大象传媒

WARTIME MEMORIES
LONDON, SOUTH COAST and MANCHESTER

I was three when the war started and vaguely remember being called in from the garden to listen to someone speaking on the wireless, but was more interested in getting back to play. We lived in Eltham in south-east London and as it was considered a high risk area if the Germans started bombing, arrangements for evacuation were immediately put in place. Within a few weeks my mother and I were sent with a group of expectant mothers and small children to Deal, near Dover in Kent. Deal was a small seaside town and the French coast was often clearly visible across the Channel. As a refuge from the expected invasion of bombing attacks it seems a strange choice.
We were billeted with a rough but not unkindly family in Deal; the father was either a coal miner or else delivered coal. He came home every evening completely black, sat down and wanted me to sit on his knee - and I found him frightening. My mother, I was told later, was concerned at the way his wife used to beat her children and by December we had moved to my grandparents' house in Portsmouth, a stone's throw from the Naval Dockyard, and my sister was born there in January 1940. My mother always said she could remember the date that food rationing started because it was January 8th, my sister's birthday.
My father had joined the Auxiliary Air Force several months before war was declared and went off to Erith and Belvedere, on the Thames Estuary. He worked on the site of the barrage balloons, great silvery monsters with ears, which, it was hoped, would prevent any incoming German planes from reaching London. I still have the Air Ministry knife with its thick blade and splicing tool used for cutting and un-knotting balloon guy ropes. He was able to come home quite often at weekends, but after months of heaving and straining on the balloon ropes he developed internal injuries and I remember visiting him in a bleak hospital near Woolwich. After that he was downgraded from A1 fitness category to C, which she thought was a good thing because he was not considered fit enough for overseas service. He was sent, though, to an RAF base in Shropshire and leave was infrequent and very short. I feel that I never knew my father very well until the war was over.
Since the expected invasion and bombing campaign had not started we soon returned from Portsea to London in the spring of 1940. An Anderson shelter was installed in the back garden. Half underground, it used to be damp and uncomfortable. The curved, corrugated iron roof was soon rusting and cobwebby; the excavated earth had been piled back on top of it and was soon covered with a luxuriant crop of bindweed. It was fitted with bunks and, when the expected air raids on London started, we used to rail out to it, carrying blankets and a torch. A few times, when the floor was puddle with rainwater which had trickled in, we crowded into our neighbour's shelter instead. After some weeks, with air raid warnings happening several times a night, my mother decided we would be no worse off if we huddled together in the cupboard under the stairs and, for the rest of the Blitz, that is what we did. Oh how I hated being roused from my comfortable bed and made to crouch in the stuffy cupboard with its smell of brooms and dusters!
I think we must have soon become used to the little difficulties of life in wartime Britain. Each evening the blackout curtains had to be securely fitted to the windows and woe betide any householder who let out any chink of light. The street's A.R.P. warden, a short, dapper man, would come along wearing his tin helmet and point out the offending gap. He was an important man in our road. We rarely went out at night, but when we did the roads were eerily quiet with hardly any cars about, and of course very dark with no streetlights, which might have given guidance to German planes. Near the back door we kept a bucket of water and a stirrup pump, to be used in case of a fire caused by an incendiary bomb, but I do not remember that we ever had to use it. Something that I hated was my gas mask. At first we used to carry our masks in their cardboard cases everywhere we went, but after some time they were left at home more often that not. My mask was difficult to put on and very tight and uncomfortable to wear; it smelt horrible and the little window to see through became steamed up quickly so that I could not see where I was going. Margaret, my baby sister, would yell whenever she was laid in her gas-proof carrycot, which was like an incubator, and even when she graduated to a toddler's Mickey Mouse mask she was not happy.
I can't remember being afraid during the Blitz, but suppose I must have been for, since then, whenever I hear the wail of an air raid siren, even on a TV programme, I have a feeling of dread. We used to listen to the drone of the bombers flying over and when we heard the 'crump' of a bomb we would try to work out how near the explosion was, especially if our house had shaken. After the sound of the 'all-clear', we sometimes looked out and saw fires lighting up the sky and searchlights scanning for returning German planes. One week we were instructed to live in the front rooms of our house and only go the bathroom at the back one a time and as rarely as possible because there was an unexploded bomb in the garden of a house in the road behind us. I don't think it ever did go off, and eventually we went back to using all the rooms.
Life went on much as usual for most people. I started school in 1941 and, because the local schools had been evacuated, I was sent to a convent about three miles away. It stayed open for most of the war years but sometimes, if there were daytime raids, we trooped down to the boiler rooms in the basement. In the streets we used to pick up bits of shrapnel, swap them with our friends, or boast about big pieces we had found. Occasionally we would find the tubes of incendiary bombs - quite a prize.
Daily life for my mother, I remember, was harder. Clothes rationing meant plenty of make-do and mend. She made most of our clothes out of whatever fabric she could acquire and coats and school uniforms were bought with hoarded coupons. Children's Wellington boots were sometimes advertised on a local shop notice board and we also had hand-me-downs from friends. We were fortunate in one way because my father became a quarter-master sergeant and we obtained rough, grey air force blankets, some parachute silk, little pieces of silvery grey balloon fabric and a pair of airman's flying trousers, which my mother converted into pairs of mittens for all the family. I wore mine for years and still have them, tucked away in a draw.
Food shopping took up a great deal of time; how bored I was if I had to accompany my mother. There were always queues at the United Dairies shop, where every item had to be carefully cut, weighed or measured and the coupons cut out of the ration books. Cheese was cut with a wire and Miss Ball, the manageress, was extremely skilled at judging each piece to the nearest fraction of an ounce. Sugar was scooped out of a big sack and into little blue bags; salt was chipped from a large block. Visiting the butcher's shop was even more tedious. As the war went on the queues became longer and the choice more limited. The beef, much of which came from Argentina, was tough and banded with bright yellow fat - ugh! Whenever some un-rationed morsel became available the word was passed along the street and mother would park us with a neighbour while she went to queue for some liver, kidneys or the like.
We were fortunate in one way because we used to receive food parcels from friends in New Zealand. We loved delving into the box to uncover the enormous tin of honey and the packet of chocolate among the tins of meat and peaches. We grew vegetables in our back garden and the borders lining the path at the front sprouted rows of beetroot instead of alyssum and lobelia. Some people in the houses behind ours kept hens, not so unusual in the suburbs of London, and early morning cockcrow was a familiar sound.
Any vegetable waste was carried up the road to a pig bin - a dustbin chained to a lamppost - and its contents were taken regularly to a pig farm on Shooters Hill. Milk, bread and greengrocery were still delivered on a regular basis and came on carts pulled by horses. While deliveries were made to our door, the horses would be rooting about in their hay bags and I was always amused by the greengrocer's horse which used to rush off to the pig bin, dragging the cart behind it, in order to knock the lid off and sneak a few mouthfuls while its owner had his back turned. I was instructed to grab a bucket and shovel as soon as I saw some horse dung landing on the road and try to reach it before any of the neighbours, for it was a competitive business to get manure for the garden.
The cast iron railings and the gate at the front of our house were cut and taken away 'to help the war effort' early in the 1940's. we were expected to be economical and save and re-use everyday things, which might soon be in short supply; I was used to folding up the brown paper from parcels, un-knotting and rewinding pieces of string, and hoarding bits of knicker elastic. A little water was poured into the dregs in the milk bottle to eke out the milk ration. Little pieces of soap went into a metal soap saver, which was swished about in the washing up water before the plates were scrubbed - no frothy detergents then - and only dissolved soda crystals were used to combat grease.
We used to listen to the wireless often: Children's Hour, with Uncle Mac and Toytown, I loved and, as I grew older, Tommy Handley's ITMA was a favourite. In the mornings there was a five minute chat by the Family Doctor, who gave medical advice in a gravelly voice, often without humour. I remember my disappointment, though, when he talked about chilblains, from which I suffered every winter, and all his comments were about the reasons for land girls having them on their bottoms after they had been sitting on cold tractor seats. The Ministry of Food used to broadcast recipes designed to help housewives make the most of their rations and my mother would write down ways of cooking carrot pie or flapjack without syrup. I still possess her little book of recipes broadcast by Mabel Constanduros and Freddy Grisewood, full of methods to use the bright yellow dried egg which we depended on.
Travel was by bus locally and by train to visit my grandparents near Portsmouth. In 1941 German bombing raids destroyed large areas of old Portsea as they targeted the Naval Dockyard. The Kent Street Baptist Church, which they had supported for many years, was hit by an incendiary bomb and completely gutted. Their house in Hanover Street was badly damaged and they moved to rented accommodation. I remember being taken to the old house, which was still standing, and finding it very strange, with hardly any furniture left and only an aspidistra in the bathroom. My grandparents moved to a flat in a large house in Bridgemary, between Gosport and Fareham. It seemed and idyllic place to me - the area was semi-rural and there was a large cedar on the front lawn with a swing hanging from a branch. By 1944 they were looking after a Victorian house, Briarwood, which had a drawing room full of wonderful treasures: a table with elephants for legs, another table on the hump of a camel and a rug made of a bear's skin with the animal's jaws raised to catch children's feet.
We were fortunate in having my other grandmother and an aunt living in a little bungalow in Lyme Regis. I have happy memories of seaside holidays there. We would play on the town beach but rolls of barbed wire along the shore westwards and to the east towards Charmouth meant no walks to find fossils or to look in rock pools. Every now and then warnings went up that a mine had been sighted just off shore. Life seemed peaceful there compared with London. We could go to the bakery early in the morning to collect bread and, sometimes, doughnuts. The milkman came on a small cart with a row of copper measuring jugs hanging at the back and we would take a large jug out to the gate and have it filled. If we visited Mrs Street , who lived round the corner, we were given a bowl of clotted cream, for she always had a shallow pan on the side of her range, filled with milk on which a crust of yellowish cream was gradually forming. Only in the evening did war sound again; I don't know why, but the Last Post was often played on a bugle somewhere not far away, and at the Drill Hall down the hill there were sometimes dances. We could hear jolly sounds of dancing and singing - 'There'll be Blue Skies Over the White Cliffs of Dover' or 'Run, Rabbit, Run' - but we were to young to go to see what was actually happening, though I did climb out of the bedroom window once or twice so that I might hear better.
By 1944 London was being attacked by Germany's latest weapons - the pilotless planes we called 'doodlebugs' and then the V2 rockets. These were very frightening, I recall, because they came in daytime as well as at night, and we were given very little warning. If we heard them droning overhead we knew we were safe, but if there was a sudden silence we dived for shelter, for once the engine stopped they fell and exploded, doing great damage. Eventually a great aunt and uncle in Fallowfield, Manchester, offered us a home with them and, from the end of September 1944 to March 1945 we were evacuees in a strange city. My memories of Manchester are of grey skies, grey buildings and damp weather all the time - probably not really so, but that is how I recall it. I went to a local school where I had to become used to double desks with attached seats, a teacher who used a leather strap on ones hand if any misdemeanour was committed, and children who were friendly but found my southern accent very strange. I became used to eating mushy peas with my meat pie, having raspberry vinegar sprinkled on my pancakes, and to being called 'duck' by the shopkeepers. We used to laugh sometimes when local people would tell horror stories about the times when one or two bombs had fallen on Manchester - how would they have survived the nightly bombardments in London, we wondered.
By 1944 I was aware of what was happening to our troops in Europe and used to follow their progress in the newspapers, which often had maps marked with the little flags. As victory approached we returned to Dumbreck Road, Eltham, where our house had survived with only cracked ceilings and broken panes in the conservatory where tomato seedlings were growing on the damp coconut mat! We went back to school in Welling, waving as we passed them to friendly Italian prisoners of war, who were working in the field by their camp on the slope of Shooters Hill. We listened with growing impatience to the wireless and then, V.E. Day, victory at last. All I remember about the day it was declared is the noise - hooters, sirens and people laughing. Later, we had our street party, something quite new in a quiet suburb, with trestle tables piled with food, bunting stretched between lampposts and a little platform on which children had to perform if they could. My sister and I dressed up in our pyjamas and dressing gowns to sing, 'Christopher Robin is Saying His Prayers'!
There were sad memories too. I remember earlier in the war the nuns sitting is down and telling us gently that one little boy, Donald, would not be seeing his father again as he would not be coming home from the war. I remember too seeing in the newspaper the first terrible pictures of thin white bodies lying in pits at Belsen - a sight I will never forget.
Gradually life became more ordered; Margaret and I were given oranges and bananas to eat - exotic tastes we had never experience before, and I was most impressed with my first piece of proper steak. My father, by the end of the war, was stationed in Scotland and was not demobbed until 1946. Not until he returned in his 'civvy' suit did I feel that the war was truly over.

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