大象传媒

From Children鈥檚 Home in London to luxury on Somerset farm.

鈥淭his story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Anita Howard from the Essex Action Desk CSV on behalf of Mrs Jill Pye and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs.Pye understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions鈥�.

I was 5 years old when war broke out. My father, Sidney Grimsdale, 鈥楪rim鈥�, was 39 years old, an experienced Territorial soldier, and a crack shot, having come third in the British Empire at Bisley. So when war appeared imminent he was called up to be a Sergeant Major in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He left us in July 1939, not to be seen again until 1944.

My mother, brother John and I were living in the family home, a rented house in Surrey, on the corner of Kenley aerodrome. On September 9th my mother was taping up the windows of the house, in anticipation of a gas attack.
Shortly after that we were ordered to leave, as it was considered too dangerous to live so close to the airfield. The house was in fact bombed flat in 1940.

John and I went to live with my mother鈥檚 youngest sister, Auntie Vi, in Witney, Oxfordshire. My mother moved to a house in West Ewell, Surrey, and worked in an antique shop to help with our upkeep. She had a good 鈥榚ye鈥� according to the owner, and purchased several pieces, some of which I still have, but most were sold in subsequent times or destroyed in the bombing, including a very nice dressing table for me, which was replaced by two orange boxes with a curtain around them!

The year was memorable by John and I learning to swim. The town pool was a section of the River Windrush, partitioned off by corrugated iron fences erected across the river. We left our clothes on the bank outside and ducked under the fence to get in the fields by the river. The magnificent stone factory was still there a few years ago, but sadly boarded up and unused for some years. I got a piece of blanket in my eye and had my first visit to hospital to have it removed.

In 1940 we rejoined my mother in Ewell. Having an aversion to school dinners, experienced in Witney, and consisting of mince and rice every day, my friend Kit and I were allowed to go to the nearby British Restaurant, where my mother was working. These were set up to produce cheap nutritious food, and they did! In a recent visit the building is still standing, and is now a scout hut.

We bred rabbits to eat, called them by numbers so as not to get too fond of them. Fed on large saucepans full of bran mash and local greenery they supplied us with meat. My brother killed them, with a swift blow to the back of the neck with a shaft of a large hammer. My job was to nail the skins to the shed door and clean them with alum and saltpetre, ready to be made into hats and mittens, which we then sold. The paws were kept in many pockets for good luck charms!

We had a cat called Pandora, prodigious producer of kittens, which she insisted on having in my bed, covered with an old army groundsheet. After the event she would retire downstairs, but every morning they were brought up to me and placed on my neck.

Our first bomb was an ordinary high explosive, landing in the road 100 yards away. We were all sheltering in the cupboard under the stairs, thought to be the safest place. We had food, drinks and blankets and my mother sang songs to us, notably a favourite lullaby,
鈥楧o you want the moon to play with, or the stars to run away with? I鈥檒l get them for you by and by鈥�.
Unfortunately the blast took a lot of tiles off, and blew all the windows in the front of the house in. The cupboard door jammed and we could not get out. My mother was terrified as she could she see flames nearby. We were rescued on the morning by a friendly A.R.P. warden.

Whilst the house was being repaired we went as a family down to my paternal grandfather, the only grandparent we had still living. He was in his 80.s abd lived in an old stone cottage down a track in the village of Rowledge in Surrey. The toilet was an earth closet in a lean-to outside the house. My mother struggled with an old black-leaded primus stove range for cooking. Apart from the garden my grandfather鈥檚 principle occupation was to sit on the kitchen steps and shoot crows, and pick the fleas off his dog鈥檚 back, and crack them in his fingers with great satisfaction, the poor dog was bald as lot of hair came off with the fleas. He also taught my brother to shoot blackbirds, because they went after his abundant fruit! A greengage tree grew over the lean-to and we used to sit on the roof eating the ripe fruit with the juice running down our chins.

On returning home we were given a Morrison air raid shelter, an enormous iron box with solid roof and gratings at the sides. We used it as a dining table and the crockery had to be placed carefully to avoid the rivets.

The second bomb was a V 2 rocket, landing at the back of the house with a similar amount of damage. We were showered with glass from the windows, but no harm done, - another sojourn with Granddad!

In 1943 my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and underwent a major operation, 鈥榳ith everything taken away鈥�. The ensuing menopause caused a lot of problems.

John and I were taken under the wing of the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen鈥檚 Association, (SSAFA). We were sent to a children鈥檚 home in Muswell Hill; a grim experience with orphaned families being split up and sent for adoption, to great heartbreak. Once a week we were kitted out with clean clothes, going to a big cupboard with a miscellany of clothes, we were never given the same garment twice. We went to school and were the subject of some bullying, and to church twice on Sunday, walking in twos鈥� in a crocodile and sucking Bovril cubes for a treat! A visit to London Zoo resulted in a boy called Gerald being bitten on the finger by a monkey and for days he screamed the place down while kaolin poultices were applied each night.

My mother survived the operation, and lived to be 85, but was unable to care for us, so we were sent down to Somerset to a farm for the summer. It was idyllic. We had never seen so much food!! An old fashioned dairy had huge tubs of brine with hams soaking and more hanging from hooks in the ceiling. There were large bowls of thick cream (which was illegal) and junket. It was a mixed farm, run by the farmer and his wife and their son. My chief memory of the son was his feet sticking through the brass bars on his bed, when he slept in after a night out. The cooking was done on a large open fire in the kitchen, and it was my job in the morning to go up to the field and pick huge mushrooms for breakfast. They grew in abundance in a field sloping up a hill, and I had to keep a sharp lookout for the ram, which had an impressive head of horns, and would come thundering down the hill while I legged it for the gate! There were a lot of feral cats, which were fed skimmed milk in the morning. The abundance of kittens was dealt with by the farmer hurling them against a post with deadly accuracy, and drowning them. The dispatch of the chickens upset me more as they were hung by their feet, throats cut and left to scatter blood and feathers all over the place, much worse than our rabbits鈥� fate.

We returned home with my mother in poor health and the assistance of SSAFA with clothes and blankets. Our sofa had collapsed and we decided to recover it with a new grey army blanket. All the springs were taken out, re-sewn in, the horse hair teased out and the blanket sewn over, the underneath being covered with Hessian from a food parcel my father had sent from the desert. A true labour of love, and when we finally finished and sat on it, we heard a mewing, and realised one of the kittens was inside! The whole thing had to be taken apart to reveal the kitten inside one of the springs. We agonised on how to get it out, but on putting down on the floor, it just walked out.

In 1944, before D Day, but after Alamein, there was a knock on the front door, a strange man in a bright blue pinstripe suit there. It was my father, reluctantly demobbed, to look after his family.

On V.E. Day we went up to London and I shall never forget standing in Trafalgar Square watching the searchlights criss-cross the sky, and everybody singing and dancing.

My father returned from the war profoundly deaf and his work severely affected. My mother reckoned it took him 15 years to recover.

Jill Pye

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