When Mum rescued me from Retford

I was born in March 1935 in Earlswood in Warwickshire. My great aunt owned a number of properties in Birmingham and shortly before war broke out we moved to one of these houses called Church House in Moseley.

Birmingham, like Coventry, was very heavily bombed. My earliest recollection of the war is having to go into the deep shelters at night. I wasn’t then five years old but the thing that sticks in my mind most vividly is coming up out of the shelters after an air raid one morning, when the area had been heavily bombed the night before. We were walking down the road and I looked up and saw a house which had been blasted completely. But up on the first floor was a door and hanging on the back of the door was a dressing gown.

You used to go out to collect shrapnel and you used to try to find the nosecone which was always the prize.

The house in which we were living at the time was bombed and we had to move to a flat above a greengrocers’ shop.

After a period of this the authorities decided that all children should be evacuated and I was sent to Retford in Nottinghamshire. I don’t have very happy memories of that period. In fact I hated it. I came from quite a large family and we were all scattered about.

Eventually my mother, who was in Lincoln, came to visit and she was so horrified she took me away. There and then she said “Get your things, we’re going.” And the lady was saying “You can’t take him, you can’t take him” and Mum said “He’s my son and I’m taking him and that’s that.”

She had been given a lift and I remember going with her in a lorry back to Lincoln, and the house she was staying in, the back of it overlooked Lincoln racecourse, which doesn’t exist now, and I saw horses being exercised on the track. I just thought it was a big field.

I spent the rest of the war in Malvern, where my aunt lived and took us in. I remember seeing the Americans stationed at a nearby transport unit. They became very familiar to us and we used to go up there to see what we could cadge. We took great delight in disrupting them as much as possible, for sheer devilment. Sometimes they would give us chewing gum and candy, as they called it, but most often they told us to clear off! Apart from that time when I was evacuated I really enjoyed the war.

I only discovered in 1980 that my father, who served in the Allied Expeditionary Force in the Second World War, had been a boy soldier in the 1914-18 conflict and lied about his age to join up.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.