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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio Cambridgeshire Story Gatherer Team on behalf of Mr. Thomas and has been added to the site with her permission. Mr. Thomas fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

One memory is my brush with the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard. Mom’s second brother, Uncle Len, was in a reserved occupation, working in the foundry at the Birmid, and he had joined the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard. On this particular night my Uncle Len had collected his rifle and the one bullet from the unit before coming to Gran’s for his tea. It was his turn to have the live round. Mom and I were eating our dinner when he came in and propped his rifle against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. I finished eating and was allowed to leave the table. I sat on the settee by the rifle. At some point I pulled a lever thing and the bullet jumped out of the gun and rolled across the floor. Len and Granddad scrambled about on the floor but the bullet had vanished. The furniture was moved except for a monstrous sideboard. Eventually it was decided that the only place this bullet could be was under the monster. Len and Granddad pulled this thing away from the wall but still no bullet. It had rolled under the skirting board. Granddad got a piece of wire and tried to hook it out, unfortunately he knocked it under the floor.
The floorboards were pulled up and the round recovered. Then Mom and I went home. Len could have been court martialled for losing that bullet.

Another memory is as a small child I remember vividly being scared wit less, by the people in Middlemore Road. They lit a giant Bonfire in the road, (although I did not know at the time what it was), and were shouting, yelling and dancing around the flames. At some point a human body was flung into the flames. It scared the life out of me. Only afterwards did I find out that it was Victory in Europe day and the people were celebrating the end of the war and of course the body was an effigy of Hitler. Years later when retelling this to people, they found it difficult to understand that I had never seen a bonfire before because of the black out.

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