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Name Beryl Clarke
Interview Date 28th April 2005
Subjects covered Evacuation, Digging for Victory, Rations, Military Presence,
Location Oxford, Masonic Hall, Post Office,
People Included Rex,

This is an edited extract of a recorded interview conducted by Museum of Oxford with Mrs Beryl Clarke. It has been submitted to the People’s War website with her permission. A full version of the interview transcript and audio recording will be available at the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies.

Evacuation
I remember the day the evacuees came down very clearly. They came down in a crocodile down the road with one or two of the teachers and there were these kiddies with their cardboard boxes round their necks with the gas masks in it most of them had a little suitcase with some of their clothes in it and there were mothers in the street used to come out and say, they came out and said ‘well, look. I can have one or I can have two, if you want a brother and a sister. Two can come’ and looking back it must, how those children, whether they felt what was happening or not…

Digging for Victory
And er… see… my father grew all our vegetables. He’d got an allotment and he kept us well supplied. All our lives we had fresh vegetables. In fact he used to say, why was it when I used to go with the baby in the pram the baby was right down low in the pram when we arrived but when we left he was just lodged on the top. So, you know, parents did that in those days… they not only looked after you as a child but they looked after your children when the time came. Again, where’s that gone?

Rationing
Food was tight, it was… you had to make a little go a long way, you had to improvise with your food a lot. I used to let my Dad have my sugar cos I used to have his sweet coupons. You see you worked in families and in neighbours like that sometimes; friends and relations you’d say ‘Oh, we haven’t used all our tea Nelly, do you want some tea. Right let me have a bit of sugar then or a bit of butter’ and you’d swap around like that…

I remember… eggs were a job to come by… eggs and bacon during the war it was rationed… and this one boy, Rex, that I was friendly with at the time, he slept in the Masonic Hall and we’d been out one evening and he said ‘Hang on, I just want to pop in here before I go .. we go take you home’… So he went in… and I don’t know where he went, but he came out with this … a towel wrapped round something in his arm… and I said, ‘What you got there then Rex?’ and he said ‘Breakfast tomorrow morning!’ And he’d managed to scrounge eggs and bacon from somewhere and I never did know where. And we took it home and we had it for breakfast the next morning. But… he wasn’t allowed in my bedroom… he slept in the bed downstairs… I had a bedroom upstairs….

Military Presence
And when the Americans came over they, things changed quite a bit. The first thing you got to know an American for was has he got any nylon stockings. There’s no such things as tights in those days. All stockings and they were nylon so if you could get hold of an American boyfriend you could get some nylons you were well in. Chocolate was another thing that we hadn’t seen for years.. that came with the Americans. Chewing gum came with them… but um, I never had a regular American one, no I had quite enough to do with the English boys.

I’d walk up most mornings… and …um there were soldiers stationed outside the Post Office. I remember that very well because (laugh) and you needn’t record this but … I had a pair of knickers on that were kept done up with a button and as I got off the bus this time I felt the button go and they were silk knickers, French knickers, silk French knickers and so.. I grabbed them like this cos I knew they were going to drop off and the.. the soldier stood at the Post Office laughing his head off cos he knew what had happened and I managed to get round to the Offices and I let go and me knickers fell to the floor. Um… that’s one of the happier if embarrassing moments of the War.

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