CHILDREN OF THE WAR

Tina and I are definitely children of the war, the Second World War.

I was born in 1937 and Tina the following year 1938. The war started on September 1st 1939 and ended in August 1945 when I was approaching my eighth birthday and Tina one year behind. But everything did not really settle down with rebuilding and rationing etc until 1954 and by then we were teenagers. Here are some memories to give you a sense of being a child in those times.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Fathers went away [many did not return] and Mothers were sad but brave and more often than not did not betray their anguish to the children.

Sometimes the man would come home and find it was obliterated and his family dead. Tina and I were fortunate children, my Father obviously survived fire on board ship and raids, and Tina's Dad ultimately came home from the carnage of the Normandy Landings.

Tina was fortunate in living in Weston-super-Mare in that it was not a major target for bombing but that did not prevent the odd German bomber dropping his balance of bombs on the town on a return from a raid on Cardiff over the water or over-run from a blitz on Bristol. She remembers scurrying home behind her Mum as the air-raid warnings went off and the anti-aircraft guns opened fire on the golf-links [just over the road!] and they ran home to Uphill. Her Mum had promised a picnic on the sands but compensated for this by setting it out under the steel table shelter. It was fun. Tina loved the table-shelter and was sad to seeing it go at the end of the War. [The steel shelter did save lots of lives.]

My Father was posted to Scapa Flow in Orkney late 1940 as he was very familiar with the positions of the German Fleet scuppered there at the end of the First World War and had helped set up the supply of munitions there for the Royal Navy. My Mother could not move there so moved with Keith [a new baby] and myself to Halkirk, near Thurso into a very basic croft. Life was very tough but safe from bombs etc. My speech became broad Highland Scots and I went to school at about 4/5 and used a slate to learn to write. I remember a horrible girl broke my slate and I got a slap, I hated that girl! Mind I had another little girl who was a great friend who had kid goats, that was nice! I have loved goats ever since and I think Velia has an affinity with them or vice versa!

1943/1944 we moved to Plymouth as my Father was posted to Bull Point, the Royal Naval Munitions Depot in that Port. This was to be a brief posting.

Let me put Plymouth into perspective for you. The city was massively blitzed in 1941 and subjected to many subsequent raids in fact a total of 59 attacks with last taking place in 1944. The city lost 1,172 people and 4,448 people were injured. My Mother must have been scared to death moving there and we were living very close to Bull Point.

I remember my first raid, I was sobbing with fear, the big anti-aircraft guns were a thunderous, crashing, repetitive pounding and flames were in the city. But through all this my Mum managed to calm me and love me and hug me and my brother. We moved again to Bath as the Admiralty had set up there from London. It was safer there as Bath had experienced its major blitz in 1942 but even there warnings as German planes passed overhead. We used to take cover in an Anderson Shelter across the road [this a kind of bunker into the earth with a curved metal roof] .

Now every boy in those days used to have a piece of shrapnel in his pocket. Shrapnel is a piece of metal designed to rip a plane apart or hurt a human being. It is the casing and content of a bomb or, as in this case, an anti-aircraft shell exploding. On this night we could hear the shrapnel tinkling down on the roof of shelter so a bigger boy ran out to grab a piece before this great souvenir and prize disappeared. There was a scream of pain, the shrapnel was still extremely hot!

I will save more stories for another day, Tina has stories of evacuees, there are stories of POWS, and of course Minnie Brinstone and the ARP warden.

We were children of the war but we do not have unhappy thoughts because the essential ingredient was always there and that was that we were loved and protected.