大象传媒

[鈥淭his story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Annika from Cedars Upper School on behalf of Monica Whitmore and has been added to the site with her permission. Monica Whitmore fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions鈥�.]

When war broke out I was seven In September my parents wanted to take me to London. My Dad was a bus driver. They changed their mind because the bus conductor said. You don鈥檛 want to go to London because the sand bags were out. So they changed their mind and went to Whipsnade zoo instead. They had wolves and wallabies just inside. The next day we went to Welwyn Garden City. My Mother left her hat on the rack on the train. The day that war broke out we lived in Queen Park in Bedford. People stood outside their houses. All people said it would be over y Christmas. We then had a practice air raid. We were told the safest place was a passage between the houses; it had an arch over it. We didn鈥檛 have a duvet; instead we had a cotton mattress which they put on the floor. The next door neighbour brought a canary. Then they said that it was safer to go under the stairs in a cupboard. So we put a mattress there. One of the sorts of bombs to fall in Bedford was called a landmine it fell in the fields. We felt the thud of the Bomb falling on the field. We heard the explosion; our heads were under our bed clothes. We were as scared as the parents were, but they didn鈥檛 let on. Two bombs fell on Midlen Road Station (Bedford Railway Station). I saw those because we were on the way to School. They fell when we were half way between home and school, then I had to make a quick decision; to run home or to run to school. I had a little sister.

Then as the war went on we had Morrison Shelter. That was a big metal table that filled our dining room. So we lived creeping around the edges of it. Some people had Anderson Shelters at the end of their garden. I don鈥檛 remember anyone using any of them because they were filled with water. A boy at my Primary School once said that he鈥檒l lock me in the Anderson Shelter. I was so frightened that I hit him hard and he went off crying. I learned a lesson then, that sticking up for yourself is good.

A great treat for me and my sister, on Sunday evenings they used to play the national anthems of all the countries that were at war and we used to go to bed but we were allowed to listen to all the anthems before we slept/ France was the last country to capitulate and I remember saying to my mother, now we are on our own. These were my childhood memories.

Because trains weren鈥檛 safe and we weren鈥檛 allowed to got o the seaside. My Father liked winkles (shells), they were horrid and you had to get a needle/pin to get them out. I liked the crabs-I liked history/biology. We never saw the real thing. Now you get mushrooms all year round, we only got the ones in the fields. My Father had the privilege of reserved occupation which meant that he didn鈥檛 have to fight. He used to drive the 大象传媒 around. He had to stay in the Tower of London for a fortnight and had to stay on the same level as Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce).

We had dried eggs. The best we did was to scramble them. When we got real eggs we didn鈥檛 like them. You were only allowed bananas if you were under five. I always felt guilty cause when I didn鈥檛 like a banana I gave it away. And butter was very scarce. So we used margarine. My Mother said you scrape it on and then scraped it off. One of my teachers at my Confirmation classes gave me buttered toast and I thought it was strange cause I hadn鈥檛 tasted so much butter on bread before.

We had an evacuee next door, he was the only boy I knew, his name was Jeffrey. We were larking about one day; I threw his hat over the bridge. It fell between the billboard and the wall of the bridge (20 feet approximately) my father had to get his chimney sweep stick to fish the hat out. I missed a lot of things. Older girls were allowed a week off to go potato picking. They had really lovely carol concerts with Isabelle Bailey (famous Soprano). I was too young. We had cheap music lessons. I learned the violin we learned in groups. We had an orchestra where everyone who could play were first violin we had also third violin for people like me. My Maths teacher was playing the cello. We didn鈥檛 like him very much. So Adrian Bolt shouted at him. Saying Cello, cello what do you think your doing! So I sniggered in the back. I remember a few evacuees there in our school. We didn鈥檛 mind. One was so dirty, it wasn鈥檛 her fault, her foster mother didn鈥檛 care about her. The only place on her which wasn鈥檛 dirty was her tears. Miss Fay, the evacuee鈥檚 headmistress was absolutely round. Every morning all the children had to line up to get cod liver oil. It was brown sticky stuff. The evacuees each got a mouthful of it. The children were walking in the queue with their mouths open. She stuck a spatula in the jar and stuck it in their mouths.

Sometimes when I get depressed it feels like you have a thundercloud on you which I associate with the war. The feeling I had was the unknown coming through the air. I was deprived of all sorts of pleasures; I only went on the trains once or twice. Our neighbour had bees and he was allowed to go and visit his bees with extra petrol rations given to him, he sometimes took us. I used to hate going out because the fields seemed to have thistles. I hate picnics because we couldn鈥檛 go to restaurants as we always had to take food with us.

Once we went out for tea and they wanted to please us so they opened a tin 鈥淎pricot conserve鈥� and when we opened it was jam imported from Australia. We thought it was tinned apricots. It opened the eyes of people-the war. In a way it reduced our experience of life and also expanded it we saw black Americans and Americans. In one way we were living in Bedford with parents, we were very protected. In another way we were deprived. The teachers we got weren鈥檛 very good. They had to get what they could. When I went to University, I was lucky, all the people who had gone before us had to compete with ex-soldiers. And I didn鈥檛 have that sort of problem.

Two years running there was only radio, no television; they had a play called 鈥渢he magic box鈥�? (box of delights by John Masefield) and since then somebody asked all the people who remembered that programme to write in to them and it had made a great impression of children my age and they think it was-at five o鈥檆lock-and the children came in from the dark outside to hear this story about dark and light, good and evil. And it chimed with our experiences. It got that feeling of darkness and dread, goodness and light.

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