大象传媒

Having already contributed an account of my war up to the invasion of Russia and another of my evacuation after the Germans attacked South East England with their V-1s, I realized that in many ways the intervening period was actually the most typical part of my experience of WWII, and have accordingly decided to send you my memories of it.

Doing my Bit in "normal" wartime.
I have always looked upon the 37 months between the end of the Blitz in May 1941 and the launching of the first flying bombs in June 1944 as my "normal war," when things seemed to have settled down into a routine, and peace was so far off (in either direction) as to be either a distant memory of early childhood or a faint hope (should I survive) for my adult life to come.
Everything was by now "make do and mend." Even London Transport central buses and trolleybuses were repainted an "austerity" dull red ochre. Newspapers were down to eight pages, and books were closely printed on horrible cheap paper with tiny margins and the rather superfluous information on the title page that they conformed to the wartime production regulations. Clothing was such a problem that young women without G.I. boy friends would dye their legs brown to create the illusion of their wearing stockings. On the other hand, what few goods did reach the consumer, although dull in appearance, were of really good quality, the result of government forcing manufacturers to abide by special "economy" standards. I remember years after the war mending a puncture and discovering that the still serviceable inner tube bore the wartime utility "kite-mark" Furniture, available only to newly weds and the bombed-out, had a sturdy, simple, rather Scandinavian, design that was to influence the taste of a whole generation, weaning them away from the pretensions of Art-Deco and earlier styles.
At regular intervals there would be a street exhibition of captured enemy armament to persuade the public to support the war effort by investing its money in "National Savings." This gave me the wonderful chance one day to sneak into the cockpit of a Messerschmidt Me-109E on display at the top of Tolworth Broadway. At another exhibition I was even able to sit in the unarmed but otherwise fully functioning rear gun turret of an Avro "Lancaster." The "Lancaster," the most successful British heavy bomber of the war, was developed from the unsuccessful "Manchester" by doubling the number of engines, from two to four, and decreasing the number of tail fins from three to two, and my first acquaintance with poor continuity in film marking was a war film in which a "Manchester" took off and, to my incredulity and disgust, became a "Lancaster" as soon as it was airborne.
At school, teachers were always changing, as the younger ones were called up and replaced by earnest young women with a painful lack of experience in disciplining pubescent males, or by truly ancient, but fearsome, types called back out of retirement, and devoted to a good cursive hand, orthographic accuracy, and prescriptive English grammar of the most traditional kind. One of these changes led to our doing Macbeth two years running (why complicate matters by letting on that the previous master had done it the year before?). As this turned out by chance to be the set book, not only in my own School Certificate year (1945), but also, eventually, that of my youngest daughter's "O" level year in 1981, it has become one of the two Shakespeare plays that I can really claim to know something about. The other is the super-patriotic Henry V. In early 1944 the school gave us the unheard of treat of a visit en masse to the Surbiton Odeon, to see Lawrence Olivier's interpretation, evidently as a foretaste of the real invasion of Normandy!
What had been games afternoon had for some obscure wartime reason been moved to Saturday morning. Rugby was compromised by a shortage of good boots, but cricket was nice, as you could get on with your home work when your side was batting鈥攎y own innings were generally brief, despite my confusing the bowlers by batting left-handed. Even nicer was "Cross Country Running." Provided we ran out of the school gate and back in again, hours later, we (a little group of four enthusiasts for wartime politics) could spend the meanwhile just ambling along in a furiously partisan critique of our country's leadership. We particularly enthused at the by-election defeats of official Tory candidates by the Common Wealth Party, a device of the Labour left to breach the wartime electoral truce. The best informed of our number, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, went on to teach politics at Oxford, write a textbook on the British electoral system and lead the Dons' refusal to let Maggie Thatcher have an honorary degree. However, when the potato harvest was ready in the school garden, we had instead to spend our games mornings "digging for victory."
In the summer of 1943 the school invited all boys of 14 or over to volunteer to help with the corn (i.e. wheat) harvest. We went by train to Betjeman's celebrated Addlestrop station (subsequently closed by Dr. Beeching) to stay for a couple of weeks in the neighboring village of Oddington. Little in farming was mechanised in those days and, for the first time in my life, I learnt the pain and joy of falling asleep each night from utter physical exhaustion. Living in camp with our schoolmasters and working outdoors beside them, heaving sheaves up onto farm carts, brought us closer together than at any time in the class room, and we practically became friends with some of them鈥攁lthough the history master was rather disgusted to discover my breakfast table reading to be "Famous cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury" (all the juicy murders of the early 20th century). This brief Gloucestershire idyl was also a glorious time for eating well, as the farmers duly rewarded our amateurish but most enthusiastic efforts!
At home, we had traded our meager egg ration for the alternative of chicken meal, to which we added all edible kitchen waste, and raised four hens on it in our backyard. My first task each morning was to collect the eggs and clean out the droppings (ugh!). An aunt who was a vegetarian got a special cheese ration, and her elder sister, when she saw how much bigger this was than the standard meat ration, became a vegetarian too. I myself learned to take my tea without sugar, but not my coffee, perhaps because I never had coffee in wartime.
As my parents ran an ironmonger's shop, my mother got special treatment from all the other shopkeepers in hope of reciprocity: she did not get extra rations, but was always offered the best cuts of whatever was going! Our suppliers on the other hand gave us no such favours and we had to make our own arrangements to collect whatever they deigned to sell us. I soon stopped going to school on Saturdays at all and either cycled to a soap wholesalers in Kingston, or took the train ("Is Your Journey Really Necessary?") to a cycle wholesalers in Weybridge. Such were wartime shortages that the four shopping bags full of cycle parts, which my eight year old brother and I managed to struggle back with, were deemed worth their weight in proverbial gold by my parents and their customers. Despite being formally rationed, soap supplies were much more uncertain. The shop's pedal cycle had a large sidecar, and although sometimes I would have to really battle my way back with the weight of a full load, rather more often I had to return empty. My weekly pocket money tended to vary directly with my success! The soap multinationals were my father's b锚tes noires for their insistence on their products being sold to retailers in "balanced consignments," including such peace time luxuries as soap flakes and toilet soap (to keep their brand names in the public eye), whereas our customers all wanted their soap rations to consist exclusively of hard yellow household soap, for its greater economy. On the other hand, Lend Lease made supplying tools to local armament factories a real money spinning doddle. We were agents for Moore and Wright who made such essential tools as micrometers. The factories would telephone us, we would convey their needs on to the manufacturers who would supply by return of post and I would take the items (with, happily, a very high value to weight ratio) round to the factories by push bike. The Lend Lease regulations limited our markup to 10%, a third of what it would have been in peace time, but this was for a certain and immediate sale, completely free of any commercial risk or even the need for storage space.
In late 1943 my sexagenarian father had to go into hospital and could not return to work until 1945. As our assistants were by now all in the forces, I did what I could (I was now 14) but my help was necessarily limited to out of school hours. (Prewar, shops closed at 8 p.m., but the still prevalent closing at 5.30 or 6 p.m. had been introduced with the Black Out in September 1939). As much of what we sold was heavy and dirty (bags of cement for instance) my mother was now having a physically exhausting war running the business to all intents single-handedly. Her salvation came when a young woman customer, who must have had several small children not to have been called up for war work, assessed the situation and volunteered her services unasked. Young, strong and sturdily built, she turned out to have been a member of the UK team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and stayed with us until the return of our chief assistant on his being invalided out of the VIIIth Army in late 1944.
With the bulk of the German army heavily engaged in the steppes and snows of Russia, the authorities could at last relax some of their preparations against an invasion and in 1943 I was even able to attend my grandmother's funeral: she lived near Southend on Sea and this was my first visit to the forbidden invasion coast since she had hurriedly put me onto a train to send me back home on the last Saturday of peace, September 1st, 1939.
People began to feel that, as the Germans had still made no use of poison gas (the great terror of the First World War), they were unlikely ever to do so, and the ubiquitous, cumbersome gas marks could be left at home. For the (by now) only occasional air raids, we no longer ventured out to the misery of a waterlogged public shelter, but slept comfortably in a "Morrison" shelter in the back shop. Although this might have kept us safe under the rubble had we taken a hit, it would have been a ghastly death trap had an incendiary bomb ignited the surrounding stock (paints, varnishes, linseed oil etc.) or the 500 gallons of paraffin just outside the back door. Somehow we never thought of that. There were indeed many things in wartime just too awful to start thinking about. Instead, the Morrison is still firmly and pleasantly associated in my mind with Anthony Trollope: I must have been lying there when the 大象传媒 began its long series of delightfully escapist broadcasts of The Warden and the Barchester chronicles!
But in early June 1944 it all changed. No sooner had we rejoiced at the fall of Rome on the 4th, and the successful landings in Normandy two days later, than the flying bombs began to drop and destroy completely the routines of my "normal war." But that is another story.

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