大象传媒

When I was a child, our family of six people lived in a tiny country cottage (2 up, 2 down) right on the edge of an R.A.F.airfield. Not unnaturally, as we passed by to school, we got talking to some of the airmen, and one day one of them asked my Mother if she knew anyone who might take on washing his clothes, as he was discontented with the official laundry arrangements. She fell for it, and soon another man joined in; before long others heard about it, and Mum and Nan between them set up a cottage industry, which eventually outgrew all expectations, to the extent that one one particular week they actually dealt with 100 bundles of washing. These bundles arrived, usually wrapped in the airman's towel, with some indication as to whose clothes were inside. As you may know,all the clothes were official issue, and identical, except for size, and occasionally a badly printed number on some articles. So Mum and Nan hit on the idea of using what was left of a pre-war collection of Clarks' embroidery threads, putting a stitch in each garment - a different colour and a different stitch for each customer! Before returning the clothes to their owners, they picked out the stitch, and next week put another in! At the height of this activity, some of the jobs, such as darning socks, were farmed out to neighbours, and once or twice, someone would unwittingly pull out the stitch, and then nobody knew whose they were. A typical bundle would be one shirt, two collars (to be starched), two pairs of socks, one vest, one pair of pants, two hankerchiefs. Each item had a price, ranging from 1d to 4d. The fun part for us children would be returning the bundles of clean washing, each wrapped in newspaper and string, with a hand-written bill attached, on an old pram, to the Orderly Room.The grateful servicemen would sometimes invite us to the Village Hall, when E.N.S.A. was putting on a variety show or a film, and we occasionally got hand-outs of food etc, left over from the Sergeants' Mess. Everybody seemed satisfied: the airmen were pleased, the family gained a supplementary income, Mum applied for, and got, an industrial soap ration over and above what other households received. The tiny cottage was permanently filled with wet washing, dry washing, steam, ironing, airing.
Then, one fine morning in June, 1944, there was a rumbling sound before we were awake: the troops were moving off towards the D-day invasion of France, and suddenly our friendly nieghbours/customers had all disappeared!

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