大象传媒

The day I started school in September 1940, the Battle of Britain was at its height. I remember looking up at a beautiful blue sky and seeing what seemed like small dots chasing each other. They had long white tracer tails.

I was born and brought up in Witham, in north Essex, and my father was excused from military service because he worked in a factory which made parts for tanks. However, he was in the Home Guard and used to go out a lot at night. My mother worked on the land.

When I first went to school I had to take a gas mask with me, which was housed in a cardboard box. I never used it, apart from when we had to have practices.

The Germans must have thought my father's factory was important because quite a few bombs were dropped on Witham. I don't think any hit the target, but they fell in surrounding meadows and one made a huge crater in a street near my house. My friends and I used to play in the bomb craters in the meadows, even though we were told not to by our parents.

For a short time we had some evacuees from London staying with us, but when my sister was born they had to leave. There wasn't enough room in our little council house. Later in the war some men came round with an enormous steel table and put it in our kitchen. It had wire squares which fitted on the sides and we had to sleep under it when there were air raids. Someone told me it was a Morrison shelter. I hated sleeping there. It made me feel like a caged animal. Other houses had shelters in the gardens, called Anderson shelters, but my Dad said his garden was far too important to be messed around with by a shelter. He grew all our vegetables, and he had an allotment as well, about a mile away.

Food was very strictly rationed and we were each given ration books with little tear-out coupons or squares which were crossed out when you'd had your ration of a certain thing for the week.

Dreaming of bananas
I used to dream about having a banana. I had never seen one, and when my grandma visited us and said she had a special present for my birthday I secretly prayed it was a banana. I was quite disappointed when she produced a toy pistol for firing 'caps'.

I used to be fascinated by the way the weekly rations were kept in the home of my father's parents, whom I used to visit by crossing the railway line at the bottom of our garden. My dad came from a big family and as he was the oldest there were still four or five of his brothers and sisters at home. (One was fighting in the war, but he never came back. He was killed in Italy, although they never found his body.) My grandmother would take each person's rations for the week (butter, cheese, jam, meat, etc) and put them in separate piles on a huge dressing table in the sitting room, so each person could see how much he or she had left.

It was always hard to keep warm in the winter. Coal was strictly rationed, so every Saturday my dad and I used to take an old bike and a sack down on the railway line and look for bits of coal dropped by the steam engines on the way to and from Braintree. But it was rotten coal, full of slate and didn't burn very well. Still, it was better than nothing. I used to have my dad's Home Guard greatcoat on my bed, which kept me warm. Of course, we never had holidays during the war. All the seaside beaches were covered with barbed wire because of possible invasion, and although we didn't live far from the coast I don't think I saw the sea until I was ten.

Remembering D-Day
I have an abiding memory of 6 June 1944 - D-Day. I think it was a Monday. All the houses on our newish council estate had long back gardens, each separated from the neighbours by a low wooden fence. When I came home from school for dinner I found my mother halfway up the back garden, and to the right and left, almost as far as the eye could see, the women were calling across the fences to each other, laughing and waving, swapping snippets of the latest news of the invasion. I remember them so well. They stood there in their full length pinafores, some wearing headscarves and some, like my mum, wearing their wellies, completely oblivious to the high winds and squally showers, sharing a common and almost tangible joy.

My mum hugged me and said the war would soon be over and then she would see her young brother again. He had been a prisoner of war in Germany for a long time. I remember being caught up in the general excitement, but I still pestered mum about what was for dinner.

Doodlebugs
Near the end of the war the doodlebugs paid us a few visits. The V1 engines would cut out before they fell to earth and we used to hold our breath, waiting to see how close they were when they exploded. One passed just over my auntie's chimney when we were staying with her in Chelmsford. My youngest uncle used to swap bits of a V2 he'd found for a few sweets, and sometimes we got chewing gum from the American airmen who were stationed a few miles away at Wethersfield.

Like millions of others we relied on the 大象传媒 to entertain us and give us news about the war. We had a funny wireless. It was powered by batteries - like small car batteries - and they used to have to be topped up and recharged every couple of weeks or so. For some reason we called them 'accumulators'. A man would come round and collect them and leave us a couple of newly charged ones. This went on during most of the war and it wasn't until much later that we got our first electrically driven wireless. (We never called them radios in those days).

We loved listening to Tommy Handley and 'ITMA' (It's That Man Again), but my favourite was Frankie Howerd. I seem to remember he entertained the troops in North Africa. Then we never missed 'Family Favourites' and Vera Lynn's lovely voice. I think it was on Sundays because it somehow went with our little joint of roast beef and mum's marvellous gravy and Yorkshire puddings. Then there was 'Workers Playtime'. My Dad used to say he couldn't have made it through a day at the factory without a dose of that.

In the last days of the war, I remember seeing a photograph in the Daily Mirror which haunts me still. British troops had just liberated Belsen concentration camp and there was a large close-up of a body which had been completely burned. It was like a large piece of grey ash shaped in human form. I recall staring at it, fascinated and horrified at the same time.

When the war finished we had an enormous street party, with long tables which stretched for nearly 100 yards. A couple of men dressed up as Hitler and Mussolini and all the children were told they could attack them and give them what for. The poor men emerged with black faces, torn clothes and bleeding mouths, but they seemed to think it was worth the pain!

Things didn't change for us all that much for a couple of years after the war ended, except of course, there were no more air raids! The rationing stayed and it was ages before sweets came off ration, and even when they did the shops ran out of stock.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.