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World War II changed the lives of many families. At the time we
were living in Portsmouth at 56 Alyesbury Road, in the Copnor area. A few
streets away at 60 Portchester Road, North End lived my father's parents with
his bachelor brother Eddie and spinster sister Hilda. His other brother Lesley
and his wife lived in a house backing onto Fratton Park, the home of Portsmouth
Football Club. All the homes were within long terraced houses with small front
courtyards and short back gardens. Our back garden was dominated by an Anderson
air raid shelter and adjacent to the back door was the outside WC complete with
squares of newspaper on a string. Recycling was the order of the day. My
grandfather kept 2 carrier bags hanging on the doorknob of the sitting room,
one for neatly-tied pieces of string and the other for carefully-folded paper
bags.
My short memories of Portsmouth have now dimmed with the passage
of time, but some have remained. The occasion when playing with a lad over the
street, whose father was a painter and decorator. We had a great time splashing
paint around except my father, who spent ages trying to remove it from my hands
and arms with paraffin. One Christmas day, we boys woke very early, as you do,
and a toy drum woke up the whole family, perhaps the neighbours. A major
moment, experienced by many children throughout the country, was evacuation. I
was at the Town Station, Portsmouth with many, many other children. It cannot
be recalled whether my elder sister Mary and my younger brother Leonard were
there too. We all had our gas asks in brown cardboard boxes, a parcel label on
our collars probably with our names and where we were off to. No doubt we had a
bag containing a change of clothes and toiletries, as we mingled around scared,
but excited with an adventure to come. But it wasn't to be, for whatever
reason, whether the trains were cancelled or it was just an exercise we
returned home.
Maybe the defining moment for a move away from Portsmouth
came when my infant school at the top of our road was hit in an air raid. We
were shown the classroom with its rubbled remains and blackened beams. On some
bad raids we would spend the whole night in the Anderson shelter. On one early
morning my brother and I found ourselves on a milk float on our way to
Emsworth. This took us to the home of our mother's parents.
This was a
first stage of our new family life in Westbourne during the early 1940's until
the last member left in 1998 to live in Plymouth.
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