大象传媒

My memories as the war years went by:

1939 鈥� Sept. 3rd. My family was on holiday on motor cruises on the Norfolk Broads. First night of war an air raid warden shouted at us to 鈥淧UT THAT LIGHT OUT!鈥� - it was a glimmer of battery powered light shining through a small porthole!

1940 鈥� At school 鈥� Chichester High School. Owing to overcrowding due to us sharing our space with girls from Streatham High School (evacuees) some of us had to move to dusty, musty rooms in the nearby Bishop鈥檚 Palace. Another time I remember being sent to the food office with other girls to help with writing the names, addresses and numbers on the new Ration Books 鈥� a nice escape from learning German!

Dunkirk 鈥� my father, who had joined up in the war, was officer鈥攊n-charge at Chichester station. Trains were bringing the wounded solders from Dunkirk to hospitals all along the south coast. One day the platforms were crowded with schoolchildren waiting to go home when we were told to go down into the subway while a troop train was unloaded. My father had decided it was not a sight to be witnessed by children, but I was busy bragging that it was my dad that had given the orders! I did not realise the seriousness of it at the time.

1941 鈥� My mother, Brother John and I moved to Wembley so that Mother could go back to teaching where my godmother was Head teacher of Roxeth Hill Junior School, Harrow. I remember spending evenings painting newspapers with white wash, so that children had paper on which to do art work.

I was sent to Harrow County School and hated it. We spent half the time in awful, dark damp air raid shelters because of the bombing. We tried to continue life as normal 鈥� my brother, a very keen Boy Scout built himself a kayak. It was launched, with two others, at the local open air swimming pool (closed for the winter but full of water for fire fighting purposes). The Scout Master worked at an aircraft making firm at Hendon and I still have and use the saucepan and lid that he made us from scrap bits of metal. Getting things like new saucepans was very difficult.

1942 鈥� I went to Beaconsfield as apprentice to my cousin on her Nursery Garden. Cycled 20 miles approx. home each weekends. I had to register but was exempt from the forces as I was in food production.

1943 鈥� I went to Swanley Horticultural College, Kent. Unfortunately we were bombed out in March 1944. There were between 30 and 40 students inthe common room at the time, as we had been roused from our beds to take shelter downstairs. The actual airraid shelters were outside the building and we rarely used them. One girl was killed, the rest of us escaped.

Later a group of us went to the Sparsholt Farm Institute near Winchester to continue our studies. While there we witnessed the D-Day flight of hundreds of planes towing gliders as big as the planes, filling the skies above us as they went over to France. We also had seen the miles of troop transport vehicles lined up and waiting to board ships at Southampton.

1944-45 We ended our college days, the 2nd year, at Wisley R.H.S Gardens, boarding at an ex-school in Ripley. We were there to paint the village red, white and blue. (the paint was pinched from the gardener鈥檚 shed!) when Victory day was announced.

Thus a teenager鈥檚 war was over, but what a mess it made of my life during those years.

The story is submitted by The British Schools Museum, Hitchin on behalf of Mrs Joy Field

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