大象传媒

"This story was submitted to the People's Was website by Anne Wybrow of the County Heritage Team on behalf of Rosemary Gitsham and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

I was four and a half years old at the outbreak of war. My father was in the RAF and we were in married quarters at RAF Bicester at the time. I have a clear memory of waiting for the wireless announcement in the kitchen, with all our furniture and belongings packed and ready to leave immediately. My poor mother had recently had her first driving lesson in our car and was not at all confident of her abilities, but she was sent off to a rented house at 100 Oxford Road, Kidlington driving herself, me and the dog. She was so frightened by the experience that she never drove again. But we arrived safely and I was very excited at having to sleep on an armchair that night, the rest of the furniture not arriving until the next day.

We spent the next 6 months at Kidlington, the hightlight of which was the village nativity play when my doll was chosen to play the part of Baby Jesus! Around Easter 1940 my father was posted to RAF Silloth. We followed, first staying in an hotel facing the Solway Firth, then in a room in a small terraced house in the town. There was an outside lavatory in the yard, and rather than reaching it through the owner's back room (where they used a tin bath in front of the fire) my mother walked me round the block, down the back alley and into the yard.

By the summer my parents had rented a bungalow at Skinburness directly facing the Solway Firth, with Mount Criffell in the distance. Sometimes the water was very rough and the waves pounded against our front porch. It was then that I had my first taste of school, for the first few weeks in a dark Victorian building (since turned into a Heritage Centre) and then for a short time in a new school building nearby. The first day at school I remember being given an abacus and taught to count on it, but no-one thought to tell me that you had to stay for the afternoon session, so after lunch I walked the mile back home! As there was a military checkpoint between our house and the school I cannot imagine why I was not challenged. The time at Skinburness was happy, but marred by the loss of our much loved dog down a rabbit hole on the track to the airfield. In spite of employing a man with his ferrets there were so many rabbit holes along the track that she was never found. My mother joined a first aid class and took me along for the ladies to practise bandaging. She also knitted socks for the armed forces.

Soon we were on the move again when my father was posted to RAF Sealand near Chester. Another rented house was found at 11 Endsleigh Gardens, Upton by Chester, and I started at Hollybank School, Chester - a private school run on very strict lines by the owner and headmistress, Miss Crewe. There the cane was very much in evidence, but the learning was thorough. By the age of eight I was already learning French. At one time school dinners were provided (if you brought your own plate, knife and fork) and eaten at your desk; at other times I went along to the British Restaurant for a meal. German spies were very much in our minds, and my 1943 school prize book was called "Merrily Makes Things Move" by Hann & Nash, which was all about a little girl who caught a German spy. Our gas masks had to be carried at all times, although I never once had to go down into an air raid shelter. My mother had obtained a bar of Cadburys milk chocolate to keep in the gas mask case for emergencies. After a couple of years it had gone rather spotty, and when she managed to get a replacement I was allowed to eat it, spots and all -and how good it tasted! My mother was a fire watcher, trained to deal with incendiary bombs, though I never heard of any being dropped near us. When the owner of our rented house wanted it back for his own family we had to move to a couple of rooms in a nearby house at 19 Caughall Hall Road, owned by Mr and Mrs Nathan Moore and daughter Sheila (a few years younger than me). Mr Moore was away in the Army. We had the front downstairs room and the back bedroom, and use of the kitchen though my mother preferred to cook on a trivet by the open fire in the front room - mostly rabbit stew. I was not allowed on the back lawn but I did have a share in the sandpit. When we finally got home to Suffolk and stayed with relations in Felixstowe I danced with joy on their tiny front lawn shouting "I can walk on the grass!" But the freedom for a child of 8 in the War was incredible by today's standards. My friend Peggy, a Liverpool evacuee, and I used to roam the countryside at will, with a bottle of squash and a sandwich. We used to go down by the canal and be away from home for hours and no-one worried about us. We collected tadpoles from the pond, rode our bikes and watched the cows being milked at a nearby farm.

At that time my mother thought it was time I learned to ride a horse, although I was not all that keen. We lived near Chester Zoo (and could hear the lions roaring while lying in bed) and next to the Zoo was the riding school. You had to have the proper riding gear, but the only available jodphurs were a size too small for me, and I could hardly bend my legs, which was very uncomfortable, although the brown velvet hat was very becoming. My horse was called Bonnie, but she was rather lazy and we used to get left behind and arrive back at the stables after everyone else. All my clothes were home made, and jumpers and socks knitted from yarn unravelled from other people's old jumpers. The worst thing was that there were no toys available, so all my dolls were secondhand, and home made, but treasured for all that. At a very young age I learnt to knit Fair Isle jumpers for my dolls, and to sew.

With the War drawing to a close and my father being posted to RAF Colerne in Wiltshire, my mother became very tired of living in someone else's house and longed to get back to her own bungalow near Felixstowe which had been rented out since my father's posting to Andover in 1938. She applied to the authorities for permission to return to a restricted area, and at last we were on the move again. The bungalow was in a bad state after being used by the military and the garden was a jungle, but it was home, the end of the War was in sight, and all was well.

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