大象传媒

When the war began I was about 6 weeks old, so school began for me in September 1944 with the start of the first term after my fifth birthday. At this time London was under attack from the German V-weapons. Their flying bombs and rockets were very scary, they did a lot of damage and killed many people.

If these attacks were expected while we were at school we would sometimes be told to take cover by hiding under our little desks. At home in the living room we had something called an Anderson Shelter, which was rather like a big four-poster bed made out of iron girders. I'm not really sure that either the school desks or the iron shelter would have done us much good if a direct hit or even a nearby one had occurred.

Every Monday morning we would take our dinner money and milk money to school, where the teachers would collect it. Dinner money was 2 shillings and a penny per week, which works out at five pence per day. Milk money was a penny a day. That bought us a third of a pint of milk in a little glass bottle, mid-morning and mid-afternoon . Later on, probably after the war ended, the school milk was free.

Those prices are in 'old' money of course. In today's decimal money those 5 dinners cost just over 10p a week. For that we got a hot cooked meal every school day. The main course would be 'meat, greens, gravy and potatoes' and the second course would be something like jam tart with custard.
There wasn't much choice, in fact none.

We should have been grateful to get a hot lunch every day when food was in short supply and people were taking such risks to bring it to us. But I used to tell Mum that it wasn't nice, so eventually she came down to the school to see for herself. She said the problem was the way they cooked the school dinners, so she became a 'dinner lady' and helped to try to make the food more appetising.

To help with the supply of food, people were allowed to have allotments in the local parks. There they could grow vegetables like cabbages, carrots, potatoes and beans, to add to other foods which were in short supply during the war. Dad had one of these allotments, and when he had spare time between his work as a mail van driver he would go down to the park and work on his allotment. I saw him work the soil and plant things, but maybe the results weren't all that good because another thing I remember about that allotment is that the holes he dug with his fork and spade soon filled up with muddy water! I don't think it could have been ideal soil for vegetables.

Many foods were on ration, including fresh eggs. Instead of those we often used dried powdered egg, which came in little metal containers. I never saw fruits like bananas until after the war, and was very disappointed when Mum bought me my first peach and it turned out to be all soft and mouldy inside.

Going back to the subject of school, we used real pens with nibs in those days because ballpoints hadn't been invented and things like fountain pens were for grown-ups unless you were lucky enough to get one as a birthday or Christmas present. So every class had an 'ink monitor' whose job it was to make sure that the inkwells on our school desks were full when lessons began each morning. I liked being ink monitor. It meant we had to collect a white china bottle from the teacher, fill it with black ink from a big glass bottle, and go round the classroom making sure everyone had enough ink to write with. The teacher's desk had an inkwell for red ink as well as black, because the red ink was used to mark our work.

Our house was about a mile from school, and part of the journey took us along a main road called Aldermans Hill. This road was not surfaced with asphalt or tarmac, but with small wooden blocks about the size of bricks. The blocks were held together by tar made by the gas works. The tar gave off quite a strong smell, though not an unpleasant one. But the real problems came in the winter, when rain and frost had got down into the joins between the blocks. When the rainwater froze, it made the wood blocks rise up and the surface of the road became very uneven and bumpy. The big heavy buses didn't seem to mind, though probably they made the unevenness worse, but the bumps could be quite dangerous for cyclists and other road users. When it got too bumpy the council would send their steamroller along to flatten the road surface, but it soon became bumpy again. The steamroller used to stop at the end of our road while the road men were having their lunch. It was great fun to stand near the steamroller while it was stopped, with the flywheel going round and a lovely hot oily smell coming from its moving parts.

We didn't catch the bus to school because it would only have taken us part of the way. Another reason was that during the war the windows of the buses were made of tough protective glass which you couldn't see out of. There was only a little diamond-shaped clear panel of glass in the middle of the windows so that passengers could see when to get off the bus.

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