The year 1949 was an exciting time for me, I was just ten years old and living on the Isle of Wight. The war had been over for four years, rationing was beginning to ease, sweets and chocolate no longer required ration coupons. However, they still required money and it seemed I had less of that than I’d had of ration coupons. Nevertheless it was a time of great new things, things we had never thought of during the war years. New modern cars were slowly appearing on the roads, new houses going up on the endless bomb sites around the cities. My brother had been recently demobbed from the RAF,. he had married a girl (Joan) from Bristol and was in the process of buying a new house in Kingswood. Kingswood was a new estate with rows and rows of new house, all in different states of completion. I loved visiting Bristol to see brother. Every year around August my father took his 2 week holidays staying with Tommy and Joan in Bristol. I would travel up with my sister Lily from the Isle of Wight to spend time with my father. I remember my brother taking Pop and I to see Bristol Rovers play, we went to a motorcycle speedway, and the Clifton Suspension Bridge. My biggest treat was buying a bottle of Tizer. The best tasting soda pop I had ever tasted. My brother was working at the Rolls Royce aero engine plant in the city. At the time all the talk was about a huge new aeroplane “The Bristol Brabazon” and I remember seeing it only once in flight, what an impressive sight for a young boy who had cut his teeth spotting planes during the war years. Sadly the Brabazon never became commercially viable as a Trans-Atlantic passenger plane. In size it was somewhere between a Boeing 767 and an Air Bus 300, but only seated approximately 100 passengers. It was scraped in 1953. Great memories and always treasured.
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