Memories - Peter Coleman

"I was born in Handsworth and grew up in Wheeler Street in Lozells, a nice little community there but has since beeen more or less demolished. Then I went to an elementary school there, Gower Street and from there I went to Five Ways. Right at the beginning of the War, the day the War broke out, I was called up for Five Ways and kitted out as we had to be and went down to Monmouth"

"We arrived at a little station there, I think that's gone but I think it was called Mitchel Troy or something but it was in Monmouth and then we were taken to the Rolls Hall, Rolls named after the famous flyer and Rolls Royce. And there we were allocated our hosts and hostesses and my first hostess was named Mrs Pembridge (I think her name was) but after a while her daughter fell in love, or the chap fell in love with her ...or mutual, with a post man and she was educated at the girl's High School which was a posh school then, I was with a chap named Brian Clissold ...so we couldn't have the room anymore because she wanted it for her fiance and all that, so we were told to move and we moved up slightly at the edge of the town at an estate called Wyesham Avenue (Wye - the River Wye runs through Monmouth) and when I arrived there Mrs Ledgington, the hostess, was crying bitterly because her husband had been called up for the army and she wondered if he would ever come back you see. And I was crying too because I didn't like being uprooted from Chippenham Gate Street down by Chippenham Park, very nice.

We used to ...the River Wye was there and you could take the stones up and underneath were these gudgeons, these fish, it was a very nice park that was, of course they've driven a motorway right through it, right past a modern school where the students are trying to concentrate, and after that, my father entered the situation and unbeknown to me, without asking me whether I was happy or unhappy he raised some objection to me living at Wyesham Avenue thinking I might get the wrong accent or something, not that his was all that much better, and it was out of my hands... I was moved! Moved away from it, where I was quite happy, because of my father's intervention, all for best intentions I suppose but there we are.

"I was moved down to some digs in Mono Street, to Mrs Meredith at the bottom of Mono Street, it was an unhappy stay there and then I was transferred to Inglewood which was quite good, there were quite a few boys there and we used to sleep on paliasses on the ground and just below there, across the Dixton Road or New Dixton Road, you could run down to the meadow and into the River Wye, which we did, and there was an old church called Old Dixton Church round there".

"I remember one incident, I had been scrumping sweet chestnut trees and I was late, so there if you were late you were given a little job to do, peeling potatos or something like that. And after that I had a friend named Frankie (Francis) Barnett, nothing to do with the motorcycle of that name, and he said that, you see he lived at Mrs Little the butcher's shop in Moor Street, and he said she was looking for people because she'd had a double tragedy in her life, her eldest son joined the navy and he was in the conveying convoys and he was torpedoed and he drowned and that was that. And she also had another son, a smaller one, younger one and he was playing in the back yard of this butcher's shop and for some reason or other he was playing with a gun and the gun was left loaded, and he was playing about with his friends and he got shot ...dead!"

"And so, this was Mrs Little, she had a double tragedy and she wanted to fill up her life with something to do so she took four or five boys in to fill the gap and these boys, there was Francis Barnett who was a long-stayer and he told me about it and I got transferred there to my great joy because it was it was a butcher's shop, there was no shortage of meat or other products. In those days the cattle didn't have any offal, they seem to have been produced without any offal. These boys, Francis Barnett, Jammy James and David Jenkins, Gavin Gaves and one chap who became a doctor. Because there were so many of us suddenly we had to sleep in the same beds which was alright providing you got on with your bed fellow. It was very good there, getting towards the end of my stay in Monmouth but it was very good ...she was a good cook and on Sundays the bank manager opposite used to come over with a freshly caught salmon from the River Wye and she had the most wonderful mayonaise which I shall never forget. Her husband Mr Little, the butcher, rather large in size, he used to tease me about a crush I'd got on one of the girls at school and he used to say "what you want to do is to get some goose turd... that would be what she'd like"! I didn't know what he was talking about for quite a while. So, that was very nice there"

Prelude To War - A World Divided

In 1936 Mussolini and Hitler formed the Rome-Berlin Axis

During the early decades of the 20th century the most powerful nations of the world began to divide into three main politcal camps. Firstly there were those nations that were democratic, where the citizens voted their own governments, including Britain, the United States, France and other European countries such as Belgium, Czechhoslovakia and Sweden .

Secondly there were fascist countries such as Germany, Italy Japan and Spain - one-party states ruled by dictators. Thirdly there was the mightly communist state of the Soviet Union, meant to be run by the workers but in reality ruled by the tyrannical authoritarian Josef Stalin. Conflicts between these ideological states concerning territory and economic wealth led to the 2nd world war which broke out in 1939.

The first fascist state in Europe emerged when Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922. By the 1930s there were fascist style governments in Spain, Portugal, Austria and Romania, but when Hitler's Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933 they took fascist ideas to their most extreme. A young Hitler had developed his ideas whilst in prison in 1924 where he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a book which spelt out his theories that Germany needed strong leadership, a large army and economic self-sufficiency. In Mein Kampf Hitler also stated his more extreme ideas about supressing communism and exterminating the Jewish people.

When Hitler's National Socialist German Worker's Party (the Nazi Party) eventually came to power in 1933, he immediately began to build up the country's military strength and in 1936 he moved these troops into the Rhineland, an industrial area of Germany on the border with France and Belgium that had been designated a military-free zone after World War 1.

In 1938 Hitler expanded his dominion into parts of Austria and Czechoslovakia, thus breaking the Treaty of Versailles which had been signed in 1919 with the intention of preventing Germany from developing it's empire into neighbouring countries. Following these worrying developments along with the expansion of other fascist states, such as Italy's invasion of Ethiopea (Abyssinia) in 1935 and Japan's invasion of China in 1937, Britain and France formed a closer alliance - agreeing to help Poland, Romania and Greece should they be invaded by Germany or Italy.

In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a Birmingham MP, was welcomed by the German people to Munich where he signed the Munich Agreement, agreeing to let the Germans lay claim to the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain insisted that the Agreement would guarantee "peace in our time" and an end to further German expansion.

Six months later, Hitler took over the whole of Czechoslovakia and in 1939 his attentions turned to Poland.