大象传媒

Grand Avenue, which leads down to the sea-front at Hove on the Sussex coast, is now almost entirely made-up of large blocks of luxury flats. In the 1940's, however, it boasted some of the most expensive private houses in Brighton and Hove. One of these was taken over early in the war by the British Red Cross, and became a centre for the packing of P.O.W. parcels. These were then handed over to the International Red Cross for distribution to prisoner-of-war camps all over Europe.

At the age of 10 in 1943 I became involved in this work during school holidays. Another boy, called Henry, and myself were approached by one of his neighbours, whose husband was in a P.O.W. camp in Germany. She was a volunteer parcel-packer with the Red Cross, and said they were very short-staffed and needed help with the "fetching and carrying", so as to free up the more experienced ladies to do the actual packing. So for two hours two mornings a week that is what we did.

The rooms on the ground floor of the house were filled with long trestle tables at which the packers, many in the W.V.S., sat with a sack of straw, or maybe raffia, between them. The contents of the food parcels, tins of fruit, bars of chocolate, and packets of dried fruit etc., were stored in the basement. These had to be brought up on trolleys in a lift, one of the main attractions of the job as far as Henry and I were concerned, and taken round to the packers at their tables, together with flat-pack cardboard boxes. As each box was filled to a regulation formula it had to be carried by Henry or me and stacked in an adjacent room, and that was the last we saw of them.

I wonder if there are any other survivors left who were engaged in this branch of "war work". Somewhere, too, in the archives of the British Red Cross, presumably there are statistical records of the parcels and their contents sent to prisoner-of-war camps throughout Europe.

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