大象传媒

Part 3

By now the air raid wardens were a force to contend with. Volunteers from our street were formed into 鈥淧ost H5鈥� which was manned around the clock until the end of the war. These wardens would walk up and down the street at night looking for any leaks in the blackout curtains but their main duty was to be first on the scene at any bomb damage and to report accordingly. Catch phrases of the time were 鈥淗ey, put out that light!鈥� and 鈥淒on鈥檛 you know there鈥檚 a war going on?鈥� The two elderly Misses Cook lived together in a house across from the buried shelter that constituted the 鈥減ost鈥� on a triangular piece of ground at the junction of the Manor Way (the street on which I lived) and another, called Midcroft. Every night at eleven o鈥檆lock throughout the war one of these ladies would take a tray of coffee and cookies across to the wardens on duty. I still value the plaque in calligraphy one of the wardens drew and presented to these ladies at the end of the war commemorating this act of self-imposed duty that they never once failed to perform.

The blackout and the food rationing were the only signs that a war might be on during this first six months of what is now referred to as the 鈥減honey鈥� period of the war. The blackout was particularly trying. Not only were all the houses completely 鈥渂lacked out鈥� at night but, the street lights (using coal gas) were dimmed, and shut off completely at 10:30. Gasoline rationing had begun but there were still a number of cars about. Headlights were shielded so as to give only a glimmer of light. No shop windows were illuminated at all. People took to carrying flashlights (or torches) at night and it was not long before the supply of batteries was just about exhausted. Until then, nobody bothered much to read the print on the batteries, but now everyone knew what a 鈥淣o.8鈥� was! That was the kind you needed for the most commonly used light, but could never find.

Bananas disappeared from the shops, not to return for six years. Oranges, when available, were reserved for children. People were encouraged to make a jelly from rose hips, the seed pods of wild roses which we were told are high in Vitamin C. Black currants were cultivated for their high content of vitamins and converted into the jellies reserved for mothers with young children. For a while onions were hard to find and became the subject of jokes. A school friend was shocked to discover that some neighbours saved their urine in a bucket for pouring onto their onions in the belief this promoted growth. I have never heard of anyone doing this since. We all felt this practice was carrying patriotism too far.

The government by this time had established a Ministry of Food that extorted us all to grow vegetables under the theme 鈥渄igging for victory鈥�. Vacant land was divided into allotments on which people could grow more vegetables. In some places, strips along the railway tracks were given over to gardeners. Articles and advertisements appeared in the ever-shrinking newspapers telling us how to get the most nourishment out of the food we ate. Peeling potatoes became almost a crime! They had to be scrubbed. At home, we sliced the green beans we grew and preserved them in salt for use during the winter. Boiling vegetables was discouraged in favour of steaming to preserve the food value. The water so used was saved and used as a base for making soup.

An issue of The Economist in July 2000 contains the obituary of a lady named Elsie Widdowson who was an expert in nutrition. It seems she and a group of others had demonstrated just before the war that all the substances the human body needed could be provided by a diet of cabbage, potato and bread! This must have been music to the ears of the government who must have been extremely worried about what the population was to eat.

The most famous Minister of Food was a Lord Woolton (whose commercial background before entering politics had been in the department store business) who became the brunt of many jokes about food. He even had a vegetable pie named after him that was widely consumed at the time but did not stand the competition when food became available in greater quantities. I often wondered where he found the recipe and now believe it was Elsie Widdowson who provided it.

Pig clubs were started throughout the country by groups of citizens. After hours of gruelling work, our local club was disbanded when the pigs developed swine fever and had to be destroyed. We were glad not to have participated.

Meat was among the first food items to be rationed and was difficult to control. The basic ration was defined in terms of money. The size of the ration changed depending on the degree of scarcity. In the old money, we would be allowed, say, two shillings and four pence worth of meat each week. The buyer had to balance the desire for quality against the desire for quantity in the light of what was available, while steering clear of any cut with a lot of bone or fat in it! Balancing all these choices could pose quite a challenge. Chicken, rabbit and offal, such as oxtail, kidney, and liver were off the ration and dispensed to favoured customers on whatever basis the butcher chose. Most of the butchers seemed to try their best to be fair.

On one well-remembered Christmas my mother managed to find a turkey that had been imported from Ireland with nothing more done to it than its neck wrung. To me, with all my rabbit experience (which I describe below), fell the job of cleaning it up for cooking. My mother stood by glowing in admiration of my skill, such as it was, while my father fumed his pipe in the hope that the smell of smoke would cover up any smells from the gut of the bird. Provided you don鈥檛 break the intestines of course there is no smell.
About 1942 in the darkest days of the war, a new shop opened on the High Street that sold nothing but horse and whale meat. Neither of these meats was rationed. My parents could never bring themselves to try either meat but many of our friends did and they spoke well of both. For a while even bread was rationed. Great queues developed outside the fish shop whenever it received a shipment of fresh fish. Despite the shortages, people kept in very good health even though they all look thin in photographs. The general level of health was said to have been excellent with a very low level of obesity.

In 1941 I bought a couple of domestic rabbits and bred them for food using garden and kitchen scraps gleaned from neighbours and shops. A group of my school friends did the same and with them I learned which weeds rabbits liked and went around collecting the leaves from anybody who would let me onto their property for the purpose.

Despite his aversion to demonstrations of religious practices, my father would not allow his feelings to offend others who might not share his views. When I came to build the hutches for my rabbits, he insisted that I should disturb or offend our neighbours by hammering on Sundays so I was obliged to use screws.

Rabbit meat was a welcome treat. Meat of the domestic rabbit is white and indistinguishable from chicken. My mother made gloves from the skins that I dried and tried to cure. I kept a cashbook with which I was able to demonstrate a small profit. By joining the local rabbit club, I qualified for a bran ration with which to feed my rabbits that then grew more quickly.

Fresh milk became scarce and was extensively replaced by powdered milk that was acceptable when mixed with something but not very appetizing when simply mixed with water and drunk. Each night at bedtime I would mix powdered milk with sugar and powdered cocoa in the mug given me at school in 1936 to mark the coronation of King George VI, and drink the resulting hot cup of cocoa.

We were given free milk of the regular kind at school every morning at 10:30. Later the one-third pint glass bottles (made especially for schools) fell from use and the milk came in regular quart bottles. Monitors were chosen from the senior pupils to supervise distribution. When I became a monitor we made sure all the cream that separated near the top of the bottle went to the monitors. We saw to it that the bottles were never shaken as they were supposed to be in order to homogenize the cream with the milk. We were hungry growing boys so thought nothing of drinking a pint of cream.

The conviction that terrible depredations would come from air raids continued to haunt the community and many children living in cities were evacuated to the country. Photographs in the newspapers showed train loads of children massed on platforms of city stations with their names written on luggage labels tied to buttonholes of their coats. My grandmother Hester, living at Princess Risborough in Buckinghamshire had a young Cockney boy, from London鈥檚 East End billeted with her. She was a very prim Victorian in her ways and quickly took the upper hand in the ever-present battle between generations. In no time she had the young fellow fully instructed in the many niceties of behaviour that she regarded as appropriate in small boys. He seemed to take it all in good part, even when she referred to his short trousers as 鈥渒nickers鈥� 鈥� a turn of phrase my cousin Derrick and I always resented. In the course of time the young lad returned home and his parents came especially to thank my grandmother for the job she had done in improving their son鈥檚 manners and deportment.

A far more ambitious form of the evacuation programme involved shipping children off to countries overseas. Many children were sent privately in addition to those who went under the government-organized scheme. The Heslewoods, old family friends from Wandsworth and of my grandparents鈥� generation, had moved to Ruislip at my father鈥檚 suggestion. The family unit consisted of Willie鈥檚 wife Nan and her widowed sister Phaikie who was otherwise known as 鈥淎untie Campbell鈥�. Phaikie would stay the night at our place when my parents went out for the evening. She had returned to Britain from Vancouver when her husband, a lawyer there, had died. I loved it when she stayed with me, as she would keep me entranced with stories about the Indians in Canada.

Mr. Heslewood had been instrumental in getting my father his job with the Geological Survey. They were originally from Scotland. During the summer of 1939 cousin Sandy Grant and his wife arrived from South Africa where Sandy was postmaster at East London. They were childless and took such a liking to me that they were anxious for me to return with them for the duration of the war. My parents were on the point of letting me go, but relented so the Grants went off home to South Africa never to be seen again. Had I gone, I am sure to have returned eventually to England with a South Africa accent and strong Presbyterian beliefs that I am sure my father would not have encouraged.
Many of the children evacuated to the British countryside remained there for the duration of the war but the overseas evacuations ceased in 1940 when a shipload of children was torpedoed in the Atlantic. Very few were lost but that incident finished the programme. A boy I knew who was on the ship spoke little of his experience but was held in awe by us all for a long time. A girl from our class and her two younger twin brothers successfully reached New York under some private arrangement. We were all very impressed when the photograph of the three children appeared in the London evening paper. The two young boys were still wearing their school caps 鈥� bright red with a silver bishop鈥檚 mitre as a badge.

No sooner was 1940 upon us than the school authorities decided we should start attending full time again so the homework finished. For several months, the 鈥減honey鈥� war continued with nothing happening. With the arrival of spring weather, the Germans moved their troops out of Poland and back to the west. The First Canadian Fighter Squadron arrived at Northolt and its crews were billeted around Ruislip. We took in a country lad from Saskatchewan called Carl Briese who flew a Hurricane fighter. He quickly became my idol. The war business was building up and intruding into our lives more and more.

In early summer of 1940, the Germans did exactly what they had done in the previous war and drove through Belgium to get at France. This time they wanted to consolidate their seaboard against Britain so for good measure invaded the Netherlands as well. Churchill took over from Chamberlain as prime minister. Some of the British troops stationed in France were cut off but a lot got away in the famous evacuation from Dunkirk. Where was the Rev. Watkins? We never heard.
These were dark days. Carl Briese was suddenly very busy flying sorties over the English Channel. He always looked the same to me but my father said he saw him change from a carefree boy to a haggard man over a few weeks. He was always glad to get away from the base and relax in our garden. It was a beautiful summer for those of us who had time to notice it.

The army had volunteer bomb disposal squads who would be called to de-fuse any unexploded bomb as soon as it was found. The disposal engineer was generally an officer whose job was indicated by a badge on his arm depicting a red bomb. These men performed a dangerous job and many were killed. They and the pathfinder pilots of the bomber squadrons were our heroes. Not all delayed action bombs were found in time and on one memorable morning we were showered with great fragments from someone鈥檚 rock garden that had harboured the offending bomb overnight. None of the larger blocks hit our house but neighbours had as many as seven lumps come crashing through. One or two houses had to be demolished but nobody was hurt. If the building inspectors thought the house could be saved, crews of men would arrive and throw tarpaulins over damaged roofs and nail tarpaper over broken windows until permanent repairs could be made, which in many cases would not be until after the war.

By August 1940, France had capitulated and Britain was on its own. Now they had occupied France and the Low Countries, the Germans were much closer to Britain so could reach us with ease by bomber. Everyone expected the Germans to attempt a landing before the end of summer but to our surprise it never came. All they did was bomb the British airfields where fighter aircraft were stationed. Years later we were to learn that this strategy by the Germans resulted from a difference of opinion within their High Command. The military wanted to press on while they had the advantage and invade Britain in what would almost certainly have proved successful. Hitler was more cautious. At this time, the German army could have over-run Britain with ease but Hitler listened to Herman Goering who was a fighter ace in the previous war and now was in charge of the Luftwaffe. Goering wanted to bring Britain to its knees by air power alone. Hitler went with Goering in what must be classed as the major mistake of the war.
In the meantime, suitable precautions were taken in Britain to make such an invasion as difficult as possible. Any foreshore considered suitable for beaching landing barges was quickly fortified with rows of concrete cubes designed to keep tanks at bay. Little cement forts, or pillboxes, were constructed all over the country at strategic points, many of which remain to this day. Slots were cut in the roads into which iron rails were to be set in such a way as to jam the tracks of enemy tanks should there be an invasion.
The Germans had used big gliders to great effect to land troops throughout the Low Countries and later for the invasion of Crete. To prevent these from landing safely in England, telegraph poles were erected in the middle of all fields thought large enough for gliders to land on. To delay any invader, convenient trees were felled across the roads, a steel pin was driven into the stump, a hole bored through the lower end of the tree trunk that was then set on the pin. The top of the tree was cut at a suitable point and a cartwheel attached to it. In the event of an invasion, these trees were to be wheeled across the roads to slow down enemy troops.

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