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Wartime in Temple Guiting

When war broke out I was 9. We were staying with cousins at Milton under Wychwood and had to go to school there for two or three weeks. We had rations but grew a lot of food and kept hens.

We had to take a gas mask to school everyday and if you hadn’t done your homework and went to school without your gas mask you would be sent home to fetch it and homework would be forgotten.

There were soldiers billeted in the local farmyard and in the village hall next to the school. They seemed lonely but we were not allowed to talk to them over the wall.

Later on Americans were billeted at The Grange at Guiting Power . They had transport unlike our troops. They rode around in jeeps and offered us chocolate.

Several planes crashed near the village, mostly training planes based at Little Rissington, near Bourton-on-the-Water.

A few bombs were dropped too, by German planes returning home and jettisoning their unused cargo. We would go and look at the big craters — thankfully none fell on houses.

We did not have an air-raid shelter at school. When the air-raid sirens went off we had to go to different places — my sister and I went to Grandma’s house a short distance from the school. She made drop scones for us, and treated us, so we never minded the air-raid warnings. As soon as the all-clear was sounded we had to return to school.

My father was an A.R.P. He went out with his gas mask , first aid kit and tin hat every time the siren went off. He had to make sure no lights were showing (all windows had blackout curtains) and be on alert for bombs / casualties.

When Coventry was bombed, the sky to the North was red from the burning city. My father had been in the First World War and it upset him to see it.

My mother helped in the fields picking peas, fruit and potatoes. She was a good dressmaker and sometimes she had clothing coupons spare which she could sell or trade for things which she needed.

An elderly couple from Birmingham, who owned a very old Rolls Royce, came from Birmingham every fortnight to buy eggs, and if we had any, surplus vegetables.

We had evacuees from Dagenham — mostly from the Ford Motor Works and their families. The children came with their teachers (previously we had only three). Among them was a Mim Fox. She was tall and dramatic. She taught me English and gave me a love of poetry. I can still remember ‘Night sank upon the Dusky Beach’.

The two groups of children had difficulty understanding each other’s dialects, but after about half of the evacuees returned to Dagenham, the others soon got together. Many returned after the war to visit their ‘foster parents’. My Grandma’s two evacuees came back every year until she died.

My husband went to Cheltenham Grammar School. A school from Moseley in Birmingham shared their school and my husband and a Moseley boy had to share a desk. One in the morning and one in the afternoon.

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