The Fish-Smoker's Tale
by Ros Barber (Brighton)
During the war the beach was closed. Barbed wire and landmines. Guns on the roofs of the hotels, hotels packed with soldiers – free French, Polish, Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians. This was going to be the front line, the place where Hitler landed.
Only the poor were left. I had no shoes so I couldn’t go to school. But who wanted to? I was ten years old, playing war games. Every child I knew had a collection of shrapnel and ammunition. We learned how to open live bullets and light them with matches.
Air raids, we’d hide, not go in the shelters. We’d watch the action. One day there was an almighty bang. A Canadian bloke had walked on the beach and blown himself up. There was a boot hanging in the barbed wire with a bit of leg in it. We were delighted.
I longed to go fishing. When the beach opened after six years my boat was in a terrible state. I patched it up with canvas and tar. Wallow said ‘Come see this boat in Shoreham.’ It was a great boat. He said, ‘You can have it, if you set light to yours.’
What Ros Barber says about The Fish-Smoker's Tale:
Jack Mills and his wife Linda run a traditional fish-smoking business in the seafront arches. Jack, 77, has lived in Brighton all his life and was brought up in one of the small houses in the centre of town that was demolished to build the Churchill Square shopping complex in the 1960s. Jack’s childhood home in Milton place can be seen at http://regencysociety-jamesgray.com/volume29/source/jg_29_103.htm - that’s his motorbike outside, and his mother peeking out of the door to see what’s going on! Jack has been a fisherman all his life, hampered only by closure of the beach during the war during his childhood, and his father’s insistence that he do an engineering apprenticeship. (“I still fished part time, and at least I learned how to fix my own engines”). When one of his good friends “went to sea and never came back” he ended up with the friend’s wife, and he and Linda have been together some 40 years.
