Those Miserable Happy Times

Part 5.

When we moved to our new home in the County Durham countryside which lay between Bishop Auckland and Willington, I had to start school for the first time it was a nice clean modern building for that time, and the kids in the school were quite tidy looking compared to back home where I came from.I did eventfully settle in there and become just like one of the locals, I remember all we boys used to draw and paint pictures of the war, mostly aircraft pictures, Spitfires and Hurricanes seemed to be the favourites of all of us. Every boy wanted to be a Spitfire pilot all the girls wanted to nurses, their pictures were scenes like nurse tending the wounded, or just household scenes helping their mothers. Whereas we would paint pictures of dogfights with German planes going down in flames or bombers drop bombs on Berlin, usually with the caption “Bombs over Berlin”. Often when we went to town to see some war picture, something like Errol Flynn and his crew being shot down over Germany in a Lancaster Bomber then escaping back to England; we each would all adopt one of the characters rolls and re-enact the whole picture. Well boys will be boys so the saying goes and we were no exception, on the school walls we used to have pictures of double the size of A3 posters, there would be a story on one side and a coloured picture on the other side. The pictures used to be scenes of things like the Sea Side, Harvest time or Christmas time, I always liked harvest time the summer months were peaceful leading up to the threshing of the wheat, there was a farm right next to the school we kids liked to watch the threshing. We would climb onto the fence and watch the farm hands using their pitchforks to pitch the wheat into the machine, there were always a couple of Jack Russell’s to catch the rats as they scurried out of the haystacks, we little ghouls used to shout with glee when they caught the rats and flicked them up in the air. Sometimes one of the rats would reach the fence and run vertically up sending us all scurrying off in all directions, but the main bit I liked was the reaping, those golden coloured fields and the warm evenings, that gold coloured sun beginning to descend in the sky; it was idyllic. Usually in the darker nights over in the distance towards Middlesbrough, the sky used to light up with the explosions and searchlights, we could always tell when there was a raid on. An odd time we would hear that some village was going to get oranges in and we would catch the bus and stand in a queue, much to the annoyance of the locals, you would only be entitled to one per ration book. In the village where I lived this little shop come post office got some candy rock in, it was a little bit thicker than a pencil and was only available on children’s ration books, it was two pennies a stick, highway robbery. That was the only time I saw sweets other than Christmas day, although I’ve been told since sweets were available in other parts of the country, more so in the South of England.