Childhood Memories pt.6

Children’s toys were in short supply during the war. Most children received renovated second hand toys. Home made “Tommy guns”, which clicked when a football rattle device was hand turned, was popular. I was lucky to wake one Christmas morning and find an aerodrome complete with a hanger and a squadron of lead aeroplanes all painted in camouflage colours! On another occasion my father had fashioned a modern looking fighting ship. He had arranged for a dowel pin to slightly protrude from the ship’s side. When a steel ball-bearing the size of a marble was shot at the dowel, a mousetrap inside the ship would make the ship blow-up. The boat was made in about 3 pieces and the mousetrap had been doctored with wire retainers so that it was self-resetting withought my fingers getting near it. A board game was commercially made like snakes and ladders but with little bomber aeroplanes instead of counters which, successfully bombed a target, was shot down or was caught in searchlights and had to go back 3 places etc. Children, at least boys, developed a new hobby — collecting shrapnel. War games also grew among the 5 to 7 year olds. With arms outstretched they would run about making noises to imitate aero enines and gunfire. Older boys would read of the Adventures of Rockfist Rogan — a fighter pilot — in “The ChamAnother memory was of the Nation declaring Double Summer Time to maximise the useful sunlight and save electricity.

For 9 months of 1944, I was in a sanatorium at Glan Ely on the outskirts of Cardiff. I was lucky, because many TB patients were bedridden, but I was an up patient. I guess that it must have been about April or May that one fine day I was outside the building and looked up to the sky to see what was making all the noise. I was surprised to see something like a dozen aircraft towing a glider each. This spectacle must have happened two or three times. A little while later I saw another unusual feature. It was obviously just after the Normandy landings when, about 250 yards from the hospital, I saw 2 red Cross trains each day, pass on the main London to South Wales railway line. Years later, I learned that seriously injured soldiers were taken to Swansea where a fleet of ambulances took them to Morriston hospital among other places.

In the last year of the war, I had returned to school and one day the whole school was closed a half an hour early. Withought telling us why, we were told to walk straight home and not to dawdle on the way. This was the time when a mass breakout of German prisoners of war from Island Camp, on the A48 road near Bridgend, had occurred. Several of the escapees were found in the environs of Neath. The authorities were afraid that some of us could have been captured and held as hostages.

When the American soldiers had arrived here, children who wanted sweets used to ask the Americans “Any gum chum?”. Sometimes they would be lucky. One American soldier sent out the word that he would give a sixpenny piece for every farthing that the children could produce. I heard it said that he used them to make bangles and jewellery broaches.
pion” comic.

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