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World War 11. Memories of 1939-1945 in and around Bootle, Liverpool.
Author Copyright-Joan M. Dyer.
Chapter Four
War or no war we had to go to school, of course, and my Mother went to the Education Office in Balliol Road to register us. There were a couple of schools we could have gone to but she chose the nearest which was ‘Christ Church ‘ Infant and Junior school. We all liked it there and we had very good teachers, some of whom were Welsh and known to my Mother. I remember being brought up on a set number of hymns and prayers. There was ‘All things bright and beautiful’, ‘Onward ,Christian soldiers’, ‘O, God our help in ages past’, ‘Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah’, ‘Eternal Father, strong to save ‘, ‘Now the day is over’, ‘In heavenly love abiding’ and many others. Then there were the standard prayers and collects from the Book of Common Prayer and readings from the ‘St. James’ Bible. These have remained with me all my life.( I am sorry to say I do not admire any of the new versions of the Bible or hymnals).
I expect we did all the usual school subjects. I only got into trouble once that I can remember. In a sewing class taken by what seemed to be a very old lady I suddenly noticed her glasses. The lenses were like milk bottle bottoms and you were distorted if you looked closely and so were the teacher’s eyes. I found myself getting closer and closer to look at this strange thing and ended up right in the face of the teacher, having been sitting on the floor at her stool. She suddenly caught sight of me and thought I was being very naughty staring at her. I was made to stand all the rest of the afternoon. We had school dinners down the road at what must have been a local hall. One day I could not eat my pudding of chocolate sponge and custard. One did not waste food as rationing was still in place. The dinner lady or teacher said I HAD to eat it. I told her I felt sick and did not like it but she insisted. Of course the inevitable happened. Then another day I saw a ‘rag and bone cart’ and horse and stared and stared at it as I walked home from school. It was going one way and I another! I walked straight into a lamp-post and acquired a huge lump on my forehead and some would say I have never been the same since! The other notable food memory is that of chocolate powder, possibly from America or Canada. We were each asked to take a washed jam jar to school one day. That day we three walked home looking at the contents until we got to the top of Balliol Road, where someone offered up the words and expressed the thoughts we all had of what would it taste like. Soon the first sample was taken, dipping our fingers in to taste the powder. It was delicious and the fingers and taste-buds found it very difficult to stop. Also I suppose at that time of day we would have been heading home for tea and would have been hungry. Soon there was not much left and our jars arrived home somewhat depleted. I don’t think anything was said but perhaps my Mum did not know we had started out with a lot more.
It could not have been long, from my brother’s date evidence, after moving to Little Strand Road that the telegram boy arrived. I knew about the significance of a telegram boy but only vaguely that it was something bad, and that is how I knew it. It was from the War Office about my Dad. It stated that my Father was ‘missing, believed dead’. My poor Mum. I can just remember the day, her white face and her visibly shaking. I did not really understand what was happening as I was not told these exact words. All I knew was that my Mother was extremely upset and that it was very bad news. My brothers probably remember better than me and would have understood the significance, so this would have been terrible for them, especially Terence. The teachers at Christ Church, Terence tells me, asked him every day afterwards if there was any news of my Father. Later there was a letter from my Father’s Captain to say that they had been to the area where he and his comrades had last been seen but that no graves had been found, so he thought there was a chance he had survived. Later still we heard that the Red Cross had located him in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. He was a P.O.W. at Stalag X11a or Stalag X11b P.O.W. camp. Later we have found out this was at Limburg.
He had been called up in 1940 and was in the Royal Engineers. Very recently I have discovered a lot more of his whereabouts during the war, especially before the D-day landings. After the war he had told me that he was at Juno or Gold beach landing on the 6th of June 1944. Any information about the war had to be elicited by questions and like many soldiers who experience the ‘real thing’ in combat they prefer not to talk about it and neither did he. Around 1980, before he died in 1987, he visited where we now live in East Anglia. We were on holiday and we took him to ‘Grimes’ Graves’, a Neolithic site, in Thetford Forest. As we left here we went on towards the coast and my Father suddenly said ‘This seems familiar to me, where I was in the war’. We all asked if he knew where exactly he had been but of course there were no sign posts in the war years and it was all very secret. All he definitely knew was that he disembarked for Normandy from the forest training camp at Thetford Station. Three or four years ago we noticed on a repeat journey a bit of soldier activity on the same bit of road. This turned out to be a memorial being built to the Desert Rats and it was the site of the camp where they trained for D-Day. Although very interested we had no idea of the connection my Father had to this spot.
We went one Armistice day to the site and met an old soldier who eventually told us he had been awarded the Military Medal. We were listening to his story and he spoke of his friend who, killed in action, was the driver of the tank used for the memorial. I said my Father drove a tank and was at the D-Day landings but did not know much else. He said ‘He was probably here’. I told him he was in the 11th armoured Division , not the Desert Rats but he soon pointed to a list on a notice board naming the groupings and said he thought I would find the 11th Division, which I did. On the memorial it gives the precise dates when the camp was in operation which was from January 1944 to May 1944. With my Father saying it was very familiar to him I think the link is made and he was in camp here at that time. The extraordinary thing is that my Father spoke about his recognition of the area at almost at the exact spot where the memorial is sited.
Of course my Mother and hundreds of other families had none of this information in the war years. My memory is that one Christmas there was someone at Little Strand Road and all I remember is that we had some chocolate, a two piece sized Kit-Kat. I remember being kissed ’goodnight ‘ very late at night and remember a very strong smell of khaki uniform and having my curly hair ruffled. This, I believe, is when they were being deployed to Thetford and from the dates above it was Christmas 1944.
The moment the telegram arrived dealt more than one disaster to my Mother, the first and paramount one being my Father‘s status and then her army pay was stopped as my Father was believed dead. My Auntie Edith continued to look after us all and she and my Mother made the best they could of the situation. Without Auntie Edith goodness knows how my Mother and us three children would have fared. Also fairly recently we discovered that my Mother could have had a lot more help than she had. Auntie Edith has told me that either the Canadian Government or the American Government had set up fund to help those families in Liverpool who had been bombed or who were homeless or destitute and that my Mother qualified for help. Unfortunately my Hatfield Road Grandmother who was very proud would not allow her to go for help. Attending the Welsh Chapel she knew one administrator of the fund, a Mr. T. Jones, also a leading member of the Welsh chapel in Trinity Road, who worked in local government and she did not want this man to know that my Mother was in difficulties. So my Mother was even worse off than she needed to be. We will never know why my Mother obeyed her Mother in such difficult times. Later the army pay issue was resolved.
Joan M. Dyer. Author’s Copyright. 2004.

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