May Blitz: 1941 - Liverpool Docks & City Centre.          
The bombing of Merseyside reached its peak in the seven-night blitz of 1-7 May 1941. This was the most concentrated series of air attacks on any British city area outside London during the war.

In June of 1941, after the dreadful blitz, my mother leaves Eton Street and suddenly turns up at Burford Gardens. When she comes into the house and calls for me to come to her I'm scared and run upstairs and hide behind Auntie Horton's skirts. I haven't seen my mother for nearly two years.

She says, 'I'm your mother Jud. I've come to Tenbury so I can be near you.' At this time she's still a comparatively young woman of thirty-seven. It's only in later life I realise the awful impact of this separation from my mother at such a young and critical age. The psychological damage it wreaked on my young mind was great.

I take refuge in my own inner, imaginative world, and turn to children’s books for sanctuary from the lonely motherless world outside. Living in an isolated house, without the benefit of the company of other children, I people my environment with the fictitious characters from those childish stories. She doesn’t come to visit me for nearly three years! Why not? When railway communications are cheap and relatively fast, why does she abandon me? I never dare ask her. I don’t know why - maybe I don’t want to embarrass her - to put her on the spot.

To be fair to her, she is slaving away at a machine in the Dunlop Factory in Walton Vale, Liverpool, earning the money to live on, and to keep the home going in Eton Street. She also sends me gifts of clothes and other items. Nevertheless, she doesn’t come to see me for all that time. Almost three years is a hell of a long time, when you're four years old! When she does eventually move down to the Tenbury and Burford area, she comes to see me at the house. By this time she's irrevocably split with my father, who's now stationed in Africa. She starts to visit me quite a lot, but after a while she senses that Edith Horton resents her visits. There are some unpleasant incidents all of them initiated by Mrs Horton with her imperious attitude. Eventually my mother can stand it no longer and decides to remove me from the Horton's care and take me with her to live at her new rooms with Miss Maddocks at 21 Teme Street.

On January the 8th 1940, bacon, butter and sugar were rationed. This was followed by meat , fish, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, milk and canned fruit on March the 11th of the same year. Rationing was popular with the people and a Gallup Poll showed over 60 per cent in favour of this system. More and more foods were added to the list. Not only were food stuffs hard to obtain, but quantities were limited. Many felt hungry and housewives complained about the time they spent queuing for food. Some people considered food rationing to be very unfair. Eggs, butter and meat could be obtained fairly easily without coupons in rural areas. By the summer of 1941 greengrocers were taking their lorries into the country to buy vegetables direct from growers. The government announced in September 1939, that petrol was rationed. Initially small allowance of petrol was allowed for private motorist but this was brought to an end in the summer of 1942 after the Japanese Army occupied Malaya and the success of the U-boat attacks on the Atlantic convoys.

Ivor Novello, the songwriter, was sent to prison for eight-weeks after he had fraudulently obtained petrol for his Rolls-Royce car. His friend, the actor and playwright, Noel Coward, was convicted for currency racketeering. Another high profile conviction concerned Major-General Sir Percy Laurie, the Provost Marshal of Great Britain. He was found guilty of illegally obtaining a second ration book.

Other goods such as cigarettes and alcohol were never officially rationed, but were often in short supply. Some shopkeepers kept their limited stocks for their favourite customers. This created a great deal of bad feeling and it was not uncommon for shopkeepers to be reported to the Ministry of Food.

Children were treated differently from adults and were entitled to extra foods considered essential for growth, such as milk and orange juice. The National Milk Scheme provided one pint of milk for every child under five. Expectant mothers and young children were entitled to free milk if the combined income of parents was less than 40 shillings a week..

British officials were not even sure that Britain could maintain food supplies. Clothing was severely rationed. Every British, man, woman and child, was issued with a ration card and a National Registration Card (an indentity card).

Tenbury Market is very active in those times. Herds of cows moo and flop their tailswinging way down Teme Street guided by a straw chewing drover. Horses and carts carrying vegetables or livestock rumble over the cobbled roadway their metal rimmed wheels painting twin trails of cow excrement, which peters out with distance. There are scenes of great activity in the streets and doorways. Ruddy faced men, eyes ashine with cider, handslap agreements in pub corridors and gents toilets. Many are the mysterious brown parcels which exchange hands as dusk falls.

A couple of hundred yards from the Crown Hotel - a bit further down the road going towards the Rose and Crown, in the same field as the Castle Tump, is an old blasted oak. The tree has been hit by lightening and the centre of the trunk has opened up into a massive doorway-sized aperture. It has gradually rotted away inside and the space is big enough for two or three people to stand upright in comfort. As it is by the roadside, people take shelter inside if it is raining whilst waiting for a bus. If you go inside you'll find the usual empty beer bottles, discarded Woodbine packets and other detritus. Lovers use it for secret trysts. We call it the Witches Oak. There are stories that it goes back to the days of the cavaliers and Roundheads and that the Royalists used to hide inside when Cromwell's troopers were about. It is said Charles slept at Tenbury with some of his followers before the Battle of Worcester in September 1651. As for hidden cavaliers - in all likelihood, it's a myth - the tales are probably no more than childish stories. People say the tree is haunted. Some kids say they've seen a witch peeping out at dead of night. The witch is said to emerge from the tree and rise up on her broomstick to disappear over the Castle Tump. Castle Tump? People say different things about Castle Tump. To some, it is the grave of Cadwallader the great Celtic leader from olden times. To others, it is the remains of a Norman motte and bailey fortification. G. M. Trevelyan in his History of England says:

'The Mound Castles of England are Norman. The Saxons and Danes made earthwork enclosures to protect towns and royal forts, but not high mounds like those of the Norman Barons. The English thegn's house was usually unfortified. Hence, the English outcry against the high mounds, crowned by timber forts, which the Normans erected in great numbers immediately after their arrival in England.'

E. Wayland Joyce in his worthy book, Tenbury. Some Record of its History writes:

'Is it possible that the Normans, when they came, utilised the tomb of Caractacus in some such way, and erected their timber fort, or castle, on the spot? The Tump itself is still unexplored as far as I know. It bears upon its two time-worn oaks; the higher one showing a knot of many roots, gnarled and rugged through exposure to the weather and the consequent wearing down of the ground. These two oaks remain of four, said to have been planted upon the Mound by Edmund Cornwall, the giant Baron of Burford, who was Sheriff of Salop in 1580, whose body lies in Burford Church, whose portrait, with the portraits of his father and mother, was painted in the triptych of Burford Church by Melchior Salaboss, and whose great staff used to be in the possession of Mr. Vincent Wheeler at Newnham Court. The Giant is said to have been 7 ft. 3 in. in height. The staff is 5 ft. in height, and 5 Ib. in weight. On it is engraved the motto: 'In my defense God me defend.'

One day there's the sound of gunfire and large explosions coming from across the River Teme where the hills of Worcestershire sweep upwards in a forested embankment. The hills opposite are swarming with khaki-clad figures. There are tanks, armoured cars, heavy guns and soldiers with a variety of guns and vehicles. It is a huge scheme, of mock battle, and is part of the training and preparation for the eventual attack on the European mainland. The military take it very seriously, and we hear that a couple of the participants are killed, in spite of it being just a war game.

A lot of the local farmers and landowners are very upset because of the damage caused to the fields by the tank tracks and heavy lorries, quite apart from the fact that the squaddies are digging trenches all over the place.

However, but for the occasional scheme, and apart from the drone of the heavy German bombers on their way to bomb Birmingham, there isn't much going on. Of course we hear the crump, crump, crump of the bombs exploding, even though Birmingham is fifty miles away and there are a couple of instances where a loose bomb is jettisoned by a Jerry plane, in order to lighten its load and get the hell out of the way of the Spitfires.

Going from the Gardens towards Tenbury, just before Burford School, there's a road on the left - the road to Greete. Stan Holmes lives up there. The first farm on the left is the Morris Farm. It's the farm where the unfortunate little girl Peggy lived before her parents took her back to Liverpool where she is subsequently killed by a German landmine.

It is terrible when they're slaughtering the pigs on the Morris Farm. The squeals from the death agony of the pigs would reverberate around the whole area. Then there would be a silence followed by another inevitable strangulated screaming. It's an eerie, spinechilling sound. It's one of the most disturbing frightening sounds I'm ever to hear in my life - me, an impressionable and sensitive city kid - a vegetarian to boot. The screams of the dying pigs will never leave my memory.

In those days, the railway still exists. The Tenbury Railway was built in 1862 in the bed of the abandoned Kington to Stourport canal. It was closed down under the Beeching axe in 1962. [1] Tenbury actually has a diesel engine that plies its way between Tenbury and Craven Arms. It has a very loud klaxon horn and when I hear the wailing sound I know everything in the world is OK. Don't ask me why the sound of the trainhorn is so reassuring and peaceful - I don't know either - but it is - I am safe - it's the most comforting sound I know.

An example of the way the war, though far away, touches the lives of ordinary countryfolk is the forcible enrolment of the Horton's bull terrier dog, Bonzo into the RAF. Evidently, there's a law passed in parliament that suitable dogs are to be utilised for guard duties on military bases and can be removed from their owners for the duration of hostilities. One day an RAF fifteen hundedweight truck carrying two Military Policemen drives up the avenue with a document which says that my guardians have to hand over poor Bonzo. He is dragged to the vehicle and pushed behind a wirework partition in the back. The tailgate is closed and the two lynchpins dropped into position. We stand in a tearful little group as the truck drives off. A whining, scratching Bonzo peers over the tailboard and looks imploringly at us with his pinkish eyes. That's the last that any of us see of him.

One day in the summer of 1940 I'm running down the concrete path outside the scullery at the back of the Horton's house when I trip and fly headlong. I smash my face on the edge of a metal bin and break my nose. I'm rushed screaming to Tenbury Cottage Hospital. There's a very modern, light-filled ward. They don't operate - there's nothing they can do. They could have taken the broken bone out, but my nose would've become flat like a boxer's. Gradually I recuperate. There's a very kind nurse who looks after me - she gives me a book. Sadly, I've forgotten her name. I can still remember fragments of a couple of songs I heard Gene Autrey sing on the hospital radio. There's a very kind nurse who looks after me - she gives me a book. Sadly, I've forgotten her name.

That Little Kid Sister of Mine. Sung by Gene Autry. "She was only seven, When she was called to heaven, That little kid sister of mine And another one… Roll along covered wagon Roll along covered wagon, roll along, To the turn of your wheels I sing a song, City ladies may be fine, but give me that girl of mine, Roll along covered wagon, roll along, Going home covered wagon going home, For this cowboy was never born to roam 'Long the road that doesn't change, To that old "Bar twenty range" Roll along covered wagon, roll along, Wipee-teeyi, old timers, heading for your ranch house door Wipee-teeyi, old timers, Coral me so I'll never stray no more." Roll along covered wagon, roll along,"  [2]

I'm fortunate enough to meet John Treasure, founder of the internationally renowned Treasures of Tenbury at Burford Gardens on a number of occasions.

We first meet in the late fifties during the period when he's just taken the Gardens over, but has not at that time opened them to the public. Soon after our meeting in 1958 he opens the garden to visitors and continues with the development of his collection of clematis that will eventually become the National Clematis Collection, with over 350 varieties. I'm able to tell him many little things of interest about the Gardens and he is surprised to hear Burford House had been a girl's school during the war. He's also unaware of the subterranean tunnel that was discovered under the front lawn, which is now hidden under a new rectangular ornamental pond. The last conversation we have is in 1994 when he is wheelchair bound. It must be very frustrating for such an active man. The gardens are obviously his life, and at least he's the pleasure of seeing his accomplishment on a daily basis. He was an interesting and talented man who did wonders for gardens and for Burford and Tenbury. He is sadly missed.

The present owners, Charles and Michael Cheshire, who take over the Gardens after Mr Treasure's death, excel themselves in the upkeep and further development of the nurseries and gardens. I am intrigued to see the elegant design and treatment of the early nineteenth century Georgian footbridge over the Ledwych. Although they replace the old structure without knowledge of the original timberwork, fortuitously it is almost exactly as I remember it, apart from the absence of a gate that used to stand on the garden end of the bridge. I remember as a small child attempting to climb over the gate that closes off the bridge, to try to gain access into the field on the other side. I slip and land belly-down on a pointed wooden paling. I am winded and badly bruised but not seriously hurt. The incident has impinged the bridge's structure upon my memory.

The field where Charlie used to take me rabbit shooting is now a wildflower meadow, sown around an informal arboretum of trees and shrubs. For me, a visit to Burford gardens is an eerie experience. It is the nearest thing to time travel I know. Even as I drive down the avenue towards the church, the hairs on the back of my neck start to prickle. When I go there, I take my wartime photographs. I stand in spatial relation to the original camera position, then look at the photograph. I then survey the modern reality with the old-time figures and objects removed from the landscape.

[1] The Tenbury Railway was built in 1862 in the bed of the abandoned Kington to Stourport canal. It was closed down under the Beeching axe in 1962.

[2] Roll Along Covered Wagon. Sung by Gene Autry the Singing Cowboy. 1941.

I managed to find the lyrics to this song thanks to the wonders of the Internet.