大象传媒

War in the Suburbs.

People often get asked if they remember where they were when something important happened in the world. I can never remember where I was when John Kennedy was shot, nor do I remember when the first man walked on the moon. But I can quite clearly remember September 3rd 1939. When we heard the voice of Chamberlain telling us that since he had not had an assurance from Herr Hitler we now had to consider we were in a state of war my Grandmother, my Mother, my Father and my sister Joan, our friend Mary and myself were really frightened and we all stood behind the large sofa which stood near to the window in our best room. Suddenly the siren started to wail and I am sure that we all expected bombs to fall upon us immediately, especially as we lived in London, and we knew that this would be the centre which the Germans would wish to attack. To this day the sound of a siren makes the hairs on my head stand on end. Fortunately, as we cowered behind the sofa, we very soon heard the reassuring steady note of the All-clear sounding. I can't remember very much about the rest of the day but I expect we sat down to our Sunday roast lunch. My Father was like most Fathers of the day and he liked to have a conventional Sunday lunch every week.

After that nothing very much happened. That September was a beautiful month, a sort of Indian summer. My Mother's older sister, our Aunt Milly, had a caravan which she and her husband kept in Hertfordshire. So we left our Father at home and somehow reached the caravan. All I can remember is wandering about the fields picking blackberries.
My Mother soon began to worry about my Father, who was the typical man of his time and had no idea how to cook a meal, so after about two weeks we went home. Nothing had changed in London, no bombs had fallen, and the house looked just the same. However there was the most awful smell in the kitchen. Dad had not noticed that there was a dead mouse in the mouse-trap under the brown cupboard which stood in the corner!

Soon the Junior school to which I went was closed and for the next few months I had to go to Mr.and Mrs. Hooper's house, at number 14, where Mr. Cairns came to teach us. He was a rather horrid man, red and fat. I have no idea what he taught us as we only spent about two hours each day with him. As the next year went on the bombing of London began and by now my Aunt had bought a bungalow. It was decided that my Mother would stay in London with my Father and my Grandmother would take my sister and me to live in this bungalow, in a village called Buntingford in Hertfordshire. It was quite a simple building. There was no mains electricity or water, so we got quite used to filling the oil lamps and pumping up the water into the sink. The lavatory was in a hut down the garden. Of course this was not such a great shock to us as it would be to children of today. We had no electronic toys and wireless in those days was run by accumulators which were much more like the batteries which nowadays run cars. My Grandmother somehow managed to cook on an oil-stove, but there was a big black Range in the bungalow which was lit just at the weekends when my aunt and two of her friends came down from London to stay. Our Aunt had a shop used to bring food and sweet coupons with her and we happily helped to sort them out and count them.

My sister hated living in the country as she was already at the Grammar school and missed her friends. I loved wandering about the fields in my Wellington boots and jumping in the ditches, but when it was time for School to start in September we all went back to Hendon. This time the bombing started in earnest. I remember quite clearly when I went out to play one evening that the gable wall of the house at the bottom of our road was lit by the fires that were raging in the East-end. I suppose my parents were very calm about the whole thing. My Father had been in the front line trenches in the First World War and what he had experienced there must have been so much worse than anything happening then. We did have a big oak table on which we dined, so when the sirens went we all used to go downstairs and sit under the table. After we had hit our heads and legs several times we decided that it was safer to stay in bed. We soon got used to putting our fingers in our ears so that we couldn鈥檛 hear the noise of any plane droning overhead or the Ak-Ak guns firing at them. I can鈥檛 remember ever worrying very much about the air raids. We lived at number two and in the next road the same house, number two, was hit by a bomb, but nobody was hurt. Another house, just beyond our back garden, was also hit one night. There was quite a big family living there, but fortunately the Mother and Father were upstairs in the biggest bedroom and the children all in the living room beneath. Much to their amazement when they came out to see what had happened their bathroom and kitchen had disappeared, but no one had been hurt. This time all the glass in the back of our house had been shattered and the French doors blown inwards.

In London food was quite scarce because rationing was very strict. My Father relinquished one of his beloved flower-beds to make a chicken run. We had no experience of farming, so the first thing that happened was that all the chickens flew away and we were all running up and down the road trying to catch them. They were good at laying eggs, but when it came to eating the birds a problem arose. Usually someone else did the deed, but one day my Father was called upon to do the killing. Having failed to break its neck with his hands, he took the wood axe and chopped its head off. The body then proceeded to run about the garden for a few minutes before it died. We were aghast. We also had a black rabbit, but what happened to this I don鈥檛 know. We certainly didn鈥檛 eat it.

One of our uncles, who lived in the far north, that this to say Peterborough, ran a small-holding. One year he illegally killed a pig and we received a large piece of green-cured pork. Since we always ate smoked bacon, my Father regarded this with deep suspicion and decided that we shouldn鈥檛 eat it. Getting rid of this illegally acquired meat proved a problem, but it was solved by concerted family action. When we went out for a Sunday morning walk across the Welsh Harp we all carried little bags of cuts of pork. At quiet moments we nonchalantly tossed them over the nearest hedge, for fear we should be observed. We were a very law-abiding family.

One summer holiday my cousin Bernard and I went to Hyde Park and we were wildly excited when we saw a doodlebug flying quite clearly across the blue sky. At no time can I remember being particularly frightened or thinking that we would lose the war. We were quite determined to fight on the beaches, in the towns, in the streets and in the houses! We knew we would never surrender!

When the war in Europe ended in 1945 the whole family went on the Underground and walked towards Buckingham Palace. I'm not sure how far we got but I can remember the tremendous scrum and standing in the train feeling the sweat running down underneath my clothes. The War was still going on in the Far East, but I was mainly concerned with what was happening at school and in my own personal life. Our family had been very lucky as no one we knew personally had been killed. I suppose that this is a mark of human nature, that although we sympathize, we can never feel the concerns of others as deeply as we feel those of ourselves.

Betty Drummond. (nee Prested)

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