大象传媒

I was nearly three when WW2 was declared and my mother had just given birth to my sister. My father was called up immediately as he was in the TA. His pay was 拢1-7s-6d a week, not enough to keep his family in the leafy London suburb of Chislehurst. We went to Buxton in Derbyshire to Granny and Grampa鈥檚, Mum鈥檚 parents. We shared their small house which caused discomfort to us all. The elderly grandparents thought they were doing their Christian duty in giving us shelter. My mother, caught in the poverty trap, became the general factotum, my little sister and I were seen but not heard. Every night we both kissed Daddy鈥檚 photograph 鈥淕ood Night鈥� and said prayers that we hoped the war would end soon, yet of course we did not know what a war was. The austere house keeping, food rationing, black out curtains and playing with the stirrup pump (Mum was an ARP volunteer) was all we knew about 鈥渢he war鈥� I asked Mum once, is Hitler the same as Father Christmas. Her reply showed anger I did not understand.

So, because we knew no other way of life for us it was normal. Dad we saw infrequently especially once he was posted to India for four years. We had holidays, wonderful holidays in Llangollen North Wales with our other granny, a widow.

Our mother became ill, later diagnosed with MS so we moved permanently to Wales. My grandmother was a remarkable woman. She opened her house, quite large, to anyone and everyone. We had Canadian soldiers recuperating after being wounded, a couple of old ladies escaping the London bombs (we each had our own butter dish thus ensuring Mrs Balls didn鈥檛 get more than her ration!) Great uncle and aunt, a spinster aunt, and refugees from Liverpool. A household of 14 or 15. Eric from Liverpool from whom I caught nits, we must have been about six, also enlightened me to the amazing discovery that boys had a different piece of apparatus to have a pee, secretly behind the raspberries!

Dogs, cats, chickens and fishing on the Dee. Labour was scarce so everyone helped, especially on the farm. I learnt how to milk cows, muck out the shipen feed the pigs and chickens, collect the eggs and clean the dairy. Under the watchful eye of our Land girl, Hazel, it was up at 5am, and after milking harness Polly to the trap and heave on the milk churns to take them up to the main road and leave on a platform for collection. All done before 9am, in winter we worked by hurricane lamps, there was no electricity, nor diesel for the generator, so it was oil lamps or back in the main house a Tilly lamp.

The Tilly lamp was part of a ritual. It was an oil lamp pressurised with a bicycle pump that created a bright light with a mantel. Without the Tilly, Bridge could not be played by the grown ups. Another ritual was silence at 9pm for the 大象传媒 news read either by Alvor Lidell or Stuart Hibbert. The wireless was powered by an enormous battery and an accumulator which frequently required recharging at a shop in town (tuppence). The wireless whistled and stuttered, but there in the wilds of rural Wales we learnt news of 鈥渢he war鈥�.

Yet war did come to rural Wales. We were bombed! Night after night we slept in the cellar and even ate special 鈥渂omb victim biscuits鈥� provided by the WVS. Long after the war we learnt why this remote part of Wales was bombed. German bombers flew between two parallel radio signals. The British found a method to distort and deflect these signals to a sparsely populated part of the countryside. They were diverted from their target, Liverpool over the Welsh hills. They saw mist in the valley over the Dee and thought it was the Mersey. They saw heaps of lime left in a field and thought it was a military tent encampment and bombed them hard, much to the delight of the farmer who was saved the trouble of spreading it himself!

War time perhaps became real to me when I had to go to school. It all seemed quite normal to meet the laundry van on Monday mornings up on the main road to be driven to Oswestry, 20 miles away where I was a weekly boarder. A school run by a manic witch, who were she alive today would have been condemned for child cruelty and abuse. We thought getting beaten with a ruler 鈥� oooh it did hurt 鈥� was what happened at school.

Despite what must have been a desperately worrying time for my parents and grandparents, war time for me was the most wonderful childhood. My grandmother in Wales gave me a magical insight of life and with her clear understanding, an education that covered everything from where babies came from to tickling for trout and the importance of counting the pennies! I will always be thankful she was there, but the sun fell from my world when she died just before the war ended.

Dad came home on compassionate leave, Mum was very ill by then. We finally returned to our bomb damaged house in Chislehurst, where money was tight, mum needed nursing and all the deprivations of war time seemed more acute. School, as I was nine, became more important to my father than to me, he was horrified to find I could not read (in fact I was twelve before I could) and was in despair about his illiterate out of control tomboy daughter. I hated suburbia after the freedom of Wales, but he did find me a second hand bike, so I explored this new world for miles and miles over the empty roads of Kent.

Would this be possible today? I think of my grandchildren鈥檚 lives, so different, so controlled, their every movement supervised and ordered. I would love them to enjoy making toast in front of the range, filling the oil lamps, trimming the wicks and polishing the glass chimneys with tissue paper, every morning as I did. The smell of paraffin still fills me with nostalgia.

So, my memories of 鈥渢he war鈥� have to be my happiest. It was only after I grew up that I realised what a tragedy I had lived through and what was for so many a nightmare.

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