大象传媒

WORLD WAR TWO
ONE WOMAN'S MEMORIES

I was eleven when the Second World War started on September 3rd 1939 and living on the south coast of England. My memories of that time are vivid and so are the happenings of the preceding year, September 1938 - the Munich Crisis.

PEACE IN OUR TIME?
I suspect that my father, a postman had his first ever week of holiday with pay that year. He was off work when the schools also had a weeks holiday.An only child, I was delighted when the son of friends was sent to stay with us from London because of the threat of war. I have golden memories of that week. The weather was good and I remember being taken for days out to Tilly Whim caves in Dorset and to the New Forest in an uncles car. (I only knew three people with cars!). The boy from London was 13 and besides teaching me unsuccessfully to play chess I can recall his talking seriously about the possibility of a war. A local department store boasted a wonderful toy department, still remembered by people today, and I can recall going there and becoming impatient as my parents discussed with neighbours we met the gravity of the situation. Well, Mr Chamberlain came back from Germany waving the famous piece of paper and it was "peace in our time" as we thought. This was much to my fathers relief. He had fought in the trenches in the Great War and was at the landing at Gallipoli so was appalled at the thought of history repeating itself. He went round the house saying "it's only 20 years since the last lot". Twenty years seemed a lifetime to me.

FAMILY INVASION
The possibility of war was thought to be well and truly over and the following summer holidays - August 1939 - I went with my father to Gosport and Portsmouth to visit relatives. The German ship Bremen was in Portsmouth harbour and I can recall it being flown over by several planes of the RAF 'Just to show them what we've got' said most of the onlookers. One of our relations kept a sweet shop in Gosport and most evenings we sat around the radio in the room at the back of the shop listening to the 大象传媒 news. The broadcasts must have sounded grave as my great aunt (a dead ringer for Grandma Buggins - the Giles cartoon character) sat perspiring profusely and was obviously terrified by what she was hearing. Soon after we returned to Bournemouth we were invaded by the family from the sweet shop, three adults and a child. They thought they would be safer away from Portsmouth and the huge naval dockyard. On the Sunday morning of September 3rd I was at Sunday school as usual. My Mother was at home cooking Sunday lunch for us all whilst my long-suffering father took Great Aunt for a walk along the cliffs to take her mind off the situation. Life, I think, went on much as usual for the first months of the war in our extended household. The four-year-old relative from the sweet shop, something of a holy terror, was thankfully enrolled at the local primary school for his short stay. Later on in the war when all the talk was of 'Hitler's Secret Weapon' my father was heard to say "we've had ours" meaning the small boy. When the billeting officer came round for us to take evacuees we were full up with family. After they left us a soldier and his wife shared our house for six years, joined some weekends by their daughter who was in the ATS. The four grown ups became good friends and Mrs F. and mum used to set off for the shops most mornings to see what they could buy off ration. They often joined a queue not knowing what the queue was for until they reached the front. When France fell and Britain stood alone I sensed that the parents were really worried. Dad had distant relatives in Canada and there was talk of my being sent to them for the duration of the war. In September 1940 a U-boat sank the City of Benares carrying children leaving Britain for Canada. Of the 100 children on board only 13 survived. After that Canada was never mentioned again.

THE HOME FRONT
Life revolved for me around school, Church and the Guide Company and I went off happily to evening activities in the black out. Dad painted white lines up the middle of the garden path to the back door, unfortunately the lines were too artistically painted to be of much help. Blacking out the windows was a bit of a problem. Dad produced a home made contrivance covered in black crepe paper and made to fit the living room window. It didn't quite reach and was frequently falling down. This always seemed to happen when the local Air Raid Precaution warden was near to our house on his rounds. He kept the grocer's shop almost opposite and seemed to be the epitome of the hen-pecked husband. He really came into his own when he could shout "Put that light out". My father, brought up in a fire station, was always afraid of fire so the only thing that was kept in the loft was his First World War bayonet. When the news came that France had fallen he left the living room, coming back with said bayonet saying, "if any Gerry comes up my path, I shall be ready for him". There was a certain amount of excitement amongst children at this time. A Civil Defence member rounded the children in my road up one evening and we were taken to a first aid post to be 'casualties' for the benefit of the first-aiders. We had to take swimming costumes to be showered after a make believe gas attack.

MAKING FRIENDS
Evacuees started to arrive from Southampton and Portsmouth and quite a number found their way to school, Sunday School and the Guide Company. There were rumours galore about evacuees who were dirty, unkempt and worse but I didn't meet any of these. Some of the children stayed in touch with their host families but others were not so fortunate and were not treated well. One of the many who came from Southampton became one of my closest friends and my bridesmaid when I married. We are still friends and to my children and grandchildren she is very much one of the family.
We always seemed to be raising money for some good cause or other, of which there were many. I remember an enormous jumble sale at school and children arriving with things to sell including the very large meat plates belonging to dinner services. With the very small meat ration it was obvious that they wouldn't be needed for the duration a phrase in constant use. People nowadays don't always realise that we didn't have a lot of rich food before the war. Food was simple and wholesome with some fruits only being in the shops at Christmas time and tinned fruit something we only had at parties. We were lucky to have a cherry tree in the garden and my mother bottled the fruit to be used on special occasions. The cherries lost their colour, becoming a dreary brown but were still considered a treat. She also made sweets with dried milk and cocoa powder. Dried egg powder was a boon and I enjoyed omelettes made with it. We had one egg per book as I remember. This became a problem during the middle of the war when my father became seriously ill with pneumonia. He was saved by the first anti biotic, M & B tablets but the road back to health was slow. The doctor prescribed plenty of eggs!

SCHOOL DAYS
In the autumn of 1940 I moved to the senior school, a move delayed a year because of the war. On the Friday night of the second week of term the school was demolished by a direct hit from a land mine, a second one dropping further up the road from where we lived. We lost our back door but I think the windows were saved by the strips of paper pasted on them and perhaps further damage prevented by the blast wall that was at the back of the house. (This had to be carefully negotiated when visiting the outside loo in the blackout.) Fifty years later there was a reunion lunch for former pupils to give thanks that the school had been bombed during the night. It must have been a huge headache for the education authorities to have about two hundred girls with no school. There was an empty hospital near to the local boys school so the girls school shared this, going in the mornings to the boys school and to the hospital building in the afternoons on week and the other way around the next week. No concessions were made because of this rather bizarre arrangement and school proceeded as usual apart from some pupils who couldn't remember where to go on a Monday morning. During air raids we went into the cloakrooms. A supply of biscuits and blended chocolate was kept at the school in case of emergencies. It was a red-letter day when fresh supplies were delivered and we could take the old stock home. In the first few years of the war we took gas masks everywhere and being growing girls we soon vied with each other to see who had the smartest and most fashionable gas mask case.
The local Air Cadets met at the school in the evenings and had a model plane not quite life size and camouflaged in the school playground. One lunchtime a German plane dropped a bomb in the school playground and some of the parents thought it aimed at the Air Cadets plane. The German plane was certainly flying low. I was going home to lunch and I looked up and saw the iron cross and the swastika on the underside of the wings. I had been told to lie in the gutter in the event of an air raid, which I did. My companion took to her heels and ran for all she was worth. I can recall seeing her school scarf streaming out behind her and from my position in the gutter wishing I was running too. It is said you can't hit a moving target. We schoolchildren had another week off at the time of Dunkirk. Our school was full of French and Belgian soldiers and the local children used to talk to them through the railings and get their autographs. Mum and Dad invited two French soldiers to supper with us each evening they were in the town. One evening Mum told me to go to Grandpa's house and ask him for socks and handkerchiefs to give them, to supplement that father gave them.

GROWING UP
When I was about 14 I went to evening classes. To my surprise, Father didn't object to my being walked home by one of the boys in the class who for some unaccountable reason was a source of number 8 batteries. These were in very short supply and used by almost everyone for the torches used in the blackout. Where he got his supplies from we never discovered.
Various members of the family and brothers of friends joined up and Father and an assortment of uncles joined the home guard. In the early part of 1943 I started work at the Central Library as a very junior library assistant, a job I much enjoyed. Most of the male assistants had been called up and I had evidently missed the heartthrob of the pre war staff who was now a pilot in the RAF. There was great excitement when it was known he was on leave and would be coming in to see everyone. I shall never forget seeing this handsome young man coming in to the lending library on crutches and minus a leg. My friend's brother was reported missing presumed killed and these events together with a growing awareness which came in my middle teens saw the end of the excitement.

BEING PREPARED
Having been a Brownie, I joined the local Guide Company at the start of the war. This enabled us, young as we were, to feel we were doing our bit. We collected waste paper, old number 8 batteries, rose hips and sphagnum moss (if we could get to the country). We took part in a mammoth book drive along near the main road close to where we lived. My Mother gave a handsome set of medical books which unfortunately she was sure she saw a few weeks later in a local second hand book shop. As Guides we were not allowed to camp under canvas, there was a rule that there should be no camps within 9 miles of the coast. So it was that on the morning of Sunday 23rd May 1943 my Guide Company were at the local camp house having lunch outside when we heard the most awful explosion and saw much wreckage going up in the air on the horizon. (People of my generation who were in Bournemouth at the time remember 23rd May 1943 as people remember what they were doing when John F Kennedy was assassinated.) We had no telephone or radio but a visitor came out and told us the centre of Bournemouth had been hit. 22 German aircraft had bombed the town centre. 128 people were killed and over 200 injured. What we didn't know until we cycled home was that other bombs had fallen near to where most of us lived. We cycled down Richmond Park Road which was strewn with wreckage and with people walking about, still several hours afterwards in a state of shock. We met our church minister who told us that a six-year-old boy in the Sunday School had been killed. One Guide went home to find she had only half a house and those Guides living near the railway line found their houses badly damaged.

OVER HERE
The town was full of troops, our own, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand airmen and later the Yanks. They soon made their presence felt and were generous with sweets for the young children. One afternoon my friend and I were walking along the promenade being on split duties from the library. I think we must have looked pale and wan because a couple of American soldiers stopped us and gave us an orange each. What a treat! We ate them there and then only to walk into our church minister also out for a stroll by the sea. "Where did you get those oranges" was his greeting. I'm not sure he believed us when we told him they were an unsolicited gift. It was not unknown for young teenage girls to pile on the make up and go out with American soldiers. Kind and polite as they were they certainly had a reputation. There were black soldiers among the American troops and I believe there was occasionally trouble when they danced with local girls trouble from their white comrades that is. I was asked by an acquaintance to look after her dog for a week. When off duty from the library a friend and I used to take the dog for walks along the seafront. It was embarrassing that the dog stopped every time we passed a group of American soldiers. Presumably its owner had friends among the US troops!

THE END AT LAST
The radio was an enormous source of pleasure during the war as was the cinema. The radio was always turned on for the news of course, but ITMA on Thursday nights was a must. The local theatres kept open too and my friends and I saw many topical plays at our repertory theatre and revivals of musicals at our Pavilion Theatre, although the leading men because of the call up tended to be not so young and rather portly! Cinemas must have done bumper business with queues for all seats, the longest being for the one and nines. Smaller cinemas had prices for a shilling and there we could catch the films we had missed first time round. The media was a good source of propaganda not always noticed at the time. Indeed I was at the cinema with a friend watching Judy Garland in 'Meet Me in St Louis' when the end of the war in Europe was flashed across the screen midst enormous shouting and cheering. The next day was a public holiday and my friends and I took to the streets in one long chain greeting friends and strangers alike in an outburst of joy. Later there were street parties and events to welcome home returned prisoners of war. In August 1945 I was camping at the local Guide campsite - tents were allowed now - when the local vicar (still no telephone or radio) cycled out to tell us that the war was over in the Far East. I ran to my two particular friends in the far end of the field to tell them the good news. One of them was my friend whose brother had been reported missing earlier. Her reply to my monumentous news was "the war isn't over for us yet". The next evening we all attended a thanksgiving service in the village church and this was the first we had heard of the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan. The vicar must have made the situation and his feelings very clear as I remember we were very subdued when we walked back to camp that evening.

We were fortunate in Bournemouth in that we were not an important strategic target compared with other towns and cities although shortages and separations were common to all.
Looking back I am grateful to those who made my childhood and teenage years enjoyable and fulfilling despite the war. The sad thing is that we really thought there would be no more wars.
How wrong we were.

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