We were lucky when it came to food because there were always lots of rabbits about.  You could buy rabbits but most people got theirs poached by someone who they knew.  When we lived at the cottage, people would always walk past our house to get from Town Street into the town and a few of them would give us a rabbit for their beer money for example.  At harvest time me and some other boys would go up to the Brandon Fields after school and the rabbits would run out to escape the combine harvester and we would catch them.  We would have a stick and just chase them.  Mind you there were so many that some would be running at you and you didn’t need to chase them.  The farmer would start on the edge of the field and work his way in toward the middle, so as the field got smaller the rabbits had less room and so would have to come out.  We would come out of school, call in to the baker’s for some bread and then get some tomatoes and that would be our food until they stopped harvesting, which could be until eight o’clock at night.

Coronation Place
The first part of Coronation Place, on the left hand side when you go into the road, was built in 1937, Coronation year, and the right hand side was finished in 1939.  We moved in to the road on the first week of the war and I stayed there until I got married.  I still remember everyone who lived there and there were some big poor families who lived down there and I never turn my nose up to anyone if I see them now.  At Coronation Place everyone knew everyone else who lived in the road.

Life as a boy
There were two schools in Brandon, one was the Infants for the 5 to 7 years olds, and the other was the Junior school for the 8 to 14 year olds.

In about 1942 the local Gas Manager started a Scout Troop and I think there were five patrols, which would mean that there were about 25-30 scouts.  We would meet every week in White Hart Lane and sometimes go camping at weekends on Ling Heath.

I later joined the Air Training Cadets, within a year of leaving school, when I was 15, and that was a good adventure.  We used to meet three times a week and Sundays.   At the ATC about a dozen or so of us would cycle to Feltwell nearly every Sunday and that was when I first went flying.  I went up in an Oxford when I was 15 and that was very noisy.  A few would get to fly each week, maybe half a dozen each week.  Then we would get to go away on camp each year, we went to Felixstowe one year where they had the Air/Sea Rescue unit and I had a flight in a Sunderland flying boat.  Just before Arnhem the glider pilots were stationed at Shephered’s Grove near Stanton and we went there one Sunday in a bus and we all had flights in the Horsa gliders.  It was rather scary for me because although some of the gliders had seats in that would take three or four people at a time, the glider I was in had barrels of ballast and no seats.  I stood in the doorway behind the pilot and it was so lovely and quiet and you thought the Stirling that was pulling you was moving up and down but in fact it was the glider.  Then the cable dropped and when the glider came down to land it would come down at angle of about 45 degrees before levelling out to land, and so I was left facing downward and my knuckles were pretty white then.  I got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat for a while.  We went Lyon Solent one year; we went to the Whale Island to the Naval Gunnery School and Portsmouth submarine and warships.  There was also a rifle range that we would go on and that was something really exciting for a 15 year old to fire a .303 rifle.  We would also get to go into the parachute packing area.  So the ATC was the best thing you could be in if you were a boy.  The Army Cadets did okay but they didn’t have so much to do.

On Friday night after ATC we all went to the Youth Club that was housed in a big concrete classroom along the lane leading to the school.  It was quite a big hall and we had games, music, dancing, table tennis, darts and all sorts of games for the 14 to 18 year olds.

Our activities and games would come and go with the seasons.  Hoops, conkers in Autumn, bird nesting in the Spring, building ice slides in Winter.  I remember one slide on the Market Hill was probably 50 yards long and some of the kids could slide the whole length of it.  Us kids in Coronation Place even built our own one in the road and of course some of the adults had a go at us for doing that.  I remember one time that there was a stilt craze, and everyone had to make a pair of stilts but then about a month later they were chucked in the shed for something else.

From May to October the river then became the biggest attraction – swimming.  There would be loads of us down there.  Some would go down by the High Street bridge, some near to The Stanch, but not too many because it was a bit dangerous and some would go by Green Lane at ‘Tip.

Just outside of Brandon, on the road toward Mildenhall there was a sand pit that was dug by some locals for use as building sand and the Army had built an obstacle course near to it.  Now the end of the course finished at the sand pit, the men had to crawl under a net and then sprint to the sand pit, lob in a live grenade and fall to the floor.  The grenade would then harmlessly explode at the bottom of the pit.  Well, some friends and me would walk over the fields and go up to that sand pit to watch the soldiers go through the obstacle course.  We would lay prone on the floor in a small hollow to watch the men lob the grenades in the pit and then as the men ducked down, so did we put our heads down.  It was great fun at the time, but now looking back it all seems a bit dangerous with the sound of shrapnel flying about.

Football
Also there was hardly any traffic and most of it was Army traffic and there were very few cars, so you could kick a football to a mate on the other side of London Road all the way to school without having to stop kicking it back and forth.  We played football and cricket at every spare moment and after the war, in 1945, me and some other 16 year olds reformed the Brandon football club and we started in the Ouse Valley League.  Then people came out of the Forces later and joined us to strengthen the team, but most of us youngsters went on to play together in the Brandon first team a few years later.  I kept playing until I was forty.

Before the war I used to watch Brandon’s two football teams play – ‘Tip played on the Crown Meadow and Brandon played on the Hall Meadow.  We also restarted the Brandon Cricket Club on the lower part of Hall Meadow in 1945.

Jobs
I was errand boy at the International Stores on the High Street when I was 13 and 14 years old.  I would have to go there at eight o’clock in the morning to clean the shop’s brass frontage and then after school I would have to go back to deliver groceries.  I would have to go deliver as far as Chalk Road one day, another day it would be some houses at Wangford and Weeting another day.  I would have a trade bike with a basket on the front and two boxes full, one each side of the handle.

Bombing
Although the bombing probably didn’t wake you up you heard about it the next day.  One bomb did hit a house along Thetford Road and another bomb from that stick of bombs landed in a field in Lingheath.  We got on our bikes and went to look and found a crater of about six foot deep and six foot across and we picked up a load of shrapnel.  We went to look at the house in Thetford Road and the bomb had fell right against the house.  There was a toilet just outside the back door and the bomb seemed to have exploded in between the toilet and the back of the house and there was a hole there.

We used to hear the planes taking off from Lakenheath and it was especially noisy for us living in Coronation Place at the time.  Green’s used to have a big sawdust heap and big chimneys and you could see the exhausts blowing out of the planes as they struggled to take off because they were fully loaded every night between 8pm to 10pm.  I used to watch them take off when I went to bed.

After the war
A Polish Regiment moved into the big London Road camp that the British had left earlier and they also went into the camp at Weeting because I think Churchill had promised them somewhere to live after the war.  After the war these Polish people were no longer soldiers and the Army camp soon became a civilian camp.  The London Camp also became a home for British families who needed a home and squatted there.  You would see the old ladies from the camp on the Market Hill, they did not want to buy the cabbages instead they wanted the cabbage leaves that were going to be chucked away.

The men who came back from war didn’t do too badly for jobs in Brandon.  Green’s and Calder’s were big timber yard and Mounts Whiting employed a few men and the Forestry Commission took on a lot.  There were not many unemployed.  Mind you those men that came back as Far East Prisoners Of War were in a different situation because they weren’t in the best of health.  There was an old lady that lived in the last house along Manor Road before you came to Crown Street and she had a son held as a FEPOW and she would wait at her gate for weeks and weeks for her son to come home.  He did come home eventually; I think his name was Tommy Dyer.   These men were welcomed back to Brandon and I guess we felt sorry for them.  These guys formed a FEPOW Association in Brandon after the war, although I think they went to Thetford for their meetings.

I had a couple of cousins who died at Dunkirk.  They were Brandon brothers, Rutterford.

... and finally
There was a particular school teacher who looked like a German and people would call him a German and wonder if he was a spy!  Then there was a cinema operator who was gay and people would wonder if he was a conchie (conscientious objector) or a spy, but there was nothing in it.

This website was designed and developed by Darren Norton, Brandon, Suffolk