大象传媒

I was twelve when the War began. I remember that my mother and I were making beds and we stopped to listen to Neville Chamberlain鈥檚 broadcast telling us that we were now at war with Germany. We looked at each other and just went back to making the beds. My mother was housekeeping for a gentleman with a cottage at Whitchurch in Berkshire and I was about to go back to boarding school in Rickmansworth. This meant that most of my war was spent at Ricky, with holidays in various places in the Reading area. Neither of these places were greatly affected by bombing until the Doodle-bugs started and Ricky was just at the limit of their flight if they overshot London.

When I returned to school after war was declared I found that trenches had been dug in the grounds 鈥� nasty, horrid things they were, very narrow and rather damp. For a while we had to have trench drills, but these petered out before long and school life altered very little. However, we did have to knit ourselves 鈥減ixie-hats鈥� in case we had to go into these dugouts. I was not a knitter and it took me a long time to get the thing done, although it was a very easy pattern, just two long strips, one of which was joined up to make the hood and the other sewn along to make the scarf. I eventually got mine done by dint of pulling the work until it seemed stretched to the right length 鈥� needless to say it shrunk back and I was left with the oddest looking pixie-hat imaginable.

Later in the war, once the doodle-bugs started, it was realised that we could be hit and we all had to sleep on mattresses in the corridor, two to a mattress and top to tail. In case we had to evacuate quickly, we had to sleep in our outdoor coats and wear the pixie-hat! Fortunately the school avoided any damage, although one or two of the missiles hit the village. However, I remember having to dive under my desk whilst sitting my School Certificate exams, when we heard the chug-chug-chug of the machine and then the silence 鈥� whilst you waited for the BANG!! I was also in London one day, during the holidays, walking along Oxford Street when I suddenly heard the most enormous explosion nearby and saw a plume of dust rise above the rooftops 鈥� that was a V2. On another occasion my mother and I (mother was at that time working for a lady with a flat in Park Lane) were staying at the flat and a raid started. We went down to the reception area which was used as a gathering point for the residents. There was a tremendous racket and I really thought we would be hit by a bomb, the whole place shuddered in a most alarming way, but we survived and I later discovered that most of the noise came from the huge Naval guns in the Park opposite.

I think my only other real encounter with bombs was during one holiday when we lived at Beenham, near Reading. Mother was with a family who were living in a rented farmhouse and we awoke, suddenly, to see a bright orange/green glow outside. Hastily putting on some clothes, we went outside to see what was happening and found that the house was ringed by these strange green fires. I was told this was a Molotov Cocktail, a bunch of incendiary bombs. It was a narrow escape because the house was thatched and had one of them landed on the thatch we might not have had time to get out.

My mother and I were very alone as my father had died in 1935; I was an only child and we had no close relatives in the country although there were plenty in Australia on my father鈥檚 side. This meant that I was in many ways less involved in what was happening than most of my school friends, in addition I was away at boarding school for much of the time. I suppose the war seemed rather unreal to me 鈥� just lots of news bulletins, Pathe News at the cinema and occasionally a classmate called to the Head鈥檚 office because a relative had been killed or injured. The one thing I remember very clearly is that it genuinely never occurred to me that we would NOT win the War! Such is the optimism of youth.

My personal involvement with the War was uneventful; my chief impression was that life was rather drab, but I was rarely frightened and I was never hungry, which was not the case for many people, especially in the towns. Because we were a boarding school with 400 pupils plus teachers and domestic staff, we received a good ration allowance which, together with food grown in the school鈥檚 kitchen garden, meant that the food was wholesome if rather dull. I remember eating slices of bread with either a scraping of butter or jam and then just plain bread 鈥� I was a growing lass! We had the occasional treat; 鈥渢reacle bathmat鈥� was a great favourite; this was a slab of batter pudding with warmed golden syrup. Then once a month, when the House Committee had their meeting, these impressive gentlemen would come into the dining hall to cut the 鈥淐ommittee Cake鈥�, a slab of fruit cake. I well remember how we used to giggle if one particular Committee member cut our cake, because he was an eminent surgeon and we let our imaginations run riot.

Later in my school life, this same surgeon would remove my appendix at the small, but well equipped, hospital (The San) belonging to the school. The fact that this hospital was known as the Sanatorium led to an embarrassing misunderstanding, when I had to be taken from school to the Middlesex Hospital in London for an operation on my nose, after I developed a nasty infection in my sinuses. When I arrived at the hospital the infection had spread to my lungs and I had pleurisy as well. I was taken to a screened off part of the ward and Sister came to take some details. She said, 鈥淵ou have come up from the Sanatorium?鈥� 鈥淵es鈥� I replied. There was a pause 鈥� 鈥淗ow long have you had tuberculosis?鈥� I was horrified and had to explain the situation!

However, in spite of my comparatively comfortable war there was to be one event that made a lasting impression on me as a person, and has coloured my thinking ever since. That was the Newsreel that I saw in a cinema when the Concentration Camps were liberated. I was about 17 at the time, very impressionable and somewhat idealistic. I came out of the cinema with tears rolling down my face, suddenly realising what man could do to his fellow man. I have never forgotten that moment. These dreadful things did not affect me personally, but that ordinary people men and women like myself could do these things in cold blood was overwhelming. I knew that warfare was cruel and that many innocent people were killed or injured 鈥� on all sides 鈥� but this was something quite different. I believe I grew up that day. Even today, if these pictures are shown on TV, I feel exactly the same. On one occasion when visiting a War Museum in France and seeing photographs of the Jews from that area being herded into trains to go to Germany, all the old feelings returned and I went outside and wept.

Mine was a 鈥渃omfortable鈥� war; it was something far different for thousand, millions, of others.

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