´óÏó´«Ã½

I was born in 1927 in Southampton. We moved twice and then my father moved for a job to Surrey and four months before the war started in September 1939 we had to move to a rented house because my father did not think the roof tiles were of high enough quality. My parents rented the house but the war looming the owner needed to sell it and as I say the roof tiles were of poor quality so we moved instead. We had two dogs, Roger and Digger, a black Labrador and a black spaniel, we lived near the end of the town, a large village really, and the field and the shallow stream were within walking distance. We by then five children used to see our two dogs out tracking together, Digger always behind Roger and if any of us five children called out Roger and Digger stopped instantly but it was Roger who decided to continue wagging his tail. I had an older brother and sister that were, my mother has married twice, my brother was in the Navy, he went to sea at fourteen, my sister was told by the Labour Exchange to move to London and in those days you did not get a work permit unless you did as you were told so she went to London and then she got married and she did not come home again. My brother often came home and used to tell us stories and then I had a sister next to me, two years younger, a brother two years younger, a brother two years younger than that and then a sister two years younger than that. I am the eldest, with five of us left the two eldest have died and how we realise anyway.

Roger and Digger both stopped instantly but it was Roger who decided to continue wagging his tail on the other side of the road and continue on their journey or to come over to us and then continue with our adventures instead, it was quite a squeeze to get into the house and my sister and I shared one bedroom, my two brothers shared another and when the war started my young sister had a small single bed in my parents huge bedroom. Now do I bring in there the fact that later on everyone was forced to take in people from Guernsey and Jersey so on top of this we had two mothers, so when do I bring this in? They had our sitting room and they all slept in there and one of the bedrooms. It was after the war started and the Germans, they were evacuated from Jersey before the Germans came down. That would have been around 1940. I had two mothers and I think it was just two boys each and they had our sitting room and we had a sitting scullery and a kitchen and we lived in that and in the corner was the Morrison shelter and the Anderson shelter in the garden. My childhood was very happy and now we are all in our seventies, we have all come to realise just how happy it really was, so this was right through the war. We were middle class poor as described by one of my patients years and years later, she actually saw middle class were often short of food in the war because decent clothes, a hat, gloves, handbag and shoes came before food.

My father was a chemist, he was training before the war. When the war started he was sent to make aircraft parts, he was a scientific chemist as well as pharmaceutical. He worked in shops. He was directed by the Labour Exchange to go and work in the factory and he ran the tool club which I then later on, I do not know when to put it in, every week, this was in Surrey still and I went into Kingston and I do not know when to put that in but every week during the war on a Friday night we all had our own desk, I am just reminiscing, we did not move around like the children today, we stayed in this classroom and the teachers joined you so I was able to leave this big pile of money, a cashbook and the orders from my father and I had to learn all about the machinery that a pattern maker and an engineer would need and I was only about 14. I was at school during the week and on Fridays you went into this school and then I came out went on a Greenline bus into Kingston into a shop in Kingston market and a gentleman would come forward and he would say come in Miss so and so, your seat is ready and I was only about 14 and I would go and sit in this seat and then I would take out my money and I would pay the money in, my father had done it the night before so in my cashbook was the order that I had. The money was from the tool club for the engineers. My father trained as a chemist then the Labour Exchange told him they needed him to do something with the war effort and there was a faction, I do not know what they made, they were a bicycle ride away six miles away so my father went and trained as a tool maker and he then ran the club and he did first aid, that sort of thing. He taught tool making to other people, he joined the team and they taught him, he was also ran first aid classes and things like that because we were all being bombed all the time because all of the area was near Vickers who were designed and building the Bullington bombers and the Germans came over every night and if they had not hit us all around, they used to turn round and come back and drop and we were near enough and we had to learn when it was real and when it wasn’t and then my father taught us when the doodlebugs came over how to count and then we used to work out whether or not to go into the shelter or not so if we were walking home from school or something we could know whether to go into the shelter.

My father taught me how to tool make as well and just by chance the other day a chap here I met him, he got muddled as to how I use it so he was washing up, I sat down on the drive and sat on my seat, he thought I needed help, came down and opened the door and I said no I wanted to show you I was all right and the seat is working so then he says come and have a cup of tea and while I was up there I was telling him that I was going to be interviewing him for his memories and he said oh yes I was in the middle of it all and he lived in London and he was an operator but he was always in printing and he went and got his tool makers English cabinet was actually printed on the thing so I used to carry this thing so beautifully made, tanned and grooved all polished beautiful wood to handle, I used to pick them up as an order in the shop. My father taught me how to use the tools in an engineering capacity, how much for each tool I have not been able to find out who paid for them were club set up because one could not have had the war effort held up while the person saved to buy the tools themselves or did they.

There was a lot of bombing in my school in 1939/1940, we have all our exams and often the classes had to go underground, I was at an all girls school and so it was not a huge school, they had a shelter in the ground, they dug up the tennis courts and we fed ourselves so we had gardening to do, I was self-sufficient in school. We had two farmers’ wives. I remember going down into the shelter many times, we had to keep singing and when we were taking our school certificate we were not allowed to talk so we had to keep singing. We did not take any exams in the shelter, we had to go back and continue, we were not allowed to talk, exams were disrupted all the way through and then we actually put up our own anti-glass like this on all the charting. We had a superb headmistress, a very regal lady, Mrs Eastaugh, she had a little maid with a white cap. I have got a photograph here and she was my best friend.

When I got to the shop I had to decide whether it worked smoothly if I could not get the make that he wanted because they were in short supply but I cannot find out I have tried who the other companies would have been whether it had been Canadian or Australian but I do not think many countries had good enough steel except ours.

My schooldays were happy and most parents tried to keep, all the maypole dancers all that continued and the conservative garden fete every year on the green. Life just went on as normal, we were near the River Thames and right at the end of our road there was a particular type of gun and it was only about thirty houses along and there was a searchlight in the whole area that was lit every night. Friday night was nit night and you had nit night, laxative, hair wash and a bath on Friday night. I was checked for nits and we had laxatives, I can remember years later, my father had the business by then and he used to look at all the chaps and he could tell by their nails and their skin that they were not eating properly and there was a young boy who joined and he said what’s this, a spot, so he gave him some lettuce. The laxative was one of the natural ones, we had liquorice that was the only thing you could buy with your pocket money, prunes we had regularly. Liquorice was not rationed it only cost a farthing and you could have two or three laces. In this winter we had a sewing group going and it was while we were doing our sewing group it triggered memories and I went round the room and we all decided that liquorice laces was the first memory of going to the shop by ourselves with our pocket money and that was what we could afford. Liquorice was the main laxative and then we had some kind of patent medicine as well. It was syrup and figs at one time. We had a hair wash once a week and a bath once a week, that was all five of us because we only had a geezer, nobody has central heating, nothing like that and I have said to someone the other day do not forget to remember the icy cold bedrooms and houses, you could not see out of the window because the frost was inside. We had a Rayburn down in the shelter and in the winter we had the two dogs and my brother had a white rabbit and the two dogs sat either side of the white rabbit would come to the boiler keeping each other warm and that was Pinky because he had pink ears. Once these people had arrived and took our sitting room, we had to do everything in this kitchen, dining we did everything. They had a fire in the sitting room, they had paraffin radiators in those days. My father was the only one with a car so he came down because he had, between the parents and my father, he decided that Mr Hitler would not been able to find our field in Arundel and drop a bomb on it.

We grew our own food at school because we fed ourselves, they dug up our tennis courts, the Anderson shelters took part of the school and then the rest was food, so we had fruit, raspberries and gooseberries and apples and pears on the trees and the grass courts were made into the allotments, we had two farmers wives who were teachers and our music teacher was good at horticultural. We had a competition, we had teams and I was very sporty and if you did half an hour or an hour extra you got twenty points for your team so I used to stay and do that. Then we used to go, a lot of the girls came by train because it was quite a big catchment area and all the teachers and the headmistress did a rota and did platform duty and when I was about 15 still in the war I was a bridesmaid for my aunt in London and I had my hair permed and the day after I was a ball of frizz and I went to see my special friends off every day from the station because I lived just a mile from the school and Miss Eastaugh came up to me and said, she was very well spoken, will you go and tell your parents my regards that your hair looks a mess. We grew vegetables and food, the kitchen staff used to make the bread, I used to go down there, I always got along with people and in my autograph book I have got my friends, the teachers and all the kitchen staff. I was a table monitor and everybody wanted to be on my table because when the food came out every day they would say this was for me and it was always a little bit extra or another cherry on it. We had about 25 girls in each class so it was quite small. The music teachers was a gift that she gave me was that we had to learn to listen to a concert and she would pick out an instrument and had to hum that instrument all the way through the piece again and then another instrument and another one and I still use that today. I was a witch in Macbeth and I can still remember the speech I had to do.

All the way through the war I was at school, some of my friends were sent as evacuees. We were due to go to Canada, we got our books and our gas masks, our identity things and then the Germans bombed another ship carrying all the children and the whole lot went down, they were determined they would not survive and they all drowned and my parents decided then that we were not to go but within a week of going to Canada to my mother’s cousins, the government said no more, we must survive whatever happens here, none of us went from then on but then when I went to Australia to see my daughter I met one or two people that had been sent to Australia before they stopped it all, some of them had dreadful lives. So I stayed at home.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.