´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Anne Tester. She fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Working in the Retail Trade.
The parting from my parents lasted for about a year and we were re-united when my father found work in Leicester at Vickers Mount, grocers of some repute in Gallowtree Gate. The actual position of the shop is hard to indicate but it was somewhere near the passageway through to the market. I remember visiting him as he served at the cheese counter. He wore a brown cotton coat and a white apron. When he had served a customer he had to operate the overhead system for carrying the customer’s money to the kiosk in the corner of the shop where it was cashed by the cashier and the change returned to the counter. Each container for the money consisted of a cylinder of wood which was twisted (I think) to open and shut then operated to send it skimming over the heads of the customers. Later versions used a vacuum system but this system used overhead wires.
My father had to cut up the cheese as ordered by the customer, using a wire cutter and as a consequence his fingers always bore cuts and scars. But I remember feeling very proud of him in this prominent position especially when we were told that he had been made head of the cheese counter! He too, was proud of his job and took all aspects of food handling very seriously.
Next to the cheese counter was the counter where the butter was shaped and served. There was a real skill in shaping the butter with two wooden tools (were they called butter-pats?) and neatly wrapped in greaseproof paper.
I don’t think that we visited my father at his place of work very often so I suppose it made an impression on me.
Women were not obliged to work until their children were, I think, in their teens. So it was towards the end of the war before my mother went to work at the Army Records office in London Road, Leicester and later at Blaby Hall with Dorothy Perkins head office that had been relocated from London.

Feeding the family.

Trying to feed a family during the war was a challenge that so many women had to face, using strange ingredients such as dried egg, economising on all food, collecting from the wild, nettles that tasted like spinach, blackberries, mushrooms and crab apples as well as growing all that was possible. Everyone was encouraged to collect rosehips from the wild to be made into Rose Hip Syrup which was rich in vitamin C and helped to keep up the health of the children. It was another source of sweetness and much enjoyed.
Our dishes were plain and filling and I never remember turning anything down.(Bubble and Squeak was a favourite). I think that our diet was probably very healthy with the semi- wholemeal bread that was universal during the war, lots of vegetables and the taking of supplements that was encouraged by the government. There was an orange concentrate and cod liver oil and a real treat instead of the oil called Virol that we used to help ourselves to when the opportunity arose.
There was lots of jam making and fruit bottling and any surplus of runner beans was packed into jars with liberal layers of salt. The beans kept fairly well but it was very difficult to get rid of the taste of the salt.
Shopping was not the occupation it is today as so many provisions were delivered to your door. The bread came from Ringrose bakery in the village which sold very crusty bread and the co-op also delivered bread at least twice a week. There was a butcher from Wigston, (was his name Higgs?) who called but of course the meat was rationed and had to go a long way resulting lots of stews! My mother spent ages dissecting the fat from the lean for these stews and then she rendered the fat down for use when frying. We must have had roast meat sometimes as I can remember the pleasure of dripping on toast especially the jelly which sank to the bottom! But we never ate mince as it was considered to consist of too much fat and other undesirable bits!
The milk came from Clarks farm in Willoughby Road every morning in a pony drawn milk float complete with churns. The milk was ladled out with a metal ladle into our jug. The jug had been sterilised with boiling water to prevent the milk going sour and was left out in the front porch to be picked up.
Great care had to be taken to prevent food from deteriorating as we did not possess a refrigerator (we later acquired an ‘O-so- Cool’, an insulated box with a door which was only big enough to hold a couple of pints of milk and perhaps one other item). There was a substantial pantry in our house, under the stairs with a concrete shelf called a ‘slab’ which was always cold and the floor was tiled with red ceramic tiles. If the milk did turn sour, it was made into cheese by suspending it in a muslin cloth until all the liquid had drained out. It was then slightly salted according to taste.
Groceries were provided by the Co-op in the village which is still, to this day, on the same site. The system involved one of the staff calling for the order which was made up in the shop and delivered a few days later.
Other shopping involved a cycle ride to Blaby or South Wigston but with a shortage of money and so many foods rationed there was little reason for shopping, certainly not just for pleasure and not even for little treats like sweets as they were not available until the later days of the war.
Ration books seemed to dominate our lives and were a constant source of anxiety. There were often rumours of special supplies available but my mother was not happy to go and queue, and sometimes scramble, for extra butter or whatever was on offer. She recalled this uncomfortable episode many years later. When my cousin from Luton came to stay with my aunt we met her at London Road train station and we had to go to an office to get permission for my cousin’s coupons to be used by my aunt while my cousin was staying with us.

A shortage of fuel.

Everyone suffered from a shortage of fuel and my memories of those years are of always feeling cold especially when going to bed. Chilblains and chapped knees were the norm in the winter as there were no such things as tights or trousers. My father used to pop hot coals into our Wellingtons, shake them round and tip them out in a flurry just as we were about to go out and were ready to put them on. I don’t know how much extra heat it supplied to our feet! But he liked to fuss over us and it was typical of the ways we were brought up that there was time to consider these small details.
We depended entirely on the coal or wood fires in the downstairs rooms one of which heated the hot water. The only other source of heat was the gas cooker in the kitchen. I once sat in front of the cooker, in those days called a stove, reading, while the rest of the family were, I presume, out!
It was quite usual for people to go out and gather wood for the fire from nearby fields and this I did with my father on several occasions, one time struggling with a wheelbarrow through the snow.
The fire was certainly the centre of the family activities and to leave the sitting room was an effort and was as brief as possible, always ending in a scurry back to the comfort of a warm room and the company of the family. There seemed to be a shortage of light bulbs as I recall that we did not have them in the early days in the bedrooms so the rest of the house was somewhat alien and bedtimes were not pleasant. The lavatory was in the back porch, next to the coal house and an ordeal to visit when it was cold. I remember how excited we were when a door was put on the porch — such luxury!

Entertainment.
The radio at that time was our only entertainment with programmes such as ITMA which I never really understood but joined in the laughter with the adults. ‘Dick Barton, Special Agent’ was exciting and ‘Children’s Hour’ with Uncle Mac and the Toytown characters such as Larry the Lamb were regular features. Once a week there was a serial for children and there were also news programmes for children and a religious slot. There was ‘Friday Night is Music Night’, ‘In Town Tonight’,Wilfred Pickles ‘Workers Playtime’and ‘Forces Favourites’ which was music chosen by the forces abroad in the war. I don’t know why I recall hearing Vera Lynne sing ‘There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover’ but I know I was standing outside the sitting room window at St.Donats while it was being played on the radio.
The regular news programmes, were, of course, always a focus for the family. The attack on Pearl Harbour stays in my memory because of the telling off I got for talking when the news was coming through on the radio. I don’t remember anyone explaining what it was all about but the conversations were obviously picked up by me. There was some bewilderment when I heard my uncle criticising Churchill and then I went to school where my classmates were talking about him in glowing terms! Yes, children actually talked about politicians! So my world of childhood was very influenced by what was happening in the wider world in spite of the efforts on the part of the adults to shield my sister and I from the worst effects. When the war ended I remember thinking ‘What will be in the news now?’

What did we do with our free time?

Children did not expect to be entertained and were free to create their own games and activities. There were such games as whip and top, colouring the top with chalk or crayons to make it more attractive as it spun round. The top reacted to rough surfaces and as there were not the paved areas we have today, a favourite place was the tarmac pavement into our drive. The games and activities were seasonal and so as the year rolled along, other games came into vogue and out came our skipping rope or balls or little square ‘snobs’( the local name) or marbles and hopscotch squares were drawn on any hard surface.
I had a very important teddy bear which belonged to a family of dolls and other soft toys that were at the centre of many of my games. My father made a cot for my dolls with a real horse hair mattress and I still have this prized possession together with the dolls house, both having been used by all my children. There is an interesting story behind that mattress. During the time when my mother and father were in London, without children, my mother was obliged to go out to work and ‘do her bit for the war’. She went to work in a mattress factory making mattresses for the forces and hated it because the workers were made to work so fast, often catching their fingers in the machine. However, that is how I acquired a miniature mattress for my dolls, perfectly made, if a little stiff!
I was an active child and liked to be creating games hence my memory of a ‘dress the doll’ book and jigsaws, crayons and games of ‘house’, making pies from mud and ‘milk’ from a mixture of lime and water. Our dolls house was a constant source of delight. We were given books as presents, often about animals ( Heron’s Island, Orlanda the Marmalade Cat come to mind) and of course all the classics like Alice in Wonderland and nonsense rhymes, many of which I can quote today but a lot of the books were fairly dull and stylised and required a certain amount of concentration. My mother was an avid reader and so was my grandmother and because of the need for a constant supply of books, my mother felt obliged to take a turn along with other volunteers in the issuing of library books to the village. There was no library in those days, only several very heavy wooden boxes that had to be opened up when the ‘library’ in the church school was open. We were expected to follow the example and read so I must have been a disappointment to her as my delight was a picture book about Shirley Temple!
Today’s children would wonder how we could have managed without comics to read but they were not really approved of although we did get sneaky views of my cousins Micky Mouse comic and his Biggles books. We were encouraged instead to read The Children’s Newspaper’ but I don’t think I was very interested.

The war comes nearer

Hanging over us all, of course, was the constant threat of bombing and from the front of the house in Winchester Road the bombing of Coventry was clearly visible. For this reason, for a while, we children had our beds in the downstairs back room with the added protection of a flock mattress hung over the window. The fact that I can remember that proves that it must have made some impression on me. My father had to go on air raid duty on the roof of Adderlys, the shop in Leicester next door to where he worked. I have only recently handed over his protective helmet together with the family gas masks to the Leicestershire field centre, Beaumanor Hall for display to parties of visiting schoolchildren.
Countesthorpe did suffer some bomb damage with two houses in Willoughby Road receiving a direct hit as a German pilot fled and let his bombs fall in a line across the fields towards the village. Luckily, they stopped short of the village. I can remember the damaged houses in Willoughby Road, (one had to be demolished), the mud all over the road and the crater left in the left hand corner of the field that is now the playing fields in Willoughby Road. No-one was injured but I was most concerned to hear that the chicken house in one of the gardens had taken a direct hit.
I suspect that this was quite exciting for us but a horrible shock for the adults especially as my aunt’s house was only four houses away. I was very envious of my sister who was recovering from chicken pox and for some reason was staying with my aunt while I was at home in Winchester Road.
I missed all the noise and excitement of the bombing. Children have their own priorities!
Some time into the war years, probably coinciding with the attacks on Coventry, a brick and concrete air raid shelter with a flat roof and no doors was built on the roadside grass in front of our next door neighbours house in Winchester Road. It was never used as a shelter but was a great place to play in.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.