大象传媒

This story has been written onto the 大象传媒 People鈥檚 War site by CSV Storygather, Martine Knight, on behalf of Ted Perring. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

I was only three when war broke out. We lived in Princerock, Plymouth and, when I was 6 or 7, we had an Anderson shelter in the garden.
One night the bombs were being dropped on the power station and oil storage depot at Cockside and we were in the shelter.
We heard a loud 鈥淲oompf鈥� sound. My father looked out and said to Mum, 鈥淚t鈥檚 alright 鈥� I can see the window and it鈥檚 just the glass blown out.鈥�
However, when the dust cleared it turned out that the window frame my father saw was all that was left of a terrace of 6 or 8 houses! All we could see were huge craters filling up with water and bits of household debris.
We went to stay nearby with my Gran and later to my father鈥檚 family in St.Judes for the rest of the war.

My elder brother, Roy, used to go to the Palace Theatre and one night, as he and his friends were coming home, they got shot at by a German plane.

I recall the Americans camping near us. We children got into their dump and one day I dragged home a machine gun. We set it up in the nearby park and pretended to shoot at everything in sight. When my father found out he made us take it back.
We taught the Americans to play football (soccer) and they gave us chewing gum or cigarettes for our parents and asked us if we had any sisters!
We used to swap items like comics etc, given to us by the Americans, at Saturday cinema.

In the old pannier market in Plymouth they used to make their own sweets which lasted much longer than manufactured ones. If we didn鈥檛 have enough ration coupons for sweets we used to buy Horlicks tablets from the chemists and suck those instead.

My cousin got married and all the family chipped in with coupons to make the wedding cake. It looked magnificent 鈥� tiers of beautifully iced cake 鈥� until we realised that the outside was a false cake made of cardboard and the real cake was one small one hidden underneath!

Italians were working on the railway line we used to pass on the way to and from school.One day we were playing in a damaged air raid shelter when the roof collapsed on one boy ,trapping him.The Italians all ran down and physically lifted the roof off of the boy who was taken to hospital but was alright.

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