Where is the beer etc

The following is a group of poems about William James Fox, my father, in the last war. I took down his words verbatim and then structured them. They are part of a longer poem about life before and after the war in our area of Bristol.

Barry Fox, Nova Scotia, Canada

Titles
Ted Moreton and the Beer
Shock Asthma
When War Broke Out
When I Went to Join Up First
Trying to Sign Up the Second Time
Petherton Gardens: After an Air Raid
Bombing the BAC
Overhead Bombers in East Street, Bedminster
Young Drunk Pilots at the City’s Ground
We Were Quite Well Off

Where was there beer?
Ted Moreton and the Beer

When there was a shortage of beer,
That was when I was living in Broad Walk,
Then. About six months.
He'd go out by the gate, lean on the gate
And then might come back in and start to put on his boots.
Nan Moreton had polished them for him.
Kept them by the fireplace.
She always helped him put them on.
Anyway. He’d start putting his boots on.
I' d say “Where you going then, Ted?”
He’d wave his hand in the air, not saying anything.
That’s it! that's him!
I had to wait then to hear what he had to say.
I said “There isn’t any beer about.”
“The Talbot.”
I said “How d’you know?”

He'd get out there and he’d see certain blokes
That liked a drink, and if he saw them going one way
That pub was open
And if they went the other way
That was “The Friendship.”

He certainly was an amazing bloke, mind you.
He was a boozer.
If Bill Taylor was alive he’d tell you a thing.
He’d go in the pub; perhaps there might be three of us--
Bill Taylor, myself, and Ted
And he’d go up to the counter
And he would (tap, tap) one finger out (tap tap)
And stand.
He didn’t say anything, just draw attention.

Was there such a thing as “Shock Asthma?

Shock Asthma

It was presumed Nan Moreton had asthma, shock asthma, in the war.
Now whether there's any truth in that I just don't know.
I mean, the doctors can say that,
They can say “she've got asthma” so much
“How she get that?”
“Shock, war, and all that”

At the time of air raids
She used to crawl under anything out the way,
She was terrified

Go down the air raid shelter when the bombs started then
Crawl under a chair or anything



When War Broke Out

Nan Fox and my dad, Mum and I,
We were at Southsea.

They’d gone down there for the week
And we went down to see them for the day.

Every body was down there.
But the papers were coming out,
Then everybody wanted to get back home
As quick as they could.

We chased back, Mum and I.

It was quite a pleasant trip actually.
But anyway we rushed,
And got home quickly
Because there was talk of planes coming over
And bombing
And parachute troops
And all that.

Everybody had a thought in their minds
Of what might happen

As far as I was concerned, myself,
I don’t know why it was,
But I was never worried about it,
Wasn't concerned about it, ever.
I had a sort of feeling that it couldn't happen.
I think Churchill built up a wonderful feeling
That we’d never be conquered.

When I Went to Join Up First

When I went to join up,
Which you had to,
Not join up actually,
You had to go to the
It was the labour exchange.
Put your name down for what force you wanted to go in
And my school pal, school mate, Bert Cochrane
He said to me, “Join the Navy, Bill.”
He said, “Let’s join the Navy together.”
We’d still kept friendly after we left school.
He worked in Marden’s and I was out the BAC..
And I said “Uh, no. I don’t fancy the Navy.”
“No, I said, “I’ll join the Air Force.”

Well, you had to get in different queues.
If you wanted to join the air force you got in one queue.
They had it up there, hanging on the wall:
“Navy” or whatever it was you wanted to join.
We were in the next line to each other.
I was in one and we were sort of going down
Till we got to the desk
And he was calling over to me
(Well he wasn’t the only one
And other blokes were trying to talk to other blokes.)
And I said, “No, I don’t fancy the Navy.”

Any way I joined,
I put my name down,
That’s all you had to do. And it was there.
That was why later in the war
I went down to the Air Force
To see if I could join
More or less, knowing very well I’d applied,
Thinking they’d have that record.

Any way, old Bert,
He went in the Navy
And he went down with the Repulse.
That was the Japs put that one down.
I don’t think there was anybody saved out of that one.
The lot went down.
The Repulse.

Trying to Sign Up the Second Time

I went down to Stokes Croft in the car.
I’d got really fed up working out at the BAC
On the machines. I thought
“I can be doing better than this.”
I went down Stokes Croft
And tried to sign up for the Air Force.

It was on one lunch time.
I had the car at the time.
I went in and saw the bloke.
I said, “I’d like to join the Air Force.”

“OK .” He asked a lot of questions.
Took all the writing down.
“Where d’you work.”
I said “BAC.”
“What d’you do.”
I told him.
“OK, You’ll hear from us.”
Never did.

When I mentioned the BAC
Wouldn’t let me go.
I was doing a job there.
I mean, they couldn’t take everybody.

Yeah, I did.

I never said anything to mum.
Probably I knew very well they wouldn’t let me out.
Just satisfied myself.

Air Raids
Petherton Gardens: After an Air Raid

At 4 o’clock in the morning, on one particular time, there was a very very bad bombing session that was all over Bristol generally. It went on all night. When the all-clear went we came out of the shelter. I remember walking down our road and into the field.

I was amazed to see cows led down in the field.
Some were stood up; they were all
Motionless. They were just like you might see
Carved out of something. You could have gone
Right up to them. They hadn't moved and they
Didn’t move then. The first one to move--
I always remember this because
Arthur Nightingale, he was with me,
And we were talking about it--
And I think it was somewhere
Around about three or four hours after
Before the first cow moved.

Further down in the field we could see
Something we thought was a cow.
It was a horse.
He'd come down from Dundry, all across the fields
Jumping barbed wire fences.
He was ripped to blazes
Where he hadn't really jumped them.
He’d gone through them,
If you know what I mean.
So terrified.

Finished up
Flat out on the field.
To be quite honest there was a few dogs down there,
Biting away at it.
That's just how it was.

And of course a huge great crater was out there
And Nick from just up the road
Used to go over swimming in it.



Bombing the BAC

You didn’t need permission not to turn up
If there’d been bombing.
At the time they were bombing Bristol
They’d be bombing the BAC.
One time I was home at night
They bombed the BAC.
Well, I say bombed it;
They bombed and some of the glass
Or whatever was on the roofs
Was broken. You couldn’t work in there
With light showing out through.

But anyway
The thing is
If they were bombing here
They were bombing the aerodrome at the BAC.
So there were problems all the way round.

When the war started
They gave us a sheet that said
If there was a raid
We had to hide in the hedges
In the fields outside.


Overhead Bombers in East Street, Bedminster

I happened to be in East Street at the time.
Everybody wondered, what’s all the noise?
About 50 or 60 planes, Germans,
And our air force met them.

Their bombers, and that, were right up
And our planes, Spitfires,
Were right at the bottom

And everybody was looking up!
Watching it!

There was our planes going up
And underneath them;
Firing at them,
And going up higher,
And then coming back down.

Brought a hell of a lot down.
Hell of a lot.

The bombers came over with fighters to protect them.
The bombers flew on; the fighter planes fought our planes
To stop us from getting at their bombers.
If their planes were put out of action
We had a go at their bombers.

God, nobody cheered
They were doing it in their pants.
Everybody was dead scared.
I mean, naturally.

I actually watched them.
They’d go up in the distance
And then you might see an odd one
With flames coming out of it.

They didn’t come down in Bristol.
They came down outside of Bath,
Somewhere like that.




What Ruined my Sight

What ruined my sight a lot
Was the fact that when I worked,
Working at the BAC
I worked a tool and cutter grinder
Which sparks kept coming up from.
You were supposed to wear glasses
But sometimes, if you’re doing a tool,
Grinding a very small tool, mind you,
You wouldn’t know the spark was coming up.
I sometimes used to drop my glasses.

The ones that were in that tin, out in the shed
Those were the ones I used to use.
The point is,
To get my vision better because they’d dirty up
I used to drop my glasses a bit to look.
Of course, in flew a spark.
Up the eye hospital.

I was up the eye hospital
Which is still at the same place more or less
If you went up there at all they had a book on you
Mine was about three pages
Printed and all that
What they’d done to your eye the other times
And I had pages
Pages.

I got told about it.
They said, “You should wear the glasses.”
I said, “Well, I do but I dropped them just for a few moments.”

Eye shades, I had loads of those about.
Always wearing them.

What happens then is
You get an ulcerated eye.
Still.
I’m still here.

Young Drunk Pilots at the City’s Ground

Young pilots, young lads 18, 19 years of age.

I remember going,
(Of course the football went on in the war.
They had football teams.
The City and all the others,
Things were still going on then.)
I remember going down to the City ground
And they weren’t too far away.

It was Third Division South
I used to go down there
And a couple of these young lads.
I knew one of them,
At Queen Elizabeth,[4]
The ones who wore the yellow stockings
In their school uniform.
I remember him because he lived
Up by Bert Cochrane.

Him and a couple of others,
They only looked boys.
I mean I was a man up to them
To look at.

Drunk.
They were going into the City ground.
Whether any of them knew anything about football,
They just carried on.

These were the pilots.
Yes, never came back.
No.

Shame really.
I mean that’s, that was what they were doing.
They were going in it,
Fighting mad, sort of.

But there, some of them did come back.



We Were Quite Well Off

You asked me if I thought,
“There’s a war going on I don’t know
If I could bring a child into the world.”

No, no; there was no question about it.
You got about life the same way.
I mean over in this country
Apart from going short of a few things,
We had rationing, and all that,
Bombs dropping and all that
We were very fortunate, very fortunate.
If you know what I mean
We knew nothing about the war.
To be honest about it.
Although we had a rough time.
But you could always think of people in France
Which was in Europe
Put it that way,
That were open targets for the Germans
But they couldn't get anywhere near us, though.
So we were quite well off.

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