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Part 2.
After about a year, Dad came home on leave to visit. We started talking about how the bombing had slacked off somewhat and he asked me if I would like to go back home. It's strange how I was just beginning to be accustomed to Brecon, but I wanted to see my old school mates. I packed my bag and was ready to go home.
When I got back to Shirehampton, I found that some of my mates had returned from Devon. That is where most of them were sent when the bombing got bad. Some of the families at the end of the street had lost their homes and one of the kids who ran around with us had been killed in the house. He was younger than I was. His name was Billy. It is funny, kids did not care much about the blitz and in the bombed out buildings we played hide and seek, and cowboys, where people we knew had been killed. My Aunt living in Avonmouth had lost her house to the bombing also. All of my uncles were away serving in the military, some even as far away as Burma, fighting the Japs whom we did not even know.
Through the years of 1943-1944 things didn’t change that much. Only a few German planes came over and dropped a bomb load. They started to lose too many planes. I had seen the skies black with planes to now only a few. The shortage of food still remained, and there were no cars on the road because there was no gasoline. Shit, I didn’t know anyone that owned a car anyway; only the military drove around town. The port was getting more ships in daily, loaded with warplanes and tanks. The highways were cramped with planes that they had off loaded. They built a very large American Army camp on the places where my mates and me played. It was near an old castle. Hell, we thought we owned that land, but I guess not. So we decided to do greater things in life like stealing from the yanks, but that did not last long. After a few well-placed rifle shots firing over our heads, we kept away from the camp at night.
We began to do favors for some of the troops, sneaking beer up to the wire fence and taking love letters to the girl friends whom they could not get to see for a while. They gave us candy, gum, cigarettes, and food from the mess hall. They even gave us and the other kids from the village a Christmas party.
Most of us boys that were in the boy scouts were converted to Army cadets,
We were issued one uniform and a set of web gear, we would train on weekends, and we would train with rifles and set up roadblocks along with the home guard. The first rifle I was issued was an old Canadian Ross; it was as tall as me, I finally got a rifle that matched my size a 303 short Le Enfield we also got to fire it every other month. All this took place because we were expecting an invasion by the Germans. In December 1945 the Army cadets were eliminated; it was fun running around looking for Germans.
We did other stupid things sometimes we would swim down the river into the docks and take a little of the cargo, such as sugar, canned fruit, and bananas, any thing that we could eat or trade on the side. It was crazy, but everyone was doing it. We did have some close calls though, like electric fences, strong water currents and guard dogs and very large wharf rats some as big as cats. June 1944 came and we began to see the tide of war start to change, troops were starting to move down to the docks and load on to large landing craft, we waved to them as they marched past, we were not sure where they were going. Then one day the sky was full of planes towing gliders, they never stopped coming; most of them were the old Gooney bird C-47s full of paratroopers off to jump into France. That night we found out that D-Day had started, people began to say the war would soon be over, but it took almost another year.
In early 1945 my Robin Hood days came to and end. The minimum age to leave school was fourteen and some of my buddies had left school to begin working. Me, being thirteen, was left behind. I found a job in a butcher’s shop. My duties consisted of cleaning up at first, but then the butcher let me make the sausages and I would deliver them to his customers on a bicycle with a basket on the front. After a few weeks of this, I made more sausages than were required and built up my own clientele. I made a little on the side you might say. I did that for almost a year and Mr. Newman the owner was sorry to see me leave school and quit the meat enterprise. Mr. Newman and I remained friends for several years, up until I left England. His son still runs the store to this day.
The war was slowly winding down, as there were no more air raids over our town, or even in Bristol, the big city seven miles away. But London, which was about one hundred miles east, was catching hell with the Buzz bombs, V-1 rockets and V-2.
In December 1945 I found a job at the large oil facility on the docks and because of the war, all of the oil companies had merged as one big company called “The Pool” and they were beginning to separate and reform as private organizations. I landed a job working for the Shell Oil Company. I did not get the CEO job but I was told I would be able to work up to it if I worked hard and kept my nose clean.
My job consisted of taking fifty-gallon drums that had once been filled with heavy crude oil, and steam clean them. It was a nasty, greasy, slimy, messy, and very dirty job. My work clothes consisted of wooden clogs for shoes so I would not make sparks when I walked, coveralls that were way too big for me, and a pair of goggles to cover my eyes because I was using extremely hot steam. Oh, how I had wished that I were a butcher boy again, delivering the meat to all the women. Young men out of school at that time did not have many choices. We worked for the pool; go down in the mines, or at age seventeen we could join the Army for two years.
My break came after about two months. They needed assistant drivers on the tanker trucks. I did not get to drive, as I was too young, I helped the driver unload the oil or gas when we hauled it around the country. It paid good money for a young person of fourteen years of age. I held on to this job for one year and then around December of 1946, I quit and went to work for a contractor along with an old friend of mine.
We made big money tearing down concrete and brick walls that were built around the huge oil tanks to protect them against German air attacks and shrapnel. Good money, yes. Hard work, Hell, yes! That’s where I learned to drive a wheelbarrow and a jackhammer.
One day on my lunch hour I went over to the lock gates to see all the ships coming into port. On this day there was this little boat that was waiting to be tied up on the pier and one of the guys shouted at me to catch the rope, pull it in, and tie it up. So I did. When the boat was alongside me, I asked this guy if he needed any help on this boat. The Captain said, “Yes, when can you start”? I answered, “I all ready have." He gave me a stare and said, “Do you want to go out to the sea”? “Yes," I replied.
The next day I started working on this little coastal ship called the Hanna from the port of Bideford, Devon. That was the start of my sailing days. I sailed on board the Hanna for two months, then she was due for a complete overhaul and the captain could not keep me on the payroll. But being the good guy he was, he knew another captain and sent me to him for an interview.
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