This is a compendium of memories contributed by H2G2 researchers, in answer to the question What have you done or been part of or been there for?.
The intention was to collect first person stories relevant to global events and those from people's cultures, nations and countries.

This is part 1 of 3 (pre-1960s, 1960s and post-1960s).

There will also be an article entitled Things We Remember for those snippets that didn't fit the description.

There are two that are not first person memories, and we'll lead off with them...

Memories from fathers:

• My Dad (born 1914) served in WW II as a cook; he did not share many memories of his time spent away from his home in Canada. He did share:
  Cooking a dinner (a goose) for General Patton in Italy. No warning of the Generals' arrival, and the goose was hard to find (there was a bit of a contretemps going on down all the roads).
  Sending home earnings from card games to my Mom.
  But not unusually, he would not talk about the War.
  My father died in 1995. I, at now 55 years old, regret that I can no longer ask the historical questions pertaining to that era that would be... of interest. By the way I, as many, miss the connection to the/our history of the past.

• My dad was in the US Army in WWII. He never talked much about what he did, or how he was injured (he still had shrapnel scars on his back).
  The only story he told that I remember was his week-long posting as a forward observer in the Pacific.
  He collected canned rations for several days (the labels had been washed off due to an earlier flood in the storage area) and took his post in a pineapple plantation overlooking a strait where Japanese ships were passing.
  He had only one problem during that week. Nearly every can he opened was pineapple in some form (crushed, sliced, juice).
  In all the years since he never again ate pineapple.

Being left behind on a Indian reservation and temporarily adopted by them.

My father always said he'd give me back to the Indians if I didn't quieten down in the car.
One day he did. I don't begrudge him that little joke. It was one of the most pleasant experiences of my life and the smell of Indian sweetgrass takes me back there in a flash. I was about four then.

Baby boomer:

When I started school, aged four, all the Mothers and children enrolled at the same time – there was a long queue. We post-war 'baby boomers' caused a shortage of teachers, and class sizes were very large. I believe there were between 45 and 50 children in my own class.
After we were parted from our Mothers, (some forcibly, with much weeping and wailing) we were taken into a classroom. Most of the children had never met each other, and none of us had been inside a school or classroom before. We were grouped into clusters and given either a sandpit, or a classroom see-saw or some crayons and paper to share.
I distinctly remember wondering why so many of the other children were crying.
I can't remember much about this first classroom, but very soon the teacher discovered I could already read and write, and so I was sent into the next class, which was also so full of children there were only enough chairs for a portion of the class to sit at any one time. The rest had to play with the sandpit, or paint. As I loved my writing book, and the drawing that accompanied it, I had to be shooed away from that table to activities which I enjoyed less.
We did 'sums' too, with no explanation as far as I can remember. There were just long lists of sums on the blackboard, to add up or take away, which we copied out. I never got the hang of that.

An industry gone to pot:

One of my first memories is of being held in my father's arms watching the men take the ware out of a red hot bottle oven. The men were stripped to their waists and were running in and out of the glowing furnace, returning with boards on their heads where the china ware was balanced.
This would be a Monday morning, as the kilns were fired on Friday afternoon ( the whole town would be black with smoke), the kilns would reach the correct temperature over the weekend and be cool enough to empty come Monday.
The whole industry is finished now, and very few factories still produce china in the Staffordshire Potteries.

Father's job in Uganda:

Age 11, after one term at secondary school, flying to East Africa on a double-decker seaplane piloted by one 'Cat's Eyes' Kelly.
Visit to the cockpit. Overnight stops at Ghent (should have been somewhere in south Italy), Alexandria, Khartoum and finally Entebbe on Lake Victoria. Father waiting for us ... with a CAR of his own!
Back to primary school in Kampala while waiting for a place at Prince of Wales school in Nairobi. (There was another school – the Duke of York – but we didn't speak of that).
On at least one of the going-to-school train journeys (overnight, of course), climbing down while stopped on the rim of the Great Rift Valley, putting a penny on the rail (the pennies were quite big and had a hole in the middle for carrying on a string). Waiting for the train to restart and run several wheels over it before scrambling back aboard clutching a big hole – and a bigger penny.
On one such occasion, looking down on a pink lake (Naivasha?) which suddenly lifted off as a swirling pink cloud – flamingos
Flying on a Comet of the Queen's flight (it said so on a plaque). It may have been the Comet's last flight before they were all grounded because of metal fatigue (arguably the reason Britain lost out on design to the US (Boeing) for so long).
Being sent back to UK to live with an Aunt and Uncle ... due to the Mau-Mau.

The Suez Crisis:

We had just got TV (Black and White of course) in time for Suez.
I remember (cannot seem to forget) footage of ships being scuttled to block the canal and French and British paratroopers being machine gunned before they hit the ground. TV news was new and they showed everything.

The Budapest invasion:

The footage from Hungary of men, women and children running for their lives as Russian tanks machine-gunned them in the streets of Budapest. Men and boys tossing Molotov cocktails and being run over by burning tanks.

Pit props:

Age about 17, my first job, on the Duke of Northumberland's estate, working for the local sawmill.
The site boss, a big man in his late twenties probably, teaching me to use one of those two-handed saws that was rather longer than me, then making me keep up with him.
Felling pine trees to make pit-props for the local collieries.
Trees snedded (branches off flush with the trunk with an axe, another training exercise).
The trees were dragged out of the woods by an older man with his horse, then cut into appropriate lengths.
Three sizes (part memory, part guess): about 6' x 10" (1.8m x 0.25m), 4' x 8" (1.2 x 0.20) and little ones say 3' x 6" (0.9 x 0.15).
Being trained to use the bark-off machine, small props first then the medium but I wasn't allowed near the biggies before I left.
The sawmill offered me a sandwich course (part work, part university) as a tree surgeon. To my eternal regret my *integrity* turned it down because I'd already accepted a job as laboratory assistant with a big chemical firm.
What a fool! – it was another several years before I realised my love of wood.

Articles by Rod Archive

RodtheBrit with Various Contributors

09.08.10 Front Page

25.01.10 Front Page

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