Wartime Holidays

A Memory of Alnmouth.

SUMMER HOLIDAYS IN THE WAR
I have just spent a very pleasant time looking though some photos on FLICKR, my! It did bring back memories, Alnemouth in the war time Dad used to run 16MM mobile cinema in the church hall and I saw Charles Loughton in Henry the Eighth there in a very early black and white film. We used to stay at the Schooner Hotel. I found an incendiary bomb on the sands and took it back to the hotel into the dinning room God! You should have seen them shift when I said 'Mummy Mummy look what I found!!!' a very old Colonel took it from me and clipped me round the head and dashed off!!
Jumping from concrete tank trap to tank trap up the estuary ..., pulling ourselves across the river hand over hand on the anti tank and boat steel hawser ... Asking Mother "What was that small balloon with a knot tied in it on the dray hatch outside the hotel??" Clip bang wallop!! Well I did not know what it was! Gazing in the newsagent's window and asking her what the word f..k meant and getting my head smashed into the shop window and I can still see it vibrating with the force of my head hitting it!! Well I did not know what it meant! Did I?
The wonderful hot happy summer holidays staying at Fairbairn's Farm at Lesbury. Rowing on the river at Walkworth on the day six girls scrambled into a boat when only four should have been in it, and got drowned when there boat keeled over, I saw the police dragging them out of the river with grappling hooks. At the age of twelve that was when I had my first glass of beer when I got back to the hotel, they said it would settle me!
Argyle Street getting bombed! And the gasometer went up! Learning to play golf at Alnemouth Golf club and driving off with a cut down driver that the Pro' had made me and laying my Mother out 'cos she stood too close behind me. Revenge!!!! I broke her false teeth ... Then I was sent off to boarding school in Hexham. She was hard work and quite terrifying my mother, used to wash all her money and hang it up to dry in the bathroom! She also had a scent spray (remember glass with a rubber ball pump?) that she would spray the seats in a car or tram before she would sit down.
I got hit one day, very unfairly I thought. I had found a jar of Ponds Vanishing Cream and taking it at face value! I took my kit off and covered myself in it. And went down stairs stark naked and into the lounge where she was playing Whist with her cronies. I was horrified that they could all see me!! How could that be???
I could start on Ashington and the cream buns for tea at Uncle Harry and Aunty May's house when he got home from the pit ...


Added 03 October 2008

#222752

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