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My mother was 6 years old when the war broke out. She had just started school at a Dominican convent in London. She remembers having to leave her work and go down to the basement when the siren started. During that time she also remembers sleeping in a brick built shelter in the garden of her home in Chingford because of incendiary bombs. Her father was an ARP warden and helped to put them out. Mum remembers ‘escaping’ from the shelter one night and watching the ‘pretty lights’. After a while her school was evacuated to Stintchcombe in Gloucestershire and she boarded there for three weeks before being allowed to return home because she was so miserable.

Her father worked in the Civil Service and had to stay in London but he paid for my grandmother, my mother, her sister and her cousin to stay at Home Farm on the Kingston Lacy estate in Dorset, where they had spent family holidays before the war. Mum’s brother was sent to a boarding school in Wimbourne

The farmer’s wife made their lives a misery while they were at Home Farm. She gave the children so little to eat that my grandmother gave them her food to stop them from going hungry. Although it was a dairy farm they were allowed very little milk. They mostly ate rabbit pie. The rabbit often contained lead pellets and was just stewed in water and the crust was heavy and hard. Sometimes they had rabbit stewed with potatoes, again just cooked in water. At tea time they had bread with either butter or jam, they were not allowed both. If they were given apple pie it had almost no sugar and a very hard crust. My mother remembers the farmer’s wife being very angry with my grandmother when one day she knocked into a cupboard, the doors flew open and bags and bags of sugar fell out. The cupboard was stuffed so full with sugar that the doors were bulging.

The family did not know that there was an inside toilet in the house until they left. Even when they were really ill in the night they were made to use the outside toilet. My grandmother had to bath her children and do her washing outside in the barn in the tin bath where the farm workers washed their clothes.

The farmer’s wife was cruel to the children; she would hit them with a broom for shuffling their feet in the gravel round the farm house and told them that there was a ghost in the house to scare them. One day when the children were scrumping apples she found them and let the pigs under the apple trees so that they were too frightened to come down. She left them there for ages. Another day, when she caught them playing in the haystack she told them there was a scythe hidden there which would chop their legs off. My mother’s cousin loved apples, once the farmer’s wife held an apple in each hand, one red and juicy looking and one small and green. She asked the little girl to choose which apple she would like to eat. When she picked the red apple the farmer’s wife showed her that the wasps had eaten it and it was just an empty shell and told her it served her right for being greedy.

My grandmother was at her wit’s end because she could see what was going on but she couldn’t do anything about it. Her husband didn’t believe her because the farmer’s wife was always charming to him. Eventually things became so unbearable that she took the family back to London. Mum remembers that her father was cross but her mother refused to go back Eventually he realised that she was telling the truth because she was very ill when she came home and was found to be suffering from malnutrition through giving the children most of her food.

While she was at Kingston Lacy mum attended the village school. There were 50 children in 2 classes. Mum was in the younger class. The toilets were outside and the toilet roll was kept in the classroom. Mum remembers the embarrassment of having to go to the front of the class and ask the teacher for toilet roll and being laughed at by the other children. She also remembers regularly being caned for being late because the farmer’s wife would not give them breakfast on time.

After their return the family remained in London for a short time but then my grandfather’s office moved to Bournemouth and they rented a house there for two and a half years. During that time my mother went to a small private school and her brother was able to visit at weekends. My grandfather’s office moved back to London shortly after the family relocated so he stayed at a gentleman’s club during the week and returned to Bournemouth for the weekends.

My grandmother didn’t like the house that they had rented because the neighbours delighted in telling her that the lady that lived there previously had killed herself in the bath. She used to make my mother sit on the stairs outside the bathroom and read ‘The Wind in the Willows’ to her every time she had a bath.

During the time the family lived in Bournemouth they used to be visited by their cousin who was too ill to join the armed forces. On one occasion he was very upset because he was given three white feathers by someone on a bus. When he was well enough he joined the Navy, which he enjoyed.

Mum’s granny lived with the family in Bournemouth. She loved to visit two big stores in the town called Beales and Bobby’s where she could get coffee and cream cakes. Unfortunately they were bombed one after the other and with them went the cream cakes!

Shortly after the bombing of Beales and Bobby’s my mother and grandmother were in their allotment picking vegetables. They saw a plane overhead and thinking that it was British waved to it. As it got closer one of them recognised a swastika on the side and they both dived for cover in the hedge. They were machine gunned and although neither was injured they were both left very shaken by the incident. My grandmother decided things couldn’t be much worse in London so they all returned to join my grandfather.

When they go back to London they discovered they could not live in their own house because the tenant had kept 32 cats which had messed everywhere, had kittens and generally left the place in a smelly and deplorable state. It had to be fumigated and when the family finally moved back in it smelled horribly of disinfectant. By this time the convent school had returned from Gloucestershire so Mum went back there cycling to school every day because there were no cars on the road.

This was the time of the doodle bugs. When Mum heard the engines cut out she knew that they were going to fall somewhere close by. Usually they made for the local reservoirs. One day one stopped very close to Mum’s home and she rushed back and tried to get her granny to take cover under the dining room table with her mother. Her granny refused saying that if she was going to die she would die in a dignified fashion. At this point the air raid shelter was unusable as it was full of water and greater crested newts! Mum hated the newts; she remembers them as large ugly things not like the small ones we find in ponds today.

One night my mother was woken by the ceiling falling in on her. She couldn’t get out of bed because of the plaster and her mother was afraid she was hurt but could not get upstairs because the staircase was blocked with debris. Eventually Mum managed to get downstairs to her mother who was very upset but relieved that they were both unhurt. Mum was about 12 at the time. A land mine had been dropped at the bottom of the road killing a little boy and demolishing most of the houses further down. Her house was just about standing but she says you could see the sky through the dining room ceiling.

Just after the bombs fell some ladies from the WRVS came to help clear up the mess. One of the ladies was my grandmother’s sister in law. She and my grandmother had been feuding for years and my grandmother said she would not allow her into the house (Mum can’t remember if she did let her in or not in the end, but she thinks she did and the WRVS did a very good job). Mum remembers the windows being boarded up and a tarpaulin being put over the roof. They stayed in the house while some lovely Irish workmen worked round them to repair the damage. They had no hot water, gas or electricity but had a roaring fire in the living room. They collected water from the top of the hill in every available utensil, used candles and oil lamps for light and my grandmother cooked stews over the open fire.

After the worst of the bombing stopped life was much better and carried on fairly quietly until the war ended in may 1945. Mum remembers VE day, but says to her it was a bit of an anti-climax. VJ day was far more exciting. That weekend she had gone on summer camp with the girl guides in a big furniture van. At the camp some cows knocked over the provisions tent and ate all the vegetables so they had to ask the farmer if they could dig some potatoes. Mum remembers joining in thoroughly enjoying it. Then, when victory in Japan was announced the Guides joined in the bonfire celebrations in the nearby village and had a memorable party.

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