My father especially was told to move because in the wartime you couldn't work where you wanted to work.

You were either in the forces or you were told where you were working, and as my father was an electrician. And he was too old to work to be in the forces to be in the war. He ended up working in Rotherwurst at the munitions factory on the outskirts of Harryford factory stopped making munitions some years later and uh he then worked for the electricity board, and that's when we came to Ross to live in 1943. When I was 3 1/4, it was Victory in Europe Day, VE Day, and the Rosstown people had a party to celebrate in a place called the jam factory, which was an old building in the crofts.

It's gone now. And we all sat down at a big table full of jelly and all the party stuff which we hadn't really seen. And that was my first early memory that you put a date to it, VE day, which would be springtime 1945. As a youngster I used to go down to the station to watch some steam engines play around down there sometimes in the summer months.

I didn't used to come home till it got dark. I used to get home and my mother used to say, do you know what time it is? It's 10 o'clock. You're not got back home. We'll get to bed a bit quick, but it was still light, wasn't it, you know, if it's still light, you stayed out and played, you didn't come home. When I can remember going along in Ross.

As a little lad in a pedal car and I used to drive along Gloucester Road, but there was no cars and the few that did have cars. If you wanted to go to such and such a shop, you pull up outside and the shopkeeper quite often would come out and serve you. So I went to Ross Primary School, which was in Cantaloupe Road where the library is now, and I can remember being taken there by my mother, but 5 years old, the little door open.

In you go. Make your own way home.

And then when I was 11 years old, I took my 11 plus exam. I passed part one. I didn't really try on the second part, and I went to what was then called Ross Secondary Modern, which now you know as John Curl, brand new school. Some of the school rooms were unoccupied because there wasn't enough children to fill them. I've always enjoyed school. In fact, I used to say many times when I was older that I would have gone back to school as long as they pay me what I earned. I loved the school. Great, totally enjoy it.

I never missed a day. My first job was as a newspaper boy when I was about 1213, and I used to get 10 shillings a week.

Which is 50p today's money, and that would be going out every evening round about 6 o'clock, pick up the newspapers in a bag on my push bike and pedal around the area that you were allocated to deliver the papers.

At the end of the week, I used to have to collect the money and if I was lucky, I might pick up another shilling. In tips, and I did that for quite a few years till I left school. Everybody used to buy the Ross Gazette for one thing and one thing only, even my wife says now, you buy the Rostte for two things.

Births, marriages, and deaths are three things, isn't it? Well it had hatched, matched and dispatched.

Got it, hatched, babies, matched, getting married, dispatched when you're going up the road.

And that's the first thing even now when my wife buys it, in case there's anybody in there who's left this world that we knew. I left school before I was actually 15 years old.

All firms were clamouring after labour and apprentices. They wanted as many as they could get. So you could pick what you wanted to do carpenter, plaster a bricklayer, all those jobs are available. As an apprentice electrician, you would then work with an electrician, and we went out and we did work throughout the county. They used to change you around, so you got different ideas from different electricians. Lots of the villages and the surrounding areas didn't even have electricity. So you'd go in there and put it all in lights, power points, and they were wonderful place. Well, as I lived in a shop, I never really needed to go out shopping because we had it all in the shop. The shop we owned and ran was called the dairy. In High Street we sold milk out of a churn. And the mothers would send a child with a jug and say I want half a pint into the jug, put it out and pay the money and off they would go because there was no milkman and there was no supermarkets where you can buy milk in a plastic container. So when you think about it, that's far better than today because the jug that the mother sent the child to the shop, our shop, was reusable time after time after time, so there was no waste, was there? And in our street in High Street, we had a vegetable shop, a grocery shop, and a bakery all within 50 yards of each other. So all these shops were one after the other and nearly every street had its own little grocery shop. And you've got to remember in those days, very few people had a fridge. You have to go shopping for fresh food every day. And you let it that day. You might be lucky and keep it over for the next day, and then if you try to keep it any longer and that it would go off. Now, of course you've got fridges and freezers, so you keep the stuff for whatever length of time you want. In those days, the market was bigger than what it is now and uh the context wasn't so varied, it was basically food coming from outside, farmers, etc. would bring in their food to sell. Um, you didn't have sort of gifts and things like that. It was just the food and that would be mainly on a Thursday. Your mother would go and pick the chicken out that she thought was the fattest one, and they would take it out of the cage and pick it up and There and then And then your mother would have to take it home. Pluck it, clean it out before she could cook it.

You didn't go and buy a chicken leg or something like that or a chicken breast, you had to do the whole thing. When I was 16, I wanted to get mobile.

Cars were expensive to buy, expensive to run, so most of us boys bought motorbikes. It wasn't very nice in the winter time if you wanted to go and pick up a girl and take her out, and the girl didn't want to sit on the back of a motorbike when it was freezing cold and go down the road. So I bought my first motorbike, which was a BSA Bantam, all of 125 cc. I paid £30 bearing in mind that I was earning money doing newspaper rounds.

I had enough money to buy it outright, insure it and drive it around. That gave me mobility. And then a year after that, I sold it and bought a brand new Triumph from a shop in Ross. It was called H&L Motors, and it operated from a building which is on the corner of Cantonloup Road. And I think it's an insurance building now, and that was a motorcycle repair and sales shop. It was a brand new Triumph 350 cc twin. It cost me 350 quid. If you went out in those days, it was a fish and chip shop.

And it was, you could sit in the fish and chip shop, but usually it was fish and chip shop and take it home.

Um, I can't ever recall going out to eat with my parents, except maybe on Exceptional days of somebody's birthday or something like that. And then it would be mainly to a hotel and there was quite a few hotels, but it wasn't like it is now where you get restaurants, cafes, everything or you take your pick. They have two cinemas in Ross, one called The Roxy and the other one called the Curl Pitcher Palace.

The nickname was the Bug house, but I used to have to get some money off my parents, maybe once a week if I was lucky. Entertainment otherwise was the youth club. In Hill Street, the building in my days was nothing like it is now. It was all we had was one ground floor which boys used to kick a football around. Then there was an area upstairs where you could sit around and listen to music played on a record player. The whole aspect of going to the youth club as a boy was to see what girls were doing and see whether you could find any girls and I suppose the girls did do the same. They would be going there to suss out any boys that were eligible at the time. I met my wife at her village hall atlangaron on a Saturday night because they used to have a dance and I found out about the dance because I'd seen my future wife walking around the streets with her friends and took a liking to her.

I think she used to say that I used to drive this little green van around and go up the street while she's walking down there, turn it around quick and come back down again slowly and go on down the road, turn it around and come back up again. And I think she must have got the idea that was somebody in there and I found out where her father was and had a word with him and he said, oh, there's a they're doing a dance Saturday night at Langar. No alcohol in those days you just drank lemonade tea, very old fashioned, you know. And I hope you've all enjoyed it and it's given you some insight into Ross past and make the most of your schooling because it's a great time of your life.

Stay there as long as you can. And if they can pay you even better.