大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by W. Jewitt of Wakefield Libraries and Information services on behalf of Elsie and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Life in the small north-east coast village where we lived in 1939, was so safe and peaceful. My grandparents lived near the sea about two miles away and cousins and aunts were even nearer. School was just around the corner and there was no shortage of children to play with.
I had heard of the "Last War" because my Grandfather had been "in it", but that was in the olden days of course. However, this morning, voices were lowered and my cousin Jean and I were offered one of Grandfather's sweets and told to go out to play, which was unusual for a Sunday.
We were not allowed to use the skipping rope on a Sunday, so we went out into the street where several other children were playing. Most of us were wearing our "Sunday" dresses ready for Sunday School after dinner. We could smell the lovely roast beef and Yorkshire puddings seeping out of the open back doors onto the pathways as we played and we noticed that several paople had the wireless on. They were listening to a man called Mr Chamberlain.As all families had a chamber in the bedrooms in those days, we all agreed that we wouldn't marry anybody with that name! The grown-ups didn't seem to even notice his name!
After a while they started to come out into the street and we realised that war had been declared. We didn't know what "declared" meant so we started a game holding hands in a line across the stony road and dancing up and down the street singing "The War's been declared, the War's been declared".
It almost seemed like a party to us with so many people in the street. Some of them we hadn't even seen before, probably because they were so old like Grandma and Grandfather who were nearly sixty! War must be important if such old people came outside. Mrs Longstaff shouted to her mother "Go in the house Mother or you'll catch new moan here!" I looked in the sky but couldn't see anything to catch.
Everybody went home except the children. The mothers came to call us with "Dinner's ready, come on in". We all went off to Sunday School in the afternoon and the Vicar prayed for us all on this "terrible day". Why did he say that I wondered? It seemed all right to me. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, but then, I was only six.

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