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Wartime memories as a child — WW2

I was born in Hertfordshire, just beyond the northern outskirts of Greater London, at the end of 1938, not long before World War II broke out, so my earliest childhood memories are of wartime Britain. My only sister, 18 months older than me, has almost identical memories.

From the time I was one year old, until long after the war ended, I slept in a reinforced wooden shelter which was built inside our dining room; it was a room within a room. I think it was called a ‘Morrison’ shelter (although there was also talk of ‘Anderson’ shelters, but I think they were the underground type). The shelter, which was our family bedroom, consisted of 2 narrow sections, for us children, which were built on either side of a larger section which contained our parents’ mattress. The sound of air raid sirens was commonplace throughout the war and when night air raids were severe I dimly remember waking sometimes as I was carried out of the house to a neighbour’s safer underground air raid shelter — an ‘Anderson’ maybe.

Because I was blithely unaware of what was actually happening I knew no fear during the war, but it must undoubtedly have been a horrifying and exhausting time for my parents and other adults. By the same token, the frequent references to ‘The Blitz’ and to ‘D-day’ that I overheard during my childhood held neither meaning nor terror for me, nor even the hope and expectation that the term ‘D-day’ imbued in all adults in 1944. Strangely I recall only the smell of the dank underground shelter where we spent so many nights and the all pervading darkness. At that time there were neither street lights nor was there any ambient light from houses since the War Cabinet had decreed that all windows must be clad in ‘blackout’ fabric.

Having survived the war unscathed and fearless, I was reduced to a quivering wreck one evening many years later on hearing the most terrific crash from upstairs. I was alone in the house at the time and so, with legs of jelly and an imagination in overdrive, I crept timidly up the staircase to confront whatever burglarious monster should await me. Imagine my astonishment when I found only a dense choking cloud of dust in my bedroom; the cause - the entire ceiling had fallen down. I learned subsequently that this was not an uncommon occurrence after the war, resulting from the massive vibration and shock sustained by houses in heavily bombed areas.

When World War II was declared my father, along with every other able bodied man in England, went along to enlist in the armed forces but, to his eternal distress, he was rejected on account of his very bad eyesight. He was, however, an active member of the Home Guard, the significance of which was completely lost on me. My education concerning this fine group of men was only completed many years later with the advent of the much loved TV series, ‘Dad’s Army’. My only recollection associated with my father’s Home Guard activities was the constantly repeated phrase, ‘I crawled through here the other night’, which he said to my mother whenever we were out walking in the neighbourhood. It did seem strange that my father went out crawling most nights, but who was I to question it.

Food rationing continued throughout the war, ending only in the 1950s, and it meant that although we had sufficient and, in fact, ate a well balanced diet, we always yearned for more and I recall vividly the taste of a strange, flattened, brown, dried banana which was contained in a food parcel sent from Canada. It was a rare moment of pure joy for this incipient ‘gourmet’. For the rest of the time my poor mother struggled to create innovative meals with the extraordinarily limited ingredients at her disposal. I can vaguely recall accompanying her to the grocer’s shop, the precursor of today’s ubiquitous supermarket, and watching as coupons were torn from our ration books and exchanged for tiny cubes of butter, paper twists of sugar or the infamous weekly egg. Believe it or not, we perceived scrambled eggs, made from that curious wartime abomination ‘powdered egg’, a rare and wonderful treat. To augment our diet and to cope with the absence of refrigeration, home grown runner beans were sliced and packed into stone jars along with large quantities of preservative salt, and soft fruit, grown in our garden, was cooked and then bottled in sealed ‘Kilner’ jars or made into jam. Milk was boiled daily to keep it from souring and the first time I tasted fresh milk was on a farm in Devon when I was horrified to be handed a foaming cup of warm milk straight from the cow! Our larder would have seemed empty to my children and grandchildren because they would have seen nothing familiar to their 20th century eyes nor would they have recognised the food value contained in the serried ranks of pots and jars. Neither would they have comprehended the hard work that had gone into their creation. And furthermore, neither did I. Now I realise with genuine humility and huge admiration what a fantastic job my mother did in her wartime kitchen and garden.

Gardens large and small were demolished by their owners during the war as the Government’s ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign took hold nationally. We had neither flowerbeds nor a lawn in our garden when we were children, not until long after the war ended in 1945, but we did have plenty of vegetables and fruit — which was of course the object of the ‘Dig for Victory’ exercise. And we had masses of apples. These grew abundantly in a small orchard at the end of the garden and I recollect, when seesawing one day in the orchard whilst eating apples, the unbelievable shock and pain as a wasp stung the inside of my mouth.

Our wooden seesaw had been made for us by our father and uncle, both of whom were gifted carpenters. A huge, front-opening, dolls’ house which they made for us was the envy of all the local children. It was furnished with perfect pieces of miniature hand-made wooden furniture and our mother made rugs from scraps of old velvet clothing, stiffened with cardboard, and curtains from other recycled fabrics. Toys were a rarity and I realise with hindsight that we were considered particularly fortunate children since we had not only a seesaw and a furnished dolls’ house but also a beautiful and most unusual china doll which our mother had won at a Christmas sale of work when she guessed the correct weight of a cake. The doll’s name was ‘Shirley’. My sister and I didn’t name her, we didn’t need to. She came to us already named, a fact proclaimed by the neat blue capital letters painted on her clothes trunk — ‘SHIRLEY’. The trunk contained a selection of tiny exquisite clothes and, the greatest treasure of all as far as I was concerned, a miniature dressing-table mirror, the handle and frame of which was decorated with painted flowers. Our parents managed to keep ‘Shirley’ hidden from us until Christmas Day and only now, some sixty years later, can I begin to understand the pleasure they derived from that lucky guess which enabled them to give us such a priceless Christmas present in those austere times. Who ‘Shirley’ was, where she came from, who had lovingly made her clothes, her trunk and decorated her hand mirror remained a mystery. We never knew. Years later my mother put ‘Shirley’ up for sale at one of the large auction houses where she attracted a lot of interest and sold for a considerable sum of money.

My parents kept chickens during the war, most people did, in order to supplement their protein intake. We had an arbitrary number of hens - seven. They were like the ‘little red hen’ in the story and I was told that they were called ‘Rhode Island Reds’. Their food was boiled daily in a large black enamel pan and consisted of potato peelings, mainly, plus other vegetable waste and food scraps and the kitchen permanently reeked of the smell of this vile brew. One evening, when I went alone to the end of the garden to feed the hens, I mistakenly let them all out into the vegetable garden and, unable to round them up without adult assistance, I ran back to my mother weeping bitterly and begging for help. It seemed to me, a little girl, a problem of immense proportions and yet to my parents, who had weightier matters to concern them, it appeared only a laughing matter and they came, smiling, to my aid. The chickens seemed like pets to me and when one of them died and my mother cooked it, nothing my parents could say would induce me to eat or even taste what they considered a rare treat.

At the end of the war, when once again we had a lawn in our garden and a colourful and scented herbaceous border, my Godfather visited us bringing with him a coconut. I had never seen such a thing and marvelled as we all sat on the lawn watching my father break it open with a hammer. As we munched the succulent white nutty flesh that this curious hairy wooden football had yielded, I didn’t imagine it would ever be possible to taste anything more glorious. However, this sentiment was relatively short lived and when food rationing finally ended I recall running to the local shop when sweets were rumoured to be on sale there. The rumour had spread like wildfire through the neighbourhood and by the time I arrived at the shop, panting, there was a long queue of excited and hopeful children who knew nothing of today’s mind-boggling selection of confectionary. Finally my turn came and I bought my very first sweets; they were extra strong mints. The discerning palate of the modern sweet-eating connoisseur would, I’m sure, have consigned them instantly to the rubbish bin, but to this wartime child they were nothing less than a taste of heaven.

CTP, 15.1.04

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