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AN ORDINARY AFTERNOON OUTING

This was just an ordinary afternoon ride out on the 24 Bus to Trafalgar Square with my small son Michael, aged two, in 1942. My husband was serving out in Africa and had never seen his son although he was born prematurely. I had managed to get this little coat and trousers for him from a good as new shop in Sloane Square, a really good coat for very little money. My coat wasn’t new of course. There were the notices all around Nelson’s column, but we had got used to them. The pigeons were the attraction.

We would perhaps walk back through St James’s park and catch the 24 Bus home to Cornwall Street where the Pimlico Modern Secondary School is now. This was normal life for us then and we took it for granted. Like for instance his daily bath. Whatever time I tried to do this - no bathroom, a couple of ordinary chairs with a large bowl, shaped like a bath on them – there would be an air raid. I tried morning, afternoon and evening, but soon as I’d got him undressed the siren would go, and I would have to wrap him up in a blanket and head down the stairs from the second floor to the basement and out into the shelter which was the old coal cellar. I would keep saying Ooh bang! Little wonder his first word was not Dad or Mum but ‘bang’.

A LITTLE DROP OF BRANDY IN HIS BOTTLE

When Michael was first born he really was too weak to suck properly. Unfortunately I got one of the very few not so good nurses who lost her temper with him and pushed his head right against me a lot of times. This must have frightened him and he just wouldn’t try. Eventually one of the students put a little drop of brandy in a bottle of milk, and he was away! Not absolutely but that was really how he lived - so of course it’s been his excuse ever since and now he is sixty two.

NOW I’M AN L.A.C.W.

I was posted to Cardington and we lived in Married Quarters, about five of us to a house. We had of course to keep our house clean, so we made it fun as much as possible. For instance, cleaning stairs (no carpet or lino left on them of course). We stood at the top, threw a bucket of water down , brushed it down, then mopped over the floor – done! There was Officer Inspection weekly. The officer would put on white gloves, then pass fingers over door tops for dust!

It was suggested that I should go for training to be an officer, but Les, my husband was a sergeant in the R.A.S.C, so it just wasn’t on. Doing shift work meant that I could hitch a lift home sometimes. Les was stationed in Whitehall and was living with my mum and dad in Cornwall Street where Pimlico Modern Secondary
school is now . As long as you got a lift on a lorry you were fine, no problems and you were often treated to a cup of tea and a piece of cake. You just didn’t accept lifts in private cars.. We could manage to get in and out of WAAF quarters pretty easily and there was quite a bit of life going on. I always remember one concert held in the enormous hanger, really meant for the airship which held an enormous number of fellows and girls and normally unbelievably noisy. This time a WAAF sang a song - Alone Am I to a classic tune . It was beautiful and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop till a few seconds after the end. She had lost her husband - a Pilot in a raid a few weeks before.

Of course you had to go through a bit of initiation before you were accepted as ‘in’. I was sent to the NAFFI in the complete blackout on the first day, sort of miles away on such a camp, all sorts of holes and difficult bits causing quite a few falls, to buy some non existent types of cakes - but it was all part of it all, you accepted it and laughed with the rest of them.

When I was home from the WAAF with my baby, I lived in the top two rooms of my mum and dad’s house. Of course we had no vacuum cleaner, it was a brush and ashtray for carpets, and down on hands and knees with scrubbing brush and house flannel and then polish for lino I washed our clothes and of course his nappies, but the bedding went to my mum on Tuesday mornings so as it could be put in the boiling. For her, washday was a whole day’s effort. Down to the scullery in the basement of the house to light a coal fire under the boiler so as to get hot water for the washing and also the boiling. Then came rinsing, blueing and starching, followed by mangling and hanging out in the yard. Sometimes it would be frozen by the time to bring it in at night. Then it was folding and ironing with the old flat irons on the gas. Last of all airing - it was very important to my mum.

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