大象传媒

I was born in north Manchester and only two years old when the war started and eight when it finished. My memories of the early days are hazy and coloured by the stories my family told after the war was over. My parents had two green grocers' shops: one a corner shop where we lived in Crumpsall and the other on a main road a few miles away in Blackley,where my Father's sister lived with her elderly husband, a carpenter. She served in that shop with an assistant and my mother looked after our shop.
One of my first memories was being with a crowd of people on an embankment that ran across the end of our street.I was sitting astride my father's shoulders and we were watching the sky lit up by the fires and smoke after the centre of Manchester had been blitzed early in the 1940s. My father had been there in the night helping to put the fires out. It was this, I was told later, that made him determined to join up when his papers came although being in the food trade he could have applied for exemption.

He joined the Royal Marines at RM Lympstone in June 1941 and this left my mother with two young children and two busy shops to look after. This was a great responsibility at a time when rationing was in force, food was scarce and supplies of perishable goods unpredictable, especially in winter. The wholesale merchants at Smithfield Market were very helpful and made sure that my mother got her fair share of whatever was available. Such things as oranges were prioritised for children, of course, but bananas were rarely seen,if ever, until after the war was over. My brother, being six years older than I, remembered them from prewar days and told me,wide-eyed, that they came in "hands" and the bananas were the "fingers". He also eulogised about "maltesers" and chocolate eclairs! Mouth-watering!

To help my mother and keep her company, her sister,Aunty Maggie, and her young daughter,my cousin Joyce, came to live with us as her husband was in the Royal Navy. We three children were evacuated once, accompanied by my aunty, to a farm in rural Lancashire -but we came home after only a few days, farm life being just too rural for my aunty Maggie's taste. Sadly her baby died of diptheria when she was only two.

My mother could not drive and petrol was scarce anyway so the goods were delivered by lorry to the two shops. I well remember the cheerful young lady driver called Martha. She had her hair in a turban and wore overalls just like a man - an unusual sight for a child in those days.
The corner shop had an important role to play in the war and people often congregated in ours, sitting on boxes, to discuss events. Grumbles were met with the remark "Well there is a war on you know!" Everybody knew everybody else and neighbours shared their fears,worries,joys -and their recipes too, on how to make things go further. When the shop was closed in the evening either my mother or aunty would put on a tin helmet and walk around the block to check that all was well. When the sirens went off my aunt would dash next door-but-one to rouse an elderly couple who were very deaf. I remember being carried to the shelter at the bottom of the garden in my blue siren suit with my mickey mouse gas mask. We were very fortunate in our neighbourhood that we emerged to find little damage.

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