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Born 5/1/1924 at 121 Hutton Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, Maurice Bassett recalls some fond memories from the war years.
I had to do national war work, as I could no longer work for my father because the lack of aluminium forced him to shut the workshop down.
The Employment Exchange sent me to Norton Motors in Bracebridge Street, Aston, where I did all sorts of tasks: packing spare parts for the military motorcycles, picking up mail from the post office, picking up parts from other factories for the assembly line, dynamos from Lucas, hand grips and other rubber parts from Dunlop.
I also did night fire watching in the city of Birmingham from the top of Times Furniture store: midnight to 6 AM, one night a week. And then to work from 7.0 AM to 5.30 PM, have tea and then spend 12 hrs down the air raid shelter, and off to work again.
It was not a good place to be on top of the store watching bombers coming over the city and not knowing where the incendiary bombs were going to fall.
I had to go to B.S.A. Motorcycles one Saturday, urgently, to take some air cleaners for the desert motorcycles they were making, It was raining when I left and I had put on my great coat and steel helmet that I had from the home guard.
After delivering the parts I went back to the factory, only to find I had another trip to make back to B.S.A. By this time it had stopped raining and I took off my coat and steel helmet and set off again.
The motorcycle had a box fitted to the side of it like a sidecar, and this was stacked high with air cleaners, so much so that I had to stand up on the foot rests to look over the top when looking to my left.
What happened next was that I found myself in the gutter feeling very sore and sorry. I remember a policeman helping me into a shop nearby and giving me a cigarette.
After that it was hospital and some stitches in my head. Sunday morning I went to the local park rowing and then home. I told my mother I felt ill and lay down on the couch.
When she could not wake me up later that night she rang my father who was on guard duty at a munitions factory. He rushed home only to find that an unexploded bomb had landed at the end of the street. The police told him he could not go through.
He told them where to go and carried on. When he saw me he sent for an ambulance, and at that time they were in great demand, so it was some time before I got to hospital.
All of these happenings I did not know about because I had concussion and did not wake up for a number of days. The first I knew of what had happened was when my father came to see me.
He had gone to the General Hospital, Birmingham where I had been taken and was told that I had been evacuated to Bromsgrove Hospital on the outskirts of Birmingham.
Well it turned out there was another boy with same name as mine there but it was not me. After a long wait at the hospital he found that I had been taken to Holymore Emergency Hospital, Northfield.
Any way, it appeared I had a fractured skull and had to be off work for 6 months and spend many months in hospital.
I had a good job while in hospital, taking the free cigarettes round to the soldiers who had been wounded at Dunkirk in France, some of them did not smoke so I finished up with more cigarettes than enough, so I passed them on to civilian casualties.
Holymore was at one time a lunatic Hospital before they turned it into a Military Hospital. One day my father was going out with some of my clothes in a bag when a fellow said to him you are better off in here mate, there's a war on out there, he was one of the asylum's inmates that had been left behind to help with gardening jobs; my father reckoned he knew what he was doing.
Maurice Bassett, Queensland, Australia, 2001
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