大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by the Dunstable At War Team on behalf of the author and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was in Belgium in August, just as war was becoming imminent. I was still at school and staying with a girl of my own age in South Belgium, on an exchange visit in a minute village just a few miles from the French border. I was at the Cedars School in Leighton Buzzard; this girl had stayed with me for 3 weeks and then I had 3 weeks with her.

We listened to the news avidly every day and by the time the guns were out in the streets in Brussels, it looked as if I would have to come home before my time was up in the last few days of August. On the night of 31st when the radio in Belgium announced that the Germans had invaded Poland, the farmer said to me, 鈥淐hristina, it鈥檚 time you went home.鈥� On the morning of 1st September, we left at 6.00am and the farmer very kindly took me as far as Ostend. It was a long journey with several changes of train; the farmer said goodbye and I caught virtually the last channel crossing from Ostend.

The sea was dead flat calm, a 4 hour crossing and as we came into Dover I remember seeing a sub surfacing. I arrived at St Pancras station, and in those days you could put your suitcase on the train, go and have a cup of coffee and when you came back your suitcase would still be there. Which is what I did; I sat down at a table, (tea was 6d a cup) when an older man came and sat next to me and said, 鈥淚 am going to buy you a cup of tea.鈥� He then told me, 鈥渢here will be war, war is coming. If we go down, we鈥檒l go down fighting.鈥� I鈥檝e never forgotten that. We said goodbye and I got back to Dunstable. War broke out on the 3rd, so it was a pretty close shave.

I lived in Great Northern Road in Dunstable and we would all sit round our large kitchen table waiting for news on the radio, it came through just about 11 o鈥檆lock when Neville Chamberlain said war had broken out. I had never seen my father break down before, but he simply put his head in his hands and cried. He said, 鈥淚 can鈥檛 take this again, we鈥檝e only just got over 1914-18.鈥� Understandable, when you consider it was only 21 years after the First World War. My father did not go to the front in 1914-18, he did munitions work here. By WWII he was too old to go to the front, so as a family we came off extremely well.

We were summoned back to school early at the Cedars in Leighton Buzzard and had a whole week to collect clothes and underwear to send to evacuees. We all dug out clothes we could spare because we thought that there would be shortages, but initially there wasn鈥檛; it was really quiet in the first 12 months. I went back to school for a third year in the sixth form, as I was hoping to go to university. I should have gone to France as I was studying French, so I had to stay on at school and do what I could to keep my language skills going. I remember that year there was an outbreak of German measles and most of us caught it; we were kept off school for a week, rather ironic.

We only had half time schooling at the Cedars because we shared our school with boys evacuated from William Ellis, Highgate, quite a high class Grammar school. We were a mixed school so it didn鈥檛 make life very easy. The numbers doubled and the staff had a difficult time. We went in the mornings and came home at lunchtime. These boys were put into billets in the town. The same thing happened at Luton High School, with a girl鈥檚 school from Edgware. William Ellis was a bigger school than ours, we had only just over 200 in those days, however we survived.

I went by bus to the Cedars at Leighton Buzzard, Eastern National buses, they were not very frequent. It could be very inconvenient if you missed the bus. You could arrive in Dunstable at 7pm. The buses went on strike about 1938 and I used the train. Father didn鈥檛 believe in running me to school although he had a car. The Cedars took girls from Bletchley, Wolverton, Linslade as well as Dunstable. The playing fields are in Mentmore Road which was a long way from the school then but near the station. The school has moved from there now.

I left school in July 1940 and I remember Dunkirk so well. We couldn鈥檛 initially appreciate the impact that the Germans had overrun all of France. We were led to believe that it was a huge heroic action that we had fought. We were not informed, we were in the dark. It was a brilliant sunny morning when soldiers starting coming back from Dunkirk; we didn鈥檛 really understand. The streets were full of soldiers exhausted, driving, lying there fast asleep or going off to barracks.

As war broke out people were made billeting officers. One our local officers knocked on the door and said, 鈥淢rs Scott, how many rooms have you got and how many people can you billet?" We had a couple of spare rooms and we thought we were going to have some schoolchildren. In the event because my father owned quite a slab of land on the west side which was an area of lockup garages and a huge shed, Smithfield market came down. The government commandeered that and people had to be turned out of their garages. They proceeded to put a big set of doors on the front of the shed that was meant for the meat storage. Shortly afterwards the meat came down from Smithfield. Mr B, a well known meat trader at Smithfield and his wife wanted to get out of London. They came down and wanted a billet. My father agreed that they could have the big back bedroom in our house and they came to stay in September. Mrs B had a pet marmoset and that was billeted as well! Sometimes we looked after it. Mrs B used to walk around with it on her shoulder and then it went into a box wrapped in flannel, and put by the pipe near the boiler. That didn鈥檛 last long, the couple were called back to London and so was the meat. It was the phoney war at that time. We still had the empty bedroom, and I was off to university.

One day in summer of 1940 a customer came to get petrol from my father鈥檚 garage; a chauffeur driven car with a lady and gentleman in it. They said, 鈥淲e are desperate to get out of Blackheath.鈥� My father, knowing we should have someone to stay in the bedrooms told them to see my mother. The man was a pearl merchant in Hatton Garden with his sister and for 8 months we shared our house with them. They came back for another 10 months when the doodlebugs came. In between times we had officers from the barracks in High Street North, Royal Engineers I think, and then a series of colonels. They paid of course. When I came home from university, I had to sleep in the little dressing room but there wasn鈥檛 much room. We also had the box room and we were open house to mother鈥檚 relatives. One Sunday night my cousin and I shared a single camp bed; I was at the top and she was at the bottom, and in the end I put my head in a drawer because I couldn鈥檛 put my head anywhere else. It was quite dreadful. It was very hard work for my mother providing meals on rations but we were so full of people, we just had to help each other out.

A knock on the door 鈥淲e would like to commandeer your cellar.鈥� We lived at 78 Great Northern Road and in our row were 6 houses. Large cellars were built under these and there was a chute at the side where coal was delivered. Father kept the cellar whitewashed but it was very damp. They shored it up with extra wood and put in a wood floor and then dug a tunnel from the side of the house, across to the pavement and boarded it in so that there was an entrance at the far side of the street. There were various bits down there, a bucket and things and extra lighting. It was meant to be for people but in fact it was never used.

On one occasion when they bombed Luton with a parachute canister bomb, wicked things, they floated about and you never knew where they were going to land. Some people in Luton took fright, knocked on the door and said could they go down but it wasn鈥檛 feasible, there was no bed, nothing down there, it was dank and it had to be made clear that it wasn鈥檛 any good. We heard that bomb come down, horrible night, we heard crunching sounds.

I was in Cambridge and my college was evacuated from 1940 - 1943. I was in the 4th year, training to be a teacher when I went to London and was there during 1943 and 44. That was hairy. I was in a billet that autumn in Swiss Cottage, a proper boarding house. We had a shelter in the garden but it wasn鈥檛 always possible to get out when raids of about 90 planes would come over. We would just get into bed at 11 o鈥檆lock and on one occasion we couldn鈥檛 get into the garden it was too dangerous, people were being killed by the shrapnel, the ack ack was terrific, rattling away. One night we sat under the dining room table. You could hear these things going crunch. We didn鈥檛 panic, we just sat there. Sometimes our own shells would come down as they did not explode. Another night we sat in our tin hats in the shelter. I was caught in another raid off Southampton Road and we went down in the basement.

There was very little petrol making travelling very difficult. My father was allocated petrol coupons during the war, as he had a garage but his livelihood was very restricted. He had made munitions in WWI. In WWII, he turned the workshop of his garage into a training school. Some of his employees who were too old to go to war trained young men. It was very dangerous because the petrol tanks for the pumps were underneath the property.

When I finished in London, I went to teach in Herefordshire in a mansion owned by Perkins engines who had evacuated and let it to this school. It was a boarding school and children couldn鈥檛 go home, they were too widespread, there wasn鈥檛 the transport anyway so we missed out on the May bank holiday in 1944.

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