大象传媒

Part 1 = a7190561

Part 2 = a7190804

We were now left with Mrs.Lewis doing the cooking and Auntie Lew doing all
sorts of jobs. Each morning after prayers the children under seven would go with
Miss Jacka for lessons. The rest of us were given various jobs which needed
doing. Some children mopped the floors. Others dusted. Then there was the
breakfast things to be washed up and tables to be laid for our mid-day meals. I
don't remember anybody grumbling about what they had to do. We all seemed to
get on with it. In the aftenoons if it was fine Miss Jacka was in the garden and the
little ones sat at the back of the room either reading or drawing. While us older
ones sat at the front and had lessons with Miss O'Brian.

It was not long before a teacher started coming in each day from the village. The
little ones would go with her to the school-room for lessons while the rest of us
went with Miss O'Brian to the dining-room. We still had jobs to do around the
house. Miss Jacka spent most of the day either in the kitchen garden or keeping
the boilers going. I think the thing that hit us most was when Mrs Lewis, our
cook, decided to go back to London and Auntie Lew wished to go with her.

There must have been around thirty children living in the house at that time . For
a few weeks education was almost forgotten.. The little ones still had the teacher
from the village each day. The rest of us would assemble in the play room after
breakfast where Miss O'Brian would give us our jobs for the day which included
preparing the meals and then one or other of the teachers would come in to do the
cooking with our help.

After a while Mrs Pasha took over the cooking. Mrs Pasha was a widow and had
three children in the school. She had been bombed out of her home in Stepney and
had come to live in the village as there was nothing to keep her in London any
more. Everyone was so glad she came. We were told to give her a hand when
ever she asked us to help.

Considering we were a school from the East End of London we had some rather
unusual neighbours. Daneswood was in a private road. There were only three
properties in it. In the house where the grounds joined on to ours lived Sir Cecil
Dormer, the ambassador to Norway. Across the road lived John McCormack the
famous Irish singer, who always stopped to speak to us when we met him out in
the lane. One day a little child was playing in our woods , I thought at first it was a
girl but turned out to be a boy with blond hair in ringlets. I was sitting reading on
one of the logs when one of the girls asked me if I could see the two men standing
by the fence looking at the boy. She did not like the look of them and thought
they were spies. I assumed they were just looking after the child who was running
around throwing pine- cones the way some of our children did.. Miss O'Brian
went over and spoke to the two men. When she came back told us it was all right
for the little boy to be there and the men were only making sure he did not hurt
himself. His name was Alexander, and was the son of KingZog of Albania who
was living in a house at the back of the woods.

One day Miss O'Brian called myself and another girl who was the same age as me
to her room and told us she had made arrangements for the two of us to attend a
school in Winkfield. We were to catch the Windsor bus Monday to Friday and ask
to be put off at the school there. It was The Clapham Central from South London
who were evacuated in that area. We would be attending classes for English,
Arithmetic Shorthand and Typing. If there was anything we did not understand
she would go over it with us in the evening.
In December 1942Miss O'Brian said she would like to see my parents when they
visited again. I probably looked a bit concerned as she said it was nothing to
worry about. The following Sunday my mother came on her own and went to see
the Headmistress. My mother told me that Miss O'Brian was concerned as I
would be I4the following March and asked my mother to think about a business
course at Pitman's College in Southampton Row. She had already sent for the
brochures and the cost of a year's tuition. It would mean going back to London to
live and traveling each day. I said I would like to do this, so mum went home to
discuss it with dad and in January 1943I returned home.

Miss O'Brian and Miss Jacka were two wonderful teachers. Always cheerful and
did all sorts of tasks and always ready to listen to us. I received an education there
that would be impossible to get in any other school. I enjoyed my time with them
and have never forgotten the things I learnt there.

Going back to London after being in the country all the buildings looked grim. Of
course there were bomb sites everywhere. A lot of places had their windows boarded up so it was almost impossible to tell whether they were occupied or not. Belgrave Street had the shutters on the front windows shut all the time. Dad had put planes of glass taken from pictures in all the other windows just to get a bit of light into the room. They had been living in the kitchen and scullery. It was very hard to obtain coal so they could only managed to keep the kitchen range going. The old copper had gone and there was fresh paint on the walls. I slept in my own room for the first time since moving in the house.

I caught the bus to Southampton Row each day to attend Pitmans College. The
air-raid sirens would still sound now and then and we would all run down to the
basement which had been made into a shelter. I hated it if the sirens sounded
while on the bus as I never could make my mind up whether to stay on or get off.
There were a lot of young people from Gibraltar attending classes at Pitman's.
They were living in London as it was thought the Rock might be invaded' Many
foreign servicemen attended classes to learn English so there was quite a mixture
of people there at that time.

I made friends with a girl named Kitty. She went to St. Matthew's Church located
in the next street to where I lived. It was really the church hall as the church itself
had been completely destroyed at the beginning of the blitz. The same had
happened to St.James' Church which was very near. The two churches had
combined. Services were held in St Matthew's Hall and social events in St.
James' Hall. We went to the church on Sundays , and during the week went in
the evenings to St James' where whist drives, beetle drives and other events took
place. It was not advisable to be far from home. There were no street lights and
all buildings were not allowed to have any lights showing. There was also the
chance of an air raid.
In February l944 I started work at Teetgen's. in Bishopsgate. They were tea,
coffee, wine merchants and wholesale grocers. We were still having the
occasional air-raid. For a long time the heat was off London . The Germans were
concentrating more on the midlands and elsewhere. In June 1944 flying bombs
were coming across from the continent and landing on London. These had the
most awful noise as they approached . When the noise stopped it was a case of
diving under anything that was near. That was when they would drop. In June a
more deadly weapon was coming over. The V2 Rockets. They were completely
silent, so you did not know anything until they hit the ground and exploded,
causing dreadful damage.

My mother had asked the Mercers Co to let her know if there was a house that we
could move into as ours was in a very bad state by now. They had lost so much
property in the bombing that they said it was unlikely that they would be able to
let us have anything. We applied to the Borough Council for a flat. When one
became available we were glad to leave 2 Belgrave Street where all our dreams of
a bathroom French windows and a garden had come to nothing.

In London at this time there were American soldiers everywhere. In Britain men
and women between the age of 18 and 40 were in the services. We were all
praying that the war would end soon. Then we had the news that allied troops had
landed in Normandy. Our hopes were high , but the rockets where still coming. It
was not until the allies reached Holland that the bombing stopped.
Christmas came and went. The news was good. At the beginning of May we
heard that Germany had surrendered. I had a boy friend named Douglas who worked in the office at Teetgen's We went along to the Mansion House and heard the Lord Mayor declare The war had ended. On the 8th May we celebrated V.E.Day along with thousands of others. Outside Buckingham Palace we shouted with everyone else for the Royal Family to come on to the balcony. They came
out with the two princesses and Winston Churchill . We could now live our lives
in peace.

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