Free Henry Cooper by Robert Edwards

never forget the smell of that stuff they bring up – it would throw up all over the sheet, and she’d just wipe it down and turn the sheet over! I can still smell it now,’ he related to me, with some disgust.
    Henry senior and Lily, for economic reasons, were unable to see their children more than once or twice, which was torture for all concerned, albeit probably just as well for the fastidious Lily. There was worse to come, though, as Farmstead Road was also an early casualty of German night bombing and suddenly became clearly uninhabitable. The house was hit by a German parachute mine on a Saturday night while Henry senior was working a late shift on his tram, and it was only by pure luck that Lily was not insideeither. When the house was hit, she was visiting a near neighbour and nattering with her in her Anderson shelter. Altogether, 25 people were killed in that raid, and it took four days’ work to find them all, or what was left of them. Effectively now the Cooper family was homeless, and given that the house would clearly not be repaired for at least 18 months, they were rather stuck.
    A dubious and rather speculative solution arrived in the form of a colleague of Henry’s who had relatives near Stroud in Gloucestershire. There was both work and accommodation – of a kind – available there. They chose to evacuate there.
    When they saw the accommodation, it must have crossed their minds that Farmstead Road might after all have done for them very well, with or without its roof. Their new home was in fact a derelict and abandoned venison abattoir that was technically condemned. They were able to find work nearby, though, Henry William at an asbestos plant, Lily at a shadow factory making aeroplane parts. For the hard-working and house-proud Lily, this ordeal must have been terrible, even if drawing water from a well might have been a novelty. The couple, even further away from their sons than before, were well and truly miserable with this medieval existence.
    This state was further compounded when Henry senior crushed three of his fingers in a rolling mill. Unable to work, but having to watch his wife work, was a further ordeal for him. He received £ 2 a week sick pay, and eventually some modest compensation. The pair’s first thought was to liberate their children back into their own care, which they promptly did.
    For the Cooper boys, anything would have been better than Lancing, and at least living in a semi-derelict country wreck was an adventure. Naturally, being so close to the shadow factory made it a restricted area, so for the brief time that they were there, they had to play hide and seek with the security services, which certainly added to the novelty, whatever it did to Lily’s nerves. A great treat, though, was the vast pile of discarded deer antlers with which the ground floor of this dismal establishment was liberally scattered; the children had never seen such things before and they made fine toys.
    Finally, Farmstead Road was ready for re-occupation in the late autumn of 1941 and a relieved family returned to it, after a brief stay in a requisitioned flat. Most of their possessions had been destroyed or stolen (looting, sadly seems to have been rife during the Blitz) and although there was a small amount of financial compensation for the loss of their home, they were forced to lead a rather basic life, but one which was tolerable now that the family was finally reunited. That state, however, would not persist for long.
    It is a characteristic of the ill luck of the Cooper family that they always seemed to get caught out by changes in regulation. Henry senior, with six years of service behind him already, qualified for call-up only by virtue of a matter of days. He was called up in 1942, at 41 years of age, right on the limit of the age restriction after it was modified; despite his previous service in the Royal Horse Artillery and his clear knowledge of both guns and stroppy quadrupeds, he