How It Was

Part 1
Looking about me and seeing the lifestyle that people seem to enjoy today, even though the vast majority have rarely known hardship or what it is to be poor and hungry. I often think how modern day folk would cope if their lifestyle was suddenly to change for the worse. Some people, if not a sizable portion of the population, think that being hungry is an hour or two gaps between meals; or when they had their last big Mac.
I was born in the mid thirties at the time of the depression, I was at that time the youngest in the family with my two older brothers Ronnie and Bobby, we were very poor but then so were many others. My father had been out of work for nine years and had to try to find ways to feed a hungry family, you see there wasn’t the system we have today where anybody can claim almost anything whether they have contributed or not. Sometimes my father would be out all night fishing with some friends who had an old boat; the North Sea then still had quite a lot of fish for the taking. Had it not been for my father catching fish we would surly have been a lot worse off, most people today could not understand the poverty and hardship that we in this country had to endure, especially in the North East of England. My father was an excellent artist just one of the many things that he could do, he would draw paint and make pictures for just coppers; it all helped to put bread on the table.
Just before the second world war he joined the Territorial Army to get a bit extra cash, however it was not long after that he was called up for war, I remember that Christmas we had nothing my mother couldn’t afford anything for us children.
When the air raids started it was hell with incendiary and explosive bombs raining down on us; whistling bombs we used to call them as they made this terrible whistling noise together with the anti-air craft guns firing. The anti-air craft guns made frightening noises and shrapnel used to be falling from the sky; you could hear it hit the roofs and bounce of the ground and walls. One night my mother went to the door to look out, one of my aunts shouted for her to come in and just as she was closing the door a huge lump of shrapnel stuck in the door, my mother went very pale.
Some times the family used to shelter under the kitchen table as was recommended early on, the screams from my cousins just young girls and the rest of us was horrific, my cousins would wet themselves and we would all be sitting in pools of urine on the cold lino floor.
Later as the war progressed my two older brothers were evacuated, my mother and I stayed to the autumn 1941 when we moved to the country with an aunt grandmother and young cousin.