大象传媒

I was only 6 when the War finished so I have few memories of it. My father joined the RAF and I lived with my mother in Woodside Park for most of the War, except towards the end when we went to stay with my aunt in Llandrindod Wells, Radnorshire, so that my sister could be born 鈥渁way from the bombing鈥� in 1944.

My earliest memory is that during the Blitz, my mother used to take me out into the back garden and show me the sky pink on the horizon where the East End was burning ten miles away. Our next-door neighbours had a big garden and an air-raid shelter was built there for everyone in the street. But my grandfather was a builder and had been impressed by photos he鈥檇 seen of bomb damage in the Spanish Civil War: he noticed that the central wall between the front and back rooms where it crossed the wall shared with the next house was almost always left standing, unless there had been a direct hit. So he got some curved corrugated iron and fastened it to the central wall in our front room. My father fixed a bunk to the wall for me and my mother slept on a mattress on the floor. So for the rest of the War we didn鈥檛 have to go down to the shelter but stayed in the house; when we couldn鈥檛 sleep because of the noise of the bombing, my mother read me the adventures of Orlando the Marmalade Cat by Kathleen Hale or the Uncle Remus stories of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. One article, made very popular because Winston Churchill wore one, was a siren suit, which was an all-in-one garment which zipped up the front, made of a warm woollen fabric which you could scramble into very quickly if the siren went off and you had to make a quick dash for the air-raid shelter at night. It was so comfy I wore mine during the day too 鈥� see photo.

For years after the War there were 3 bomb craters in the fields at the back of our garden (the Rest Home for Horses of the Express Dairy), which filled with water very quickly. No-one ever thought of erecting fencing round them for safety: the farmer knew where they were and we children shouldn鈥檛 have been there. After a few weeks we were astonished to see that there were tiddlers (small fish) in the craters; no-one ever explained how they鈥檇 got there. I was told that these craters were where the German planes had offloaded bombs which they hadn鈥檛 managed to drop on the Docklands so as to lighten their load and return to Germany more quickly and at a higher altitude to avoid our anti-aircraft guns. One bomb did hit our street but fell in a garden with minimal damage and no injuries.

The worst aspect of rationing for me was when sweets went on ration. We got 录 lb a week, which worked out at one boiled sweet a day. I still remember how I wept when I accidentally swallowed the day鈥檚 ration before it was finished; apart from hurting my throat, it was the waste! My aunt in Wales knew we didn鈥檛 often get fresh eggs and decided to send us some from the country. She got a cocoa-tin, carefully wrapped two fresh eggs in newspaper, wrapped the tin in brown paper and tied it safely with string. You can imagine my mother鈥檚 reaction on opening the tin to find a slimy mess of newspaper sodden in egg yolk and egg white. It was heartbreaking. The government decreed that all small children should get a ration of orange juice and cod liver oil, which we had to take daily. I remember going with my mother to collect it each week from a small brick-built building just inside the entrance of Riverside Walk, off Lullington Garth (still there in 2004). The cod liver oil tasted so horrible that whenever rationing allowed I had a Fox鈥檚 Glacier Mint afterwards to take the taste away. The government set up a chain of Civic Restaurants and there was one at the Gainsborough Hall in Gainsborough Road (where nos 34a 鈥� d now stand) and we could get lunch there for around a shillling (5p) without using our rations.

Towards the end of the War, my father was posted to Catterick in Yorkshire and we went too. We lived in a house on the perimeter of the airfield. By this time I was old enough to be aware of the War and wanted to do my share to help. One of the cooks in the Mess told me to turn up the following morning and she would find a job for me. When I turned up she took me into the kitchen where there was a long counter going round the wall. She perched me on a barstool and gave me a large tin and lots of little jars (probably fish-paste jars), each with a piece of Elastoplast bearing the name of one of the airmen on the camp on it. My job was to fill each of the jars with sugar from the big tin, so that the airmen got their ration. I did it every day and that was my War Work.

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