大象传媒

Life in Old Bramhope in Wartime
Part 2

On the morning of 18th May 1943, I was staying with my aunts in Birmingham when we heard on the breakfast time news that a strong force of Lancasters of 617 squadron had carried out a daring raid on the Moehne and Eder dams, causing widespread damage in the Ruhr valley, which was very encouraging news after three years of hardship. We felt proud that our local centre of war effort was much involved in this, for our lives were affected by the roar of low flying Lancaster's being tested under load a few feet above our heads in the middle of the night and the constant bellow of Bdstol engines being tested to destruction at their factory near Carlton. One little oddity was that although the two factories were less than a mile apart, Bristol engines were not used at Yeadon Avro, who got their Rolls Royce engines from Bamoldswick, beyond Skipton. No wonder that I can still sleep through thunderstorms, and even slept through the all-night thunder of an RAF Vulcan on test when I was stationed at RAF Nocton Hall in Lincolnshire. We could recognize many operational aircraft by sound alone, and particularly the locally built Avro Anson, whose seven-cylinder Cheetah engines were absolutely distinctive.

In spite of the dramatic interludes we remember so well, the war touched us much less than in the areas of the country that were of more interest to the enemy; Hull is only an hour's drive away from us, but unlike us it was hammered unmercifully, being a major port. Like everyone else we were subject to food rationing, but we were accustomed to a simple, healthy diet; petrol was unavailable except for authorized users, who had to be nominated as the representative user (in our case it was Mr. Craddock and his Standard 10), but we were accustomed to walking anyway. If we had a long journey, such as my visit to the Birmingham aunts with Mum, it was a bus to Leeds, and a train from Leeds City Station to Birmingham New Street, stopping at Wakefield, Cudworth, Normanton, Sheffield, Derby and many more. The trains were slow, dirty, crowded and liable to stops and diversions and blackout precautions, but they got us there in the end.

There was much ingenuity displayed in the production of food without unavailable ingredients; cakes were made with dripping in the absence of butter, and sugarless recipes for jam were used to preserve blackberries and bilberries picked on the moors in season. Coming from a family of eight children whose father had been killed in an industrial accident, my mother was no stranger to "making something out of nothing'. There was no black market economy in a Methodist organization. We collected rose hips to be made into syrup for babies as a substitute for orange juice, saved paper, and bathed in four inches of water with a "Plimsoll line" on the bath side. What was very noticeable was the result of the "zoning" of well-known brands of food to save transport costs; in the Leeds area you could not get Kellogg's com flakes by normal means, as the zone supplier was Percy Dalton in Torre Road, Leeds, and I'm afraid that Dalton's Cereal Flakes tasted just like damp newspaper.

One thing we did miss as a family was motoring, for Dad had long been an enthusiastic motorist but had made the mistake of nominating someone else to receive the authorized allocation of petrol. He put his beloved Rover 12 on blocks in the garage for the duration, and bought a bike for stately joumeys across to Alwoodley to play golf at Sand Moor. He did try a motorbike, which Ted Parkinson found for him, a 350 cc Norton, but his first ride so scared all the onlookers that my mother put her foot down and that project was abandoned. He had one of those early driving licences that allowed the holder to drive any type of vehicle without having to pass a test, but that omission certainly showed up on that day. Before the war, Dad used to get his petrol and service at the White Garage, owned by George Blackbum with Eric Hunt as the mechanic. When their efforts were directed into the servicing of military or authorized vehicles, I could still go there to get my bike tyres blown up.

When VE Day came, the celebrations were not as exuberant as in those places that had been hardest hit - they were very modest as compared with the wild party in London. There was a bonfire at the beacon point on the Chevin (where some idiot threw a banger at me and put me off fireworks for life) and parties for the children, but the feeling was more 'Thank God that's over' with the knowledge that there was much yet to be done. We were on holiday in Morecambe on VJ night, and the revellers there tore up the planks from the pier and made a bonfire on the promenade; as Connie and I walked back to the hotel, a gentleman weaved past us very unsteadily, carrying a bottle and singing loudly; I wondered whether we should go to his assistance when he fell over, but Connie dryly advised me that I had just seen my first drunk!

During that summer a General Election was called; our constituency was Pudsey and Otley, and the contestants were Brigadier Terry Clarke (Liberal), Colonel Malcoim Stoddard-Scott (Conservative), and Major Denis Healey (Labour). The plethora of military titles is no accident; if a serving officer is selected as a parliamentary candidate, he leaves the service at once, so all three gentlemen got out of the Army earlier than scheduled. Col. Stoddard-Scott was elected and remained our MP until his death in 1973, and Denis Healey stood for Leeds North-East at a later election, won the seat and rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Callaghan administration. He is now Lord Healey of Riddlesden. Winston Churchill lost power, to the surprise of most of the world, and Clement Attlee's Labour government took responsibility for concluding the war and shaping the peace, heralding many years of 'austerity" before the country could relax. They were also years of social change, and health, pensions and education were altered profoundly within a few years of the war's end as a result of the Beveridge report, produced during the war as a blueprint for the country's development in time of peace.

At the end of the war a party of children was brought over from Germany, with the aim of giving them security, decent accommodation, and relief from a situation that for some of them had been traumatic, and twenty of them were sent to Bramhope. Although some of them were very disruptive at first, they eventually integrated after a rather tricky start; Jack Prince acted as the interpreter, (and checked the letters home, some of which contained some quite startling stories of things that never happened) but the real integration fell to the Sisters and the common sense of the other children. 1 remember in particular Giinter Matem, who had a beautiful singing voice, and was much in demand for solos in church; Helga Ludtke, daughter of a dentist from Dresden, who won a scholarship to the local grammar school and gained a degree in English on her return to Germany; and Deitlind von Amim, whose father was a General, who lived in a Schloss, and who complained when she arrived that she could not eat from ordinary plates with cutlery that was not made of silver! Walter Maschke was the son of a farmer, so of course went on the farm. He looked after Emie the sheep, and when the time drew near for him to return home to Germany his family sent him a suit of German farmer's clothes, so he had his photograph taken in his finery with his sheep. (I'm not quite sure where Emie came from; the farm was not usually running sheep in the fields, as it was a dairy farm).

Basil Taylor remembered the names of most of the party, many years later, and sent me a list: -
Johan Gauser, Gustav Klein, Peter, Siegfried and Walter Maschke, Gerhard, Hans and Peter Dzimbrowski, Amo Hessler, Siegfried Hunte, Gunter Matem, Paul Routenberg, Emst Gauger, Helga Ludtke, Karen Lange, Deitlind von Amim, Helga Lindenhoff, Alice Ihoss, and Heidi Ascherott.

Eventually they all went back to Germany. Only Helga has kept in touch; she won a scholarship to Prince Henry's, and on her return home she became a teacher. She tells me that she has tried to find her fellow "refugees", but so far without success.

Pr-BR

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