大象传媒

This story has been given by Barbara Davis who understands the terms and conditions of the website. It has been transcribed by Paula Thompson with Barbara鈥檚 permission at the Hillcrest Centre Newhaven.

I was born in Brighton in 1926 and was 13 when the war broke out. My parents were Arnold and Mabel Court and we lived on Hangleton Road Brighton. At about 16 I volunteered for the Red Cross and my main duty for them was in their work sending parcels to the prisoners of war. We used to gather at 4 Grand Avenue Hove a huge regency building dedicated to this task. My job was to be a filler. This involved going down to the basement and gathering together all the items such as tins of butter, dried apricots, condensed milk. We would load up the trolley and take it in a lift to the packers who would sort it into the shoe boxes. It was a huge operation and happened 5 days a week. We had a canteen in the building as well. It was not all girls. There were young men pre call up age. I can remember that some of the girls would put little notes in as well but I was too shy to do that! I remember the song of the time being 鈥淢ares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy鈥� which when sung did not sound like the above and we used to kid that we were singing in Polish. (At the time there were many Poles and Canadians around Brighton)

For my seventeenth birthday my father gave me 12 driving lessons and that was it. There were no driving tests and I became a driver! I got a voluntary job at the YMCA headquarters in New Road Brighton, next to the Theatre Royal, where I was a mobile canteen driver. The YMCA used to run mobile canteens for the service personnel stationed around the coast.
We would collect our supplies (plenty of tobacco, Woodbines, Players and huge urns of tea) in the morning and load them into the Ford V8 and go off on a round including places like Hove Lagoon, the Gasworks and Shoreham where the gun sites were. A typical request would be for, 鈥� A cha, a wad and twenty gaspers鈥� meaning a cup of tea a bun and twenty cigarettes. Sometimes we鈥檇 go 鈥榰p country鈥� to prisoner of war camps. Once on the way back from Bramber the van鈥檚 lights failed and I had to drive back in the pitch black. It was blackout time and it was nerve shattering. On my return I was so relieved that I burst into tears. It was a good test of my driving. I was still seventeen.

I had a friend Audrey Fleming who was a teacher. During her holidays from school we would go to Kingscote. There was a big house there which held Italian prisoners of War and we worked in the grounds which had been turned into a market garden. We weeded, pulled potatoes, drove tractors and did any sorts of jobs necessary. I enjoyed that work. We had dug up our garden at home and in addition my father had an allotment in the Droveway in Hove where I used to help. All our scraps went in a special bin to be given to pigs. We didn鈥檛 keep a pig ourselves but others did. I remember our Sunday treat being a sheep鈥檚 head which I would collect with my governess from the Seven Dials butchers. Sheep鈥檚 heads were not rationed so that used to help out with the meat allowance. I also remember my mother keeping a huge bucket in which she would pickle eggs in a solution called isinglass(?). Any fresh vegetables or tomatoes were kept in kilner jars for preservation.

While at Kingscote our sleeping quarters were made out of six old hen houses. One memorable night while we were asleep (me complete with my hair rollers in) we were awoken by the sound of the door rattling and an urgent whisper of 鈥淟et me in I have a present for you鈥�. Horrors, it was a pisoner of war! Terrified we leapt out of bed and threw ourselves against the door. Audrey seized a metal washing up bowls and two spoons and we made a tremendous racket to rouse the guards. We were successful in that the prisoner was taken again but we never found out what the present was to have been.

We used to walk from there to East Grinstead to marvellous dances held by the Canadian Airforce. It was at these dances that I saw for the first time the casualties of war. There was a specialist burns unit at East Grinstead hospital where injured pilots were treated. They were often very disfigured but named themselves 鈥楾he Guinea Pig Club鈥�.

We were fortunate in that my family never suffered from bombing and my memories of the war in that teenage period was that I spent a lot of time at dances in the evenings. I did use to see the aerial dog fights take place above the downs. It was my parents who suffered though through worrying. It was part of our growing up and we just accepted it.

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