some fever and was choking. They took me to the fever hospital on Leeds Road in Bradford, which was a dreadful place to us at the time. It looked like a prison, because it was a hospital for infectious diseases. You were segregated and there were bars on the windows. Visitors were allowed to come for half an hour each Saturday or maybe every other Sunday, but they were not allowed into the building, they had to talk to you through the bars at the windows. After 11 weeks, I recovered from the diphtheria but unfortunately it appeared that I was a carrier, so then I was captive for most of the rest of that year. I know I was in hospital during the New Year 1942, its funny the things that you remember.

I remember November of 1942, it was the first broadcast of Roy Plumley’s programme, 'Desert Island Discs', and I believe the guest was Arthur Askey. There was no central heating in the hospital, just an iron stove in the middle of the ward, a coke stove.

At the end of my sojourn there, the epidemic of diphtheria had gone, and I probably was the only person in Bradford who was a carrier; I was in the fever part of the hospital all on my own. I had a staff of nurses and just me and I played out in the hospital grounds and passed my time as best I could, making model aeroplanes. That really sums up my war.

After I came out of hospital, I went back to Linton for a little while, then my sister's husband, who was a navigator in the Air Force, was stationed in St Athan in Wales and they had a flat in Barry, which was about 6 or 7 miles away from the airfield. I went down to stay with my sister as she didn’t want to be on her own. That was an exciting time, we had an Ack-Ack battery at the back of the house and a barrage balloon emplacement that I used to hang around, and talk to the people there.

When the air raids were on, they were very noisy things and where we lived was on a hill overlooking the docks, Barry dock. They bombed it quite frequently. When the Ack-Ack guns were going at the back of the house, the house shook; it was terrifying really.

I remember getting up one morning. I was delivering papers for WH Smith's for my pocket money. I got half a crown a week for delivering papers, morning and evening, and this one particular morning, the headlines on the paper were, “Rome declared an Open City," and to a lot of people it almost seemed like the end of the war. Of course it wasn’t, it was between August and October 1943. The other thing I remember is that when we moved from there, my Mother had got a house in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, and my two sisters and I and my younger brother went to live in Mansfield. The thing I remember about Mansfield was the 1000 bomber raids. It must have been on their destination for the big link ups and hundreds and hundreds of aeroplanes going across every night and the noise was deafening. The sky was black with aircraft. I can remember there always seemed to be a lot less noise in the early hours of the morning when they were going out. I don’t know whether it was my imagination, but I know a lot of them didn’t come back.

That sums up my war. I was disappointed that the war ended when it did, I wasn’t all that excited by the great fuss that was happening. I remember the bonfire at Bankfoot and the crowd in the Town Hall Square at Bradford, dancing and laughing and singing, and that was interesting enough. Nobody seemed to want to got to bed that day.

I left school shortly after that. I was 14 actually, and lied about my age. I tried to join, as a boy entrant into the Air Force. I was accepted but after about 4 days, they became wise to me and threw me out. I did one or two things after that. I worked in a cellar making loaf tins for a company that made loaf tins for the big bakeries, out of sheet metal. I cut my hands to ribbons, it was a very unhealthy job. After that, I went to live in Lincolnshire with an eccentric vicar who was a friend of my father's.

I joined the Air force as soon as I possibly could, at 15½, and became a boy entrant. I went back to St Athen's again and eventually, I became a Flight Engineer. I worked on Sunderland Flying Boats, the Catalina Flying Boats, for most of my Air Force career in Singapore, Malaya, Borneo and Japan. I saw the Malayan campaign and the Korean War and had an exciting life in the Air Force. I was in an accident when my aircraft was blown up and I suffered a fair amount of damage, and after that, I wasn’t able to fly. I spent 4½years in Malaya; life wasn’t as exciting on the ground so I opted to come out after the end of my first 12 years

Pr-BR

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