IN MEMORY OF NORMAN AMOS 1933-2011......

...HIS ACCOUNT OF WW2 IN NORTHAMPTON AS A YOUNG BOY.

My name is Norman Amos, I was born in 1933 and these are some of my recollections as a boy on the wartime years in Northampton.

My first memory is actually as they used to say – the day that war broke out. It was a Sunday morning & I was at home, my father (who was a Boys Brigade Officer) was on Boys Brigade duties and I was at home with my mother, and I can remember that the radio was on and the famous announcement that I can remember quite clearly was made that we were at war. My mother had gone through one before in the First World War- all I can remember her saying was “Oh my god, and then life carried on as normal.

The memories that I give you are a little jumbled, so I hope that you forgive me.

One of the early memories was when the Luftwaffe decided to drop a stick of bombs on the cemetery on Billing Road.

I was living in Adams Avenue which was not far away; the explosion caused my mother, father and sister to wake up but not me. Mother and father took my sister down to the cellar where they stayed there until the noise abated, and I was left in bed the; reason being that I wasn’t awake and my father (who was a First World War veteran) believed that if your name’s on it then there was nothing you could do, and if your name was not on it you were OK. 


As regards school it all went on as usual the difference being that there were air raid shelters built on the school playground. I was at Stimpson Avenue School at the time, and it was strictly prohibited to go in the shelters unless it was an alert or on an air raid exercise. Unfortunately being a boy like other boys we decided to go down there and we were caught. Which meant visiting the Headmaster, Mr Smith, who proceeded to give us six of the best on the palm of our hands, but such was life.

Once a week at Stimpson Avenue School they had what was called the ‘Penny Pictures’, where children could go along and for the price of one penny there was films, Charlie Chaplin ones, Laurel & Hardy, which I presume lasted an hour and a half before we made our way home. Another thing that the schools were involved with was salvage, particularly paper salvage. A scheme was set up, and depending on how much you collected you achieved a rank. If you only collected a little bit you were made a sergeant, and it gradually went up, and some of us collected round the streets with our trolleys, knocking on doors, getting books.
Some of us achieved a high rank of Field Marshal, and we had a little paper badge that we put on our coat, we were very proud of this. However carrying heavy volumes, even though we had trolleys was quite hard work, but that was what boys did so we did it. 



I think that it was just after Dunkirk that it appeared to us children as hundreds (whether it was or not I don’t know) of French or Belgian soldiers. They came to Northampton and were allocated to St Michael’s Church hall, and they used to lay about the grounds of the church.

Of course this was marvellous for us boys, we used to go over to them. We couldn’t speak their language, they couldn’t speak ours but we used to collect money from them (small silver coins with a hole in the middle) and take them to a little shop in Whitworth Road which was just round the corner (owned by a Mr Wilford). Now Mr Wilford used to take these coins from us, which were possibly worthless and give us packets of 5 Woodbines. These we took back to the troops who were laying on the grass outside St Michaels Church and hand them around, and then we would go back for some more.

Looking back Mr Wilford has been a real wartime hero, it must have cost him quite a bit of money because he would not get anything back because the coins we gave him were worthless, but we never went to that shop without getting some cigarettes – usually Woodbines in a packet of five that were handed out to the troops.

When word got round that oranges were available on Northampton Market, a plan then swung into operation whereby my mother, myself and my sister would immediately go to the market where we would take up a position in the queue but leaving plenty of space between us. This meant that all three of us could probably get two oranges and then we would meet up again afterwards and come home with half a dozen oranges and think ourselves very clever for doing it.

At the beginning of the war a long trail of children appeared at the top of Adams Avenue and my mother had to go along, and she came back with two East Ender children named George (who was my age), and Rosie (who was a bit younger) they stayed with us for a few months and to their amazement found out, or thought, that we had a coal mine under the house, which was the cellar where all the coal was stored. Also the first Christmas, a favourite expression of my family was ‘mince pies & castad’ they didn’t know anything about Christmas pudding, as far as they were concerned a special treat at Christmas was mince pies & custard. They were quite disappointed when my mother did not serve up mince pies & custard. They did not last long with us as they went back pretty quickly. Later on we had two other evacuees, two girls from Kilburn and Bronsbury High School, I remember their uniform was red and white bands around their panama hats; they stayed with us some time, before they went back. Unfortunately none of the four have ever contacted my family again, the only contact we had was some years after the war when the police knocked on our door and asked us if one of the girls (Sheila) had been in touch with us as they were looking for her – we don’t know why.

In addition to evacuees my parents also took in a couple of Canadian soldiers. A convoy of Canadians were parked in Bostock & Stimpson avenues, supposedly to sleep in their lorries, but many of the people like my parents invited them in, so we had two of them. They left us badges etc but unfortunately although they promised to keep in touch we never heard another word. We presume that they were both killed on that big Canadian massacre on the coast.

Boys used to be taken with their fathers to Northampton Racecourse late at night where if you looked up in the sky you could see the shadows of the enemy bombers coming over. From the Racecourse you could also see Coventry burning, you could actually see the flames, not just a glow, but the actual flicker of the flames. We did not realise quite what it was.

Most boys during the war collected badges and buttons etc, which they fastened to the various types of belts which they wore. I was the envy of a lot of the boys because I had this huge Royal Marine badge attached to my belt, how I got this badge I do not know – probably swapped some shrapnel for it . It was great to get hold of shrapnel because, unlike London, it wasn’t very plentiful in Northampton.

During the war youth organisations were not allowed to go to the seaside camps, so the Boys Brigade Company that my father was an officer in used to go to a little village near Stowe called Lillington Dallow and spend a week under canvas in a huge park that belonged to Robarts who I believe was the Chairman of the National Westminster Bank. One of the perks of going there was that we were invited to spend a day with the RAF at Silverstone where the airmen would look after us and we would have a meal in their NAFFI and have quite a good time. We also found a lot of Perspex from crashed aircraft which we brought home and carved in to various items.

In 1945 I was riding home from school with a great friend of mine called John Parsonson (of the furniture shop in Northampton) when we suddenly realised that there were buntings and flags being put out, and we suddenly found out it was VE Day. Of course we didn’t go back to school in the afternoon and we just joined in the celebrations in the streets.