Pow's

A Memory of Kingstanding.

One of my earliest memories was walking to the shops with my mother. We passed along a road called Kingstanding Road, there were a lot of men mending the road and I asked my mother about them as I had not seen them before, she hurried me past them and as we got further away from the workmen she said they were German POW's cleaning up the mess their bombers had made. Apparently they were billetted in Sutton Park for a while. At the time I must have been about 6 years old as I was born just before the war in 1936. I also remember being in the back garden and my father had dug a hole to erect the shelter in. The hole was quite deep so I was fascinated by it. Suddenly there was this loud noise and when I looked up in the sky I saw this giant plane with black markings on it just above my head. The next I knew my mother had rushed out, grabbed me out of the hole, and ran into the house with me, she must have been extremely frightened for me but I was just amazed at the size of the plane. The school I went to at that time was Christ the King and when a raid was imminent they used to get all us youngsters under the stairs in the large entrance hallway (in my minds eye I can still see us all crammed into the space).

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