Teenage Memories

The year is 1939, the outbreak of W.W.2 in September and I was living in a little two bedroom cottage in Post Office Lane, Cleeve Hill with my parents, brother and sister. The local authority had just condemned the house and we had to move down to Woodmancote into a newly built Council House. Meanwhile the local authority placed an evacuee family in the condemned house.

We moved in November and the first thing was to put up “black-out curtains”. I was only fifteen and attended the Grammar School in Cheltenham High Street. 1939-40 was very bitter — heavy snow and frosty. As 1940 dawned the school had to accommodate Moseley School, Birmingham and I remember the corridors being sandbagged as a makeshift air raid shelter. We also helped fill sandbags to place around Cheltenham General Hospital.

I left school that year. Village life was very peaceful, apart from heavy German bombers on their way to Coventry and Birmingham at night, until we were bombed. Seven bombs fell, no casualties, one house damaged.

Also in 1940, an evacuee family from Guernsey, C.I. came to live next door to us. Two of them are still living in the village. I remember a Searchlight Battery stationed on the highest point of Bushcombe Hill, also the Observer Corps had a post along Wickfield Lane, Cleeve Hill.

We had a Youth Club in the village in those days, and some of us older boys formed ourselves into “Woodmancote Junior Fire Service”. We worked in conjunction with the A.R.P. wardens — our duties ending at midnight. We also cultivated an allotment down in Bishop’s Cleeve. In 1942 I worked as a temporary postman, until my call-up papers arrived in April 1943.

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