"It's a free country!" is a phrase you hear all the time on our estate. (Maybe as memories of the struggle against Hitler fade it will be heard less and less.) "It's a man's world!" is what girls say to you with a steely glint in their eyes (which means they will make sure it is not going to stay that way for much longer). "Looking for something to do" is what kids say on grey lacklustre days when they are not in the mood for a game of football. DPs - Displaced Persons - whose lives have been broken by the Nazi gangsters look back on their past and say "Hindsight is no good!" or "It has been more than flesh and blood can stand!" On some days the old man returns from town and talks of encounters with "tenth-rate punks." (He is yet to encounter any "first-rate punks.") My tough cousin from South Wales warns anyone looking for trouble that he will
"knock them into the middle of next week." "Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all? He's no bloody use to anyone, he's no bloody use at all!" This is the song which some people sing when they walk by the Smileys' prefab.
The old man must be one of the strongest labourers on the estate, and he still cannot believe he was turned down by each of the armed services on unspecified health grounds when he tried to sign up in 1939. Perhaps if he had been allowed to join up he would have ended up "dying in the western desert" (another favourite phrase) in the battles against Rommel.) During the war he worked on Avonmouth docks before going off to help build the floating Mulberry Harbours that were used in the D-Day invasion.
Once we were sat around the kitchen table having breakfast. I asked the old man: "So what did you do in the war?" "I was in the Japanese Navy!" came his lightening reply.