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15 October 2014
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PAT FERGUSON'S WW2 MEMORIES Part 1 LIFE IN AN ORPHANAGE DURING W.W.2

by cornwallcsv

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Archive List > Childhood and Evacuation

Contributed byÌý
cornwallcsv
People in story:Ìý
Winifred Rosaleen Bartrop, Charles Partrick Bartrop, Sister William.
Location of story:Ìý
Isleworth, Middx.
Background to story:Ìý
Civilian Force
Article ID:Ìý
A6809204
Contributed on:Ìý
08 November 2005

This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by CSV Storygatherer Lucy Thomas of Callington U3A on behalf of Patricia Ferguson. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

PAT FERGUSON’S WORLD WAR TWO MEMORIES

LIFE IN AN ORPANAGE IN W.W.2
My name is Pat Ferguson; my maiden name was Bartrop, and I was born in 1936 in Hammersmith, where my parents lived at the time. When I was three years’ old, in 1939, my father died. He apparently had a gas attack. The reason for that was that war had been declared in September, and the company that he worked for as a painter and decorator, decided to have a gas test with their gas masks. They put all their employees into this chamber and put Gas in there. He came home and told his wife, my mother, that he didn’t feel very well. She was concerned, of course, but he went to work as usual the following day, but then, I think it was a week or so afterwards, he had a heart attack and died. I have a photograph of him in Hyde Park, taken the weekend before he died. Unfortunately he was also a heavy smoker, and although a big man, as the photograph shows, if it was Tear Gas then that probably didn’t help because of his lungs. However, after that my mother had to move out. At the time we were living in Thornberry Road in Isleworth.

My mother was recruited after that into the ‘Bevan Girls’, because she was a widow, and therefore considered to be a single woman. She put me initially with my aunt who was a Catholic nun at the Dominican Covent in Portobello Road, and I stayed there with her for a while. I had a nurse whose name was Miss Easton who was of course in my eyes, being only three years old, a very elderly person, but she was a children’s nurse and obviously had been all her life. When the bombing of London started, my mother had the option of my aunt sending me to Stroud in Gloucestershire, or, to send me to a cousin in America who had offered to have me. However, rather than send me there or down to Stroud, she put me into Nazareth House (a Catholic orphanage) in Isleworth, which I think was probably the worst day’s work she ever did.

On my first visit there, the senior sister, at the time, Sister William who was very kind and pleasant, showed me a playroom, which was a little house in the grounds and was absolutely packed with toys; I remember the rocking horse because I rode on it. This was the only time I ever saw inside this house, which was chock a bloc with toys, and which nobody ever played with! I was shown around, and I remember going to a room where one of the nuns was using a sewing machine to mend sheets and make stuff.

Initially, we used to have films, in particular one with lots of kids and a little black child with her hair in rags all over her head and a bulldog with a patch over one eye, and Laurel and Hardy films. To begin with we had quite a nice time. However, as the war wore on the regime changed. Sister William was removed and they put in another sister who was very strict. She also had a sidekick who was very sly; I could tell that even at such a young age. She was sly and good with parents. Because it was an orphanage most of the children there were orphans. I at least had a parent who occasionally came to see me, and so I was treated perhaps better than the others. There was a lot of bullying and I have seen girls being beaten badly. We had very bad rations — we had one egg a year — at Easter! We had no meat, no butter and had no cheese. I don’t know where it went but it certainly didn’t go to us children. In many ways to me it was a regime of terror, during the worst of the war. I remember the bombing and the planes going over, because the convent was very close to Lion Wharf, which was the big coal depot on the River Thames at Isleworth. We were not happy children. I remember the shelters and the nuns in the shelters wearing robes made of ticking with a hood on the top like a bonnet, because of course in those days they could never show their hair, ankles, or anything else. One of the nuns, was very big with dark brown eyes, which were totally pitiless. She was vicious, and she was the one that welded the belt very well on most of these girls and I remember distinctly one evening one of the girls came tearing up the stairs and hid under the bed because she had been rude to this nun. Two of the nuns then came upstairs and they dragged her out and they beat her badly. We had girls who had their ears pulled and got mastoids. We got nits. I got ringworm when I was there, and I remember when I first went there, when I was only three or four, we had to wear sacking to have our bath — because of our modesty! Quite ridiculous! Our bath water was used by more than one person, this I can understand to a certain degree, but ‘more than one person’ became ‘a lot of persons’. The same with the hair washing — the bigger girls were washed first and the little ones later. You all stood in a line, and there were big tubs of water and you could see the nits swimming about in the dirty water, and we were washing our hair in it! It was horrifying. I did tell my mother about it but she didn’t believe me, because, being a good Catholic woman, she couldn’t think that nuns would do that. However, I think she found out a bit better as I got older and she came across other people who had been in the orphanage.

Anyway, I remember hearing a V1 going over whilst we were playing outside in a field that led from a concrete place at the back. These were the rockets with the noise that turned itself off just before they fell. Me, being a bit nosy or inquisitive, had to be last in, so I stood in the doorway and watched this thing go over the top of the play area and land next to the West Middlesex Hospital, where it apparently killed a cow! I remember you could hear it throbbing and everybody scattered inside and then you heard it drop.

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