Wild Strawberries

Derek Smith

Description

This is the true story of a nine year old boy who, at the height of the Birmingham blitz, is transported from his 'all mod cons' big city home to the safety of a house in a remote south Staffordshire hamlet, a mile and a half from nowhere, where he finds himself living in domestic and sanitary conditions that have remained unaltered for over a thousand years - the culture shock to end all culture shocks.It describes his acceptance of and assimilation into the country ways of life; his struggle for an education in a village school built to house ninety local children, but then grossly overcrowded by more than a hundred evacuees from not one but two Birmingham schools; his first faltering love, and the adventures that he was able to undertake by virtue of the fearless freedom afforded to children in that far off time exactly seventy years ago.A contagious affliction sees him whisked away from the now familiar village of Yoxall and he finds himself living in a grand country house where a whole new series of adventures begin, resulting in an episode that tests the resolution of a tough little 'Brummie' almost to the limit.Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Sujets

• Histoire
• Midlands (Inglaterra)
• Midlands
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Pneuma Springs Publishing
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782282136
• Langue: English

Extrait

Wild
Strawberries



Derek Smith
Copyright
First Published in 2011 by Pneuma Springs Publishing
Wild Strawberries Copyright © 2011 Derek Smith
Derek Smith has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work
Pneuma Springs
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Smith, Derek. Wild strawberries. 1. Smith, Derek--Childhood and youth. 2. World War, 1939-1945--Social aspects--England--Birmingham. 3. World War, 1939-1945--Evacuation of civilians. 4. Staffordshire (England)--Social conditions--20th century. 5. Great Britain--History--George VI, 1936-1952--Biography. I. Title 941'.084'092-dc22
Kindle eISBN: 9781782280293 ePub eISBN 9781782282136 PDF eBook eISBN 9781782281139 Paperback ISBN: 9781907728181
Pneuma Springs Publishing E: [e-mail] W: www.pneumasprings.co.uk
Published in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher.
Dedication

To Andrea Hullah and Geoffrey Blore both of whom, in their own way, set my feet upon the path to writing.
Acknowledgements
Two years ago my sister Andrea gave me a book. She had purchased it because she recognised the name of the author as being that of a childhood neighbour and knew that he and I had both been evacuated to the same Staffordshire village soon after the outbreak of the Second World War. Thus, she unwittingly became the catalyst that started me writing. I have never formally thanked her, but I wish to do so now. The author’s name was Geoff Blore and the book ‘Dicky Blood’s War’ told the story of his time as an evacuee and his return home after four years away. After reading the book, recalling as I did so, the people and places that he mentioned, I contacted him through his publisher to tell him how much I had enjoyed it, and we were reunited after almost seventy years.
During one conversation I told him that I had a book written in my head. I had tried to put it down on paper in longhand many years ago, but this only resulted in four pages of scribbled insertions and crossings out before I gave up. Geoff insisted that I must try writing it again saying that if it turned out to be good enough, he would help me to get it published and would sell it on his bookstall that he took to locations all over the country. The book that resulted was entitled ‘No Cousin of Mine’. This was a collection of human stories from my two years in the Royal Air Force serving as a National Serviceman. I wish to thank Geoff for his help and for his continued encouragement over the past two years.
Even while I was writing the first book, the flood of memories about my own experiences as an evacuee, evoked by reading Geoff’s book, made me realise that I had all the makings of one of my own. I sent an E-mail to Geoff and confessed that I was going to write the book and asked if it would have his blessing. He readily agreed, and this book is the outcome.
The book would not appear in its present form if it were not for the help I received from Janet Bentley who, using the experience she gained while working as a technical editor and proof reader, read through the draft format of ‘Wild Strawberries’ for me.
Apart from her corrections to my sometimes wayward punctuation and the odd vernacular I sometimes use, the observations she made forced me to look at some of the passages I had written through eyes other than my own. The outcome always led (for me at least) to a more satisfactory result, and I shall always be grateful for her assistance.
I wish to acknowledge the help of my son Roger for his computer ‘know how’ and for putting the book into a transmittable format for me.
Finally, but by no means the least of all those who have helped me, I also have to extend my grateful thanks to Nikki Mahahdevan. She gave freely of her valuable time to take the photographs of Woodhouses and the surrounding areas that I needed to enable me to complete the sketches that head the chapters.

Derek Smith
Author’s notes
Writing this book took me on a journey in time that went back 70 years to a world completely different to the one we live in today. It has been a strange experience that at times left me feeling that I was right back there such was the vividness of the memories.
The title of the book was chosen because it had connotations of both the great fearless freedom that children enjoyed in that far off time, together with the bitter-sweetness of being able to enjoy it all, but only at the expense of being separated from one’s home and family.
Because the title is taken from such a minor incident, the book opens with a short verse that connects some of the incidents that the reader will encounter, to the events of the final chapters.
James is, of course, me. I have written in the third person singular in order to make the narrative more readable and descriptive. All the events described actually happened.

Derek Smith
Wild Strawberries
And shall I take that walk again?
In summer sun or winter rain,
Along the lane to Yoxall school
Where I was turned from city fool
Into the country boy at heart
I should have been right from the start.
And shall I hear the morning shrill
From every sun-up songbird’s bill,
And shall I find them growing still -
Wild strawberries upon Town Hill?
Derek Smith
A Bomber’s moon



It was not the bombing that had driven young James to aspire to become an evacuee, for indeed, he had probably survived the worst of it. Air raids had become part of his nine year old life and he accepted them with the same resignation with which he accepted rain on a Saturday morning after a week of fine sunny days when he had been at school, or the loss of a favourite marble down a drain - they were part of the ‘sod’s law’ of life and you just got on with it.
The tail fins of the falling bombs made a screaming noise as they fell, but panic attacks were to be an invention that would not come along until much later. You didn’t have panic attacks because you didn’t know that you could have one; you just kept your head down and hoped that the bomb that you could hear screaming down did not have your name on it.
James had two younger brothers and a sister. At first their air raid shelter had been the dining table with two armchairs tipped up over the ends and the settee pushed up against one side. The theory was that should the house come down around your ears, then at least you stood a chance of not being completely buried and had some air-space where you could survive until hopefully, someone came to dig you out.
Eventually, an Anderson shelter was delivered. One of the last things that their father did before he was called up into the RAF was to assemble it. The first thing he did was to dig a great gaping hole in the garden, well away from the house. The galvanised corrugated iron sections were then bolted together in the hole and the base was cemented over. He built a low wall up to ground level inside the shelter to keep water out, and constructed an ‘L’ shaped wall in front of the entrance to keep out the blast should a bomb fall nearby. The wall consisted of sand bags filled with soil dug from the hole, for where could you get so much sand, a million miles from the sea, in wartime Birmingham? The remaining soil was then piled over the top of the shelter and the grass sods that had once occupied the area where the shelter now stood were placed over the soil making it invisible from the air. This was, of course, a futile gesture, as no bomber was going to target an individual shelter, even if it could be seen in the total darkness of the blackout. However, this was going to be a war like no other war that had ever gone before, and no one knew what was likely to happen.
In the event, nothing did happen on the ‘home front’ as it was called, for almost a year. This period was known as the ‘phony war’ and some who had been evacuated from the towns right at the start of the war in September 1939, had started to trickle back home again. At first, everyone carried their gas masks everywhere they went, but after a while the novelty wore off and people started not to bother. However, this ‘phony war’ was not to last and in August 1940 the Blitz began in earnest.
Air raids became a way of life and James knew the routine well. When the banshee wail of the air raid warning sirens rose and fell heralding another raid, his mother would look into his room, and as he would normally be awake by then, call out ‘come on James, Jerry’s over! Get the children.’
James would have been awoken from a deep sleep and would rise, tired and probably cold, to rouse his two brothers, Bryan and Colin. He was in charge of his brothers and his mother would look after his sister, Andrea. He would shake them both and tell them ‘come on, Jerry’s over!’ They would always be more tired and even more reluctant than James, but they too knew the routine and would stand patiently, still half asleep, while James dressed them in their overcoats over their pyjamas to protect them against the cold night air.
Coal was strictly rationed and there was never enough fuel or money to light fires in the bedroom grates. On cold, clear mornings, if there had been no air raid, when they awoke, Jack Frost would have inscribed intricate patterns, well beyond the art of human hands, on the inside of the window panes using the crystals of their night-time breath. There was neither money nor clothing coupons for extra blankets, so their overcoats were put on top of their beds to keep them warm and also to be handy when the sirens went.
Bombers loved the bright moonlit nights because these nights were better to see their targets by. They were better too for James when he led his brothers, by the hand, down the garden path to the shelter.