大象传媒

Its shortage of space I remember. By 1944 every bit of spare space was put to use, much of it for purposes for which it was never intended.

First, where I lived in North Wales, it was empty houses and spare rooms requisitioned for evacuees. I was 9 years old and it was exciting to have to attend school for only half a day so that for the other half a whole school from Merseyside could use our classrooms until other arrangements were made for them. Spare ground, like the large lawns in front of our school, was utilised for growing cabbages and nearby waste ground for a static water tank for the Fire Brigade. The Women鈥檚 Voluntary Service opened a canteen in what had always been the Conservative Club for the growing number of British and Allied Servicemen in barracks and billets in the town.

An empty shop became a British restaurant serving a good hot lunch off ration at a cheap fixed price. The Royal Observer Corps took over our park pavilion for their HQ. Where warnings of approaching enemy aircraft were received from its members watching on the surrounding hills and sent to the R.A.F.

The shortage of space that most annoyed me was in school exercise books. We were forbidden to leave any piece of any page unused and when we got to the last corner of the last page, we were then compelled to turn the book upside down and use the spaces between the lines. We鈥檇 no hope of being given a new book until our form teacher made sure we hadn鈥檛 let down the war effort by squandering the countries resources.

In the war鈥檚 closing stages, when forces were massing for D Day, they and their equipment had to be accommodated somewhere. Though we were over two hundred miles from the South Coast the population of our small town, already swelled by evacuees, refugees, munitions workers, hospital staff for an emergency military hospital, had to cope with more British, European and Commonwealth soldiers flooding in.

Most exotic were the Ghurkhas and their horses. Most glamorous were thousands of American soldiers in huge tented villages on fields around the town.
Roads were clogged with continual convoys of armoured vehicles on manoeuvres and one side of a dual carriageway, completed just before the war, was closed and used as a park for camouflaged tanks and what we learned to call jeeps.
Then, eerily, they were all gone.

This story was submitted to the 鈥淧eoples War Site by Rod Aldwinckle of the CSV Action Desk on behalf of Brenda Belcher and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the terms and conditions of the site

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