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HARPENDEN. HERTFORDSHIRE.

It was in 1937 that my father died of a heart attack at the early age of 36. Sent by General Motors in London to take up a management position at Vauxhall Motors of Luton in Bedfordshire — a new acquisition to their empire of motor engineering - he worked in the Car Delivery Department, in close contact with the firm's dealers throughout the country. After his death the firm offered my mother a secretarial position in the same department, now overseen by his previous deputy, and her main job was the documentation of all vehicles delivered to the dealers, particularly apt as she also had worked for General Motors before her marriage.

In 1939 when war was declared, I was ten, living in a village mid-distance between St. Albans and Luton, a pupil at St. Dominc’s Convent School, overlooking the Common at Harpenden in Hertfordshire, walking a mile to school in the morning and waiting for my mother to collect me at the end of her day in Luton for the mile walk home. I was a member of the local Girl Guides and settling down to life without my father.

Harpenden became a reception centre for evacuees, but by that time we had our own relations staying with us in our bungalow. My father's sister, Queenie, had married a post office engineer, now in the Royal Corp of Signals serving in France; her little girl was not very old and they came from Wembley, Middlesex. Auntie Eileen came from Ilford with her two small boys and they belonged to Uncle Bert, my late father's brother who was with R.E.M.E., still in training in the U.K. And my father's mother, my dear Grandmother who lived mainly with Auntie Queenie and visited round the family, came too. We had three bedrooms, so it was a little squashed. My mother's family lived a little further from the centre of London, thus feeling more secure, so they stayed where they were. But when no bombing and other action happened, those staying with us decided home was best and returned from whence they came. So did most of the evacuees.

During this time my mother worked thirteen days out of every fourteen and decided to accept the offer from some refugees from Austria to rent our bungalow for the next year or so, the difficulty in housekeeping proving impossible with the hours she worked, and we moved into a boarding house.

It didn't take our Girl Guide Leaders long to find ways for us girls to help in a small way with some of the jobs which were suddenly needed to be done - the Scouts too found they had tasks to do. The village was divided into areas and then into roads, and collections from the householders were begun. Spare kitchen and other utensils made of metal, surplus to immediate requirements, were coaxed from busy housewives; also empty CLEAN jam jars and bottles, and bones from the meat ration. The latter fell to the list for the 2nd Harpenden Girl Guide Co., (my lot) and the collections had to be regular. One week for the glass and one week for the bones. We had the use of wheeled transport of various kinds - old prams were very useful. And this job went on for many months. Just imagine old bones kept carefully by householders for a fortnight, to be collected in all weathers - hot days were memorable. During dark months collections were made at weekends, in the light times straight after tea. It was quite a few years later before we found out that the bones went to a glue factory which was used on aircraft fuselages etc.

Of course there was the knitting of socks, mittens, gloves and scarves for the soldiers, sailors and airmen, with wool supplied. Fortunately for those recipients of my offerings I was carefully overseen by my grandmother and can still turn heels and manage a thumb and four fingers for each hand. We spent quite a lot of time in the cellars at school, where we could at least manage a little knitting by the dim light of hurricane lamps, and didn't need much light to eat our emergency rations when the nuns were not watching. It was helpful for learning poems, speeches etc. by heart, but little use for the more important (in the teachers’ eyes) serious school work for the good, of our future life. As we were in direct line from London to Luton and the Midlands, and the main railway ran through the middle of the village, a moonlit night brought out the German bombers using the railway line as a direct route. It was amazing the greater noise a bomb seemed to make in the dark, even when you could hear the bombers passing overhead, so it shouldn't have been a surprise when a landmine, swinging down on a parachute, sounded as though it was outside your door, when really it was miles away, causing tremendous damage over a wide area.

Luton was only five miles away and Vauxhall wasn't the only target. But it made the first four-wheeled drive vehicles for the forces, and the difference in sound between the four-wheeled and the ordinary two-wheeled drive lorries was very obvious as they drove in their large convoys up the hills of the common on their way to St. Albans and to what ever part of the world was their destination. Tanks - Churchill tanks - were also made there and they moved at night, on the back road where possible, shaded by trees and unseen from above, grinding up the hill at midnight past our bedroom and changing angle to get round the bend in the road before descending to the main road and over the common. In the morning, riding down the same hill on my bike, with my homework wedged in the basket on the handlebars, I could feel the ruts caused by the tank tracks shake my bicycle almost to the tyre rims, with the depth of their passing.

You needn't worry about our lives - they were books to be written in. The Guides provided education during the winter and taught us to enjoy folk-dancing. As I grew older, a quick meal and a quick rush - I was always late- through the black-out to a school hall where we learnt and practised on each other to tie bandages and various types of slings to assist a multitude of injuries. That was First Aid, then came Home Nursing, followed by Child Care, and all could earn you badges if you passed the stiff tests, and then you sewed them on the sleeves of your uniform. And you needn't carry too much equipment with you; after all, your tie was TRIANGULAR and made a very good arm sling. Seriously you learnt many useful things, experienced valuable lessons to take you forward into the future. You laughed at bullies and made do with shortages and made a new garment from two old ones. You had to.

We were very lucky as a family in that not one of us was hurt, injured or killed. My uncle Jack didn't get evacuated at Dunkirk - he made his way further south and caught a coal coaster which happened to be going to the U.K. We didn't hear just how long it took to get him white again! He ended in Persia (I think they called it then), guarding the telephone line to Russia, with the odd skirmish here and there. What he moaned about was that being a piano player, he never got off the piano stool on his annual leave at Xmas as the lads always wanted to sing. (Poor man, he came back to a niece who was just the same!) Uncle Bert made sergeant, and shepherded a large convoy of 100 QL's (four-wheeled drive) Bedford army lorries all safe and sound right up Italy, and bought a Vauxhall car as soon as he could afford it. One of my cousins was a visual signaller in the W.R.N.S. and my twin cousins were also in a branch of the W.R.N.S. Their brother was a rear gunner who made it to the end of the war. I was the eldest of the rest.

My mother was a widow and I a fatherless child then. Now they are known as a one parent family. At the end of the war there were many of us in the same situation, making do and making a little go a long way, and not expecting any outside help. It made us self reliant and able to carry on and laugh at life. I do hope we were all able to pass it on to our children and so on down the generations. You never know when it will come in handy!

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