大象传媒

Early Memories of the War
I was 9 years old when the war started. My mother, brother and I were on the beach at Eastbourne (Sussex) when at 1 lam on Sunday 3rd September 1939 the sirens wailed. The crowds disappeared into thin air but the three of us, led by my mother, huddled beside a breakwater and waited for the invasion. Two hours later we trailed back to the hotel, tired and hungry, and were amazed to find father waiting for us. He was on his annual two-week territorial camp and had been given leave to look after his family.
He took us back to our home in Horley (Surrey) but after two unsettled nights it was decided we should stay with friends in Hertfordshire near to where he was stationed at Radlett. We were there for 6 weeks and then back to Horley. Shortly after our return the bombing over London started and we became a reception house for evacuees from London.
We first had children who stayed until they could be billeted to more permanent homes and then we had two elderly ladies who arrived in their fur coats with their two tomcats. The smell of mothballs and those cats was something we could never forget. Finally we had a family of 4 - the father traveled to London daily, his wife helped my mother and the two children came to school with my brother (David) and me. Eventually they too went elsewhere (to Cheltenham).
Then the raids over London intensified. When my father, now on embarkation leave, discovered us sleeping with our heads in the boot cupboard under the stairs he decided the time had come for us to leave our home for the north of England - he was stationed in Fleetwood on the Lancashire coast. Our old Standard car was laden and when the roof leaked my mother put up her umbrella. After one night in Cheshire with an uncle we arrived and stayed first in a hotel where after a week my brother (aged 6) was admitted to hospital with TB glands of the neck, and then in the flat my mother found. Our furniture arrived from the south and we would stay there for the next 4 l/2 years until my father returned from Egypt.
Whilst I have recorded a brief family history of the early days of the war I can also remember queuing to have our gas masks fitted and then the purchase of a case to enable us to carry them around all the time. I can remember with awe standing in the garden to see the planes flying overhead on their way to bomb London.
Later on, of course, there was food rationing and I recall queuing for 2 hours for 1 Ib plums and feasting on sausage meat encased in sage and onion stuffing (known as turkey lurkey) for our Christmas dinner.
Whenever we went away we would take our ration cards with us and my grandmother always arrived with 1/2 dozen eggs hidden amongst her underwear. On one visit to a very cold vicarage I was given a hot brick wrapped in an old vest to take to bed.
These were some of the restrictions we had to cope with but there was always the compensation of the weekly 2 oz sweet ration and the thrill of gazing at the large jars of toffees, bonbons and chocolates whilst making up one's mind as to what to choose.

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