大象传媒

No matter how many facts and figures we publish, nor how many anecdotes we tell, there is something subtle and indefinable which marks the memory of those wartime years. There was an atmosphere of those times which is hard to convey to anyone who was not there. It is almost like recognising a certain smell. For me, it takes only a photograph, a tune - or most dramatically of all, the wail of an air-raid siren - for that whole atmosphere to come flooding back, suffusing my body and mind in sensory and mental memories of those years.

And for me, shocking though it may seem to me now, this pacifist woman of 67, that World War 2 atmosphere brings with it an almost cosy, home-like familiarity.

For I was 3 years old when war was declared , so by the time I had become properly aware of my surroundings, rationing was in full force and the Blitz on my home town - Plymouth - was just about to begin. I do remember the first issue of gas masks, the strange, rubbery smell of them, and the unpleasant, echoey feeling of isolation I felt when I put mine on. My first was a child's one, in the shape of Donald Duck, but I remember wishing I had a grown-up mask like my mother and grandparents. I may have even kicked up a fuss about that, for I know it was not long before I, too, was given one the same as theirs. I also had a tin hat. And when I started school, I had to carry my gas mask and my tin hat with me as well as my little school satchel. It seemed quite a normal thing to do, all of a piece with wearing school uniform for the first time. I knew no other reality.

It was normal to have an absent father, for everyone else had absent fathers and grandfathers and uncles also. I was lucky that my grandfather and a couple of my great-uncles were still around, for as workers at Plymouth Royal Naval Dockyard they were exempt from military service. But for the most part, my world was a world of women and that, too, was the only normality I knew.

So, too, was it a part of my everyday normality to be awakened from sleep and to stagger or to be half-carried out of the back door and across the back garden to the Anderson shelter. It was a short distance in yards, but it was a walk through a world that was very different to the daytime one; a strange, huge, artificially lit-up world of mighty searchlights that swept the sky, fading the stars, and illuminating instead the strange, silver snow-stuff that danced and fluttered like dust motes in a sunbeam, only bigger and brighter. It was a noisy world too, filled with the seemingly endless wail of the siren. Then would come the sound everyone dreaded, the low, menacing and unmistakable throb of the German planes, accompanied by the staccato bark of ack-ack guns. Most memorable of all was the unearthly sound of the bombs, part wail, part screech, as they fell through the air for what seemed like forever, down and down, through octave after octave of sound, and the particular noise they made as they finally landed - a sound I can only describe as " crr-ump!"

The musty, earthy smell of the Anderson shelter is with me still. And I can still hear the comforting crunch of Granddad's boots on the clinker path above that artificial cave where we huddled, with our blankets, and the hot water bottles that Grandma had filled at dusk every night. We were like rabbits, under the ground; three-quarters submerged below the rockery where nasturtiums and heliotrope bloomed unruffled by the winds of war. Down there, there was fitful sleep, perhaps, or a hot drink from the thermos; some desultory chat to cover the thought in everyone鈥檚 mind. When Will The All Clear Sound? Every so often, a triangle of bright night sky would appear as Granddad moved aside the heavy, wooden door and stood for a moment, silhouetted against the brightness, wearing his tin hat. Then his voice, with its deep, Westcountry burr. Always the same question. 鈥淵ou all right down there?鈥�
鈥淵es鈥� we would reply. 鈥淵es, we鈥檙e fine.鈥� Then off he would go again, to watch for incendiary bombs.

And it is true - we were fine. Night after night we stayed fine. And the bombs fell and houses fell. Houses burned. On my walk to school, I would see a gap where a house used to be, with wallpaper still clinging to its one or two remaining walls. Yesterday a home- today a bomb site. A place we were definitely not allowed to play, even though we longed to. So there were more and more bomb sites. That was the way life was. But we stayed fine. We were the lucky ones.

Each morning, there would be shrapnel. Big, shiny, twisted hunks of once-hot metal to find, like treasure, and pop into one鈥檚 schoolbag for boasting about and collecting and swapping and bartering for all sorts of other treasures. That, too, was a part of normality. Did not every child in the world get up early to hunt for shrapnel on the way to school and set it proudly on the desk, next to the inkwell? Shrapnel, like conkers in autumn, was to me a perfectly normal part of a child's life.

We even hoped, each day, that there may be a daytime air raid. For daytime raids meant closing the schoolbooks and off, in crocodile formation, to the huge, communal shelter across the street, where there was hot cocoa and the teachers played scratchy records on a wind-up gramophone. I remember that so clearly, even now. There was Gracie Fields warbling a funny song about a thing called an aspidistra - whatever that was, perhaps a kind of snake, I used to suppose - and Vera Lynn singing about the White Cliffs of Dover; the boys sniggering and referring to Vera as 鈥淭he Forces Sweet Tart.鈥� prompting the teachers to threaten us with having the gramophone turned off and saying our tables instead.

On Plymouth Hoe, lived a giant barrage balloon that we used to go and look at on our family walks. Some days it would be tethered to the ground, other days it would float some distance up in the air. It was like some sort of pet elephant, and it even had a name, though I cannot now remember what we called it. There was a sort of general affection for this huge, hydrogen-filled creature, for we knew it helped to protect our city.

Nevertheless, our city could not be protected. Over two, devastating nights, it burned to the ground. Our house was high on a hill, several miles from the city centre and from our back windows we could see right across it, to Plymouth Sound. I remember how we all went indoors after the "all clear" one night in April 1941 and stood in the upstairs window, staring at the vast sea of fire that used to be Plymouth's city centre.

Yet even that horror was not fully a horror to me, at five years old. Bombs fell, houses burned - to me that was just the natural way of things. Just as it was normal to have thick, heavy blackout curtains at all the windows. The glass was pasted over with strips of some transparent stuff that was meant to prevent the glass shattering from bomb blasts. It was all a part of normality. And life went on. The large stores from downtown, like Dingles, moved to temporary premises made out of large Nissen huts. People queued for things and handing over their ration books to have the coupons clipped. In my childhood games, whether alone or with friends, playing shops included clipping coupons as a matter of course.

Bananas, I knew only as wax decorations that hung from the greengrocer's ceiling, gathering dust. The grown-ups dreamed of real ones, and of oranges. I did not miss bananas nor oranges for I had tasted neither. They were not part of normality. But I did enjoy the "banana sandwiches" that my mother made from parsnips with a few drops of banana flavouring. To me, they really were banana sandwiches, and they were a yummy treat, for I knew no different.

I knew no beach without barbed wire entanglements, so for me, those were an accepted part of the scenery. And I thought that people's front gardens all had low walls in front because, well, that was how front gardens were, and even though I knew, intellectually, that many of them had once boasted iron railings and that the railings had all been taken away to melt down for munitions, I couldn't really imagine how those gardens would have looked with railings round them.

As children will, I figured out my own answers to questions which came up in my mind. Near our church there was an ancient slot machine, painted green, with little windows in it and the word "Nestle." I marvelled at the amazing thought that anyone could get chocolate by putting money in a slot. But instead of asking anyone why this no longer happened, I reasoned that the chocolate must have been removed so that in the event of invasion, the Germans would not be able to get at the chocolate. (I was an adult before I thought back to that and actually made the connection with food rationing!!)

"The Germans" existed in my child mind as some sort of generic enemy. Thirty-two years after the war ended, even though by then I had known many German people and had German friends, when I visited Germany for the first time I felt a frisson of fear as the train I was on rumbled over the border and the words "I am behind the enemy lines." suddenly appeared from some deep, long-forgotten vault in my mind.

Though I cannot remember the beginning of World War 2, I can vividly remember the day it ended. Grandma came into my bedroom and said: "The war is over." And I can remember the feeling which washed over me as I heard those words. It was a feeling that stayed with me for a very long time - especially when the father I had not seen for four years and scarcely remembered was suddenly there again and life became a celebration. I was not used to celebration. I was not used to this strange, new thing called "peacetime." To this day, that feeling I had in 1945 still lurks in some dark, deep corner of my psyche. It was a dreamlike feeling of unreality. As though one day I would wake up and we would be at war again. Then true normality would have returned at last. #

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