大象传媒

THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD

In 1939 when Britain went to war with Germany I was just two years old.

My memories of the Second World War are therefore, flashbacks to incidents which have left a lasting impression on me. Although I was too young to feel frightened of what was happening around me in London, clearly my parents did fear for the safety of their family because as the nightly bombing raids increased, my mother and her three children were initially evacuated to Devon and then moved to Sunderland where my father's family lived.

My father, who was exempt from the armed forces for medical reasons, remained in London and worked as a Air Raid Precaution
(ARP) warden. When we were re-united as a family after the war, my father rarely spoke of his work but I did learn from an old friend, who was one of several people who went to live in our family home after we were evacuated, that he sometimes would return from his shift shaken and silenced by the horror of what he had witnessed.

I can recall very clearly the Morrison shelter that was erected in our dining room at home; it was a low, black construction with a sturdy top which was to protect us from falling debris if our house was bombed; there was some kind of metal mesh around the outside. I always slept in this shelter with my brother and sister and when the air raid siren sounded, everyone in the house got in as best they could. It was always good when the all clear siren was heard because the three of us got the shelter back to ourselves!

On one occasion when the two houses opposite were bombed, the blast caused extensive damage to our windows, roof and chimney but this awful event had its funny side, when everyone emerged from the Morrison shelter they were all as black as coal from the soot forced down the chimney by the blast.

Young as we were, we knew that the 'doodlebugs' were bad, when the drone stopped there was an awful silence, and then the explosion.

When we were evacuated to Devon my family was split up. My father remained in London, my mother and my younger sister were billeted separately to my brother and me. I am unsure as to why I feel, even now, that this was an unhappy period of my life, these feelings are based on two memories: firstly, my brother and me did not eat with our host family, we ate alone and always after the family had finished and secondly, I bit my nails so much that I recall my father, on one of his rare visits, had to bathe the whitlows on my fingers. I have no idea how long we stayed in Devon but I do know that I was happier when we moved to Sunderland and I stayed with my aunt Molly. My mother, sister and brother stayed with my grandma, who cooked bread every Sunday in the ovens by the fireplace, the bread was wonderful for a few days but by the end of the week it was stale and hard! I recall my brother got into serious trouble because he locked a tiresome neighbour into the outside loo and then left the house!

My mother worked in a factory making aircraft components.

I started school in Sunderland and have happy feelings about my childhood there, possibly because we were more of a family with my cousins, aunts and uncles.

When the war ended my father came to collect his family to return home to London. I recall the train was packed with armed forces personnel and that my mother and father had to stand all the way to King's Cross, my sister and me slept on one of the tables. How happy everyone was to be going home.

By the end of the war I was eight year's old so I find it odd not to have any recollection of our street party to celebrate the end of the war, but from the attached photograph it certainly happened; in the background is an air raid shelter supporting a few decorations, how ineffective this shelter would be in modern day warfare.

The happy day that I remember so well was when sweet rationing ended. We were given extra pocket money and by the end of the first day, with a little help from our pals, the local, corner shop's stock of sweets was gone. To the best of my knowledge, sweets were the only commodity to be re-rationed until sufficient stock was available to meet the insatiable demand from youngsters so excited by this new world of a free market! I also recall we supplemented our supply of sweets by waiting near a local railway line for the troop trains to pass, we received mainly chocolate and chewing gum, the latter mainly from the Yanks!

And so with the war over I returned to my local school where an unexpected problem arose, nobody could get to grips with my Tyneside accent!

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