Right, I have left my sick bed to put many stories right.
Just before the last war,1934 to be exact, my grandfather bought 5 new houses in Cooks lane just up from the White Heart where there were two farms on that corner of Cooks lane and Tilecross lane, to get there we used to leave Patrick Rd Yardley and walk down to the bottom of Cockshut Hill across Sheldon Heath lane and carry on to where the Remploy was. That was a farm before the war, down the side of the farm yard and across the field to the railway lines where there was a gate which got locked from Marston Green Station when a train was coming. Into Mackadown lane then on to Tilegross lane and up to Cooks Lane.
this became a regular jaunt for me and Gramp all through the war as well. Us kids used to stay over there at week ends as Yardley was getting bombed.
Now coming to the barracks alongside Garretts Green lane, it was not a army camp as such, there were anti aircraft guns situated on the area so there were only a small detachment of soldiers on camp living in the huts who manned the guns. As the war went on we were still walking to Cooks Lane because there was no other way to get there, Gramp's car was laid up so it was walk. Then we noticed the camp was changing, there were Mobile rocket firing salvo tubes mounted on very heavy army trucks coming onto the site and we knew when they were fired, the noise was a whoosh 16 time as the whole lot were fired, the first night they let rip they downed a twin engine German Bomber. you did not hear an explosion as you did from a gun just a very loud whoosh, a lot of people did not know where the noise was coming from.
I recognised what they were from pictures, that camp? was there well into the latter part of the war, then the developers got in and it is nothing like it was 75 years a go, when I think back I could stand on the top of Garretts Greenhill and see Coleshill way over the fields which seen to go on for ever.