I used to play in the crater when I was a child, that must have been about the early ’50s. That crater was around the back of School Street, the back of the Bluemels houses. It was full of water by that time, with a reed bed that you could walk on, it was like a water bed. We used to jump about and use it like a trampoline, in those days we had to make our own entertainment, you know what I mean.
Two different villages
When I was a kid in Wolston, you have to remember that Wolston and Marston were two different villages; you’ve got Wolston Mill and Marston Mill. When I was a kid and we used to play, when we went round the wrong end of the village, Kelsys Close, we were told to ‘get down your own end’. The Warwick Road was here, Manor Estate wasn’t here, and later on Wolston High school was built, so there were a lot of changes later.
Just after the war, nobody got nothing, we used to play in the street with old tyres and the like; and if you had a car it was a luxury.
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I don’t know if this was a bomb crater, but take a line from Bluemels through to Bretford Bridge, there were three or four craters there that were filled in by German prisoners of War the next day. A local farmer recalled sitting in his armchair in his cottage in Bretford and hearing a series of thumps and bangs coming towards him, and thinking the next one’s going to hit the village but there wasn’t a next one, else he wouldn’t have told me the story!
Up the top of the farm, in the next farm, there was an air raid shelter, and on the field they’d got posts with lights on as a decoy factory; they never dropped bombs on that though! The bunker’s still there.
The crater was a bomb crater from WW2. A lump of shrapnel from the bomb went through my Gran and Grandad’s house front door, no 58 School St. In fact to this day it’s the only different piece of glass in the door that was replaced.
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