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A recollection from the end of the war

On the evening of VE night (or was it VJ night?), I remember going with some friends into Saturday Market, where a huge celebration was taking place. A band was playing and crowds of people were dancing on the cobbles around the central lamp post. Fireworks were being let off everywhere and a row of sideshows and amusements had been erected facing the Butterdings as far as the Market Cross.

One tent in particular, standing opposite the Push Inn, sparked our curiosity. Here you could pay to see the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ displayed in a glass case. “No one”, we were told, “could ever wake her” and this, to a gang of ten-year-olds on the look out for mischief, was a challenge not to be missed.

We pooled our odd coppers to pay for one member to enter the tent as an observer, whist we others went around the back, lit a ‘banger’ and rolled it under the tent flap. It went off with a huge bang immediately below the glass case. Our ‘observer’ ran from the tent and we all beat a hasty retreat to the bonfire on the Westwood. It was duly reported that our ‘test’ had been a great success and that the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ had “jumped out of her skin”. Her Prince had arrived.

A recollection from the war

My father, like many people in those days, was a great ‘make do and mend’ enthusiast, who collected anything and everything that “might come in useful”. One day, whilst walking across the Westwood, he found a thick light metal object about the size and shape of a crash helmet. As he thought this was a useful piece of pure aluminium, he decided to break it up with a hammer and melt it down in his glue pot on our kitchen fire.
When the metal reached a high temperature, it suddenly caught fire with a blinding flash and we all rushed in panic into the back garden. Our kitchen window shone like the sun for twenty minutes, whist my poor mother wrung her hands in terror and my father ran about with buckets of water. Eventually, the pulsing glare died away and the smoke cleared enough for us to re-enter the kitchen. Everything was covered with a layer of fine white ash, but no serious damage had been caused. What my father had found was half of a flare canister made of pure magnesium!

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