大象传媒

Sunday morning September 3rd 1939, I was 19yrs old,my twin sister and i had joined several friends on the tennis courts to play in the sunshine,carefree, not botherd about politics, the P.M. had come back with a promise of peace, and that silly little man who looked like Charlie Chaplin would never stand up to the Great British Empire would he?they were the last hours that we would ever know that feeling. One of the lads arrived to tell us that war had been declared, and then the air raid siren sounded, a false alarm,but it bought home to us something of what the future was to bring.
All the boys who had been playing tennis with us that day were called up and we all went our very different ways, some never to return.I married the following year in a borrowed dress and a fruit cake hidden in a cardboard wedding cake model.I had to give up my job in the Streatham Public Library, no married woman was employed by the Bourough Council, though that soon changed as their single employees were being called up.I went on to a clerical job at the Ministry
of Information untill a few months before my daughter was born in 1941. I was sent out of London to Oxford to have her, away from my family and friends as it was thought to be safer,I was only 21yrs old.
Life by then was becoming very difficult, rations,air raids, shortages of everything, cloths, household goods, we had a points allowance which we exchanged for things like
tinned goods,jam, biscuits, ect.The butcher( shades of Joansy and Dads Army) would put a sausage or peice of offal in with your rations, sometimes the fishmonger would have a delivery but we had to queue for that- often to have them run out before you reached the front of the line,there was a sense of achievement if you happend to be near Woolworths and managed to get hold of
some household goods,i remember an enamel washing up bowl,a small milk saucepan,and best of all a lipstick! aluminium of course had disappeared, it was needed to build the planes.
My home in Tooting survived the bombing, apart from a few tiles off of the roof and broken windows, all repaired very quickly by the Irish men who had come over to do the work.
My husband was worried about us and he suggested we move out of London.My daughter and i went to live with my sister in Radcliff,she had a small son and we settled in with her, her husband came back home and she was expecting another child, so we had to find other accommodation,first a very small cottage with no electricity, so no Iron, lights,just two open fires,the council provided a gas cooker, outside lavatory that we had to share with other familys.I was given a wash stand to serve as a kitchen table,we were allowed so many square feet of linoleum by the Government, (but paid for by us)which was just enough for the centre of the living room floor, the surrounding floor
boards were then stained and polished, we made rag rugs for the bedside,and in front of the fire.Hot water was boiled for baths and the weekly wash in a pail on the stove,baths in a tin bath in front of the fire. I was very loneley in the cottage, and was very pleased to be told of a lady in Crew who was looking for a lodger while her husband was away fighting in Burma. We moved in with Peggy and her son Terry,we stayed untill her husband came home after the war.
When the children were small we visited the clinic once a week, we were supplied with a large tin of dried milk for feeds,orange juice,cod liver oil,and a brown marmite type thing that my baby loved to suppliment our rations.Trying to put a meal together was quite a problem, plenty of vegetables, some home grown fruit, apples, plumbs,rhubarb, which we bottled for the winter, i had some extras from my mother-in-law who had a sister in America who sent food parcels and my share of those helped out when my husband came home on leave from his AA Battery on the Thames Estuary.
Things were not easy but everyone had the same problems,the constant air raids, the blackout,the shortage of most things ,but we shared what we could,helped out where we could,tried to keep our spirits up(good old ITMA) there was only the radio in the evening, sometimes a visit to the cinema usually in the afternoon to avoid the air raids, no visits to the seaside as all the beaches were no go areas cut off with barbed wire and mines in case of invasion, no names on stations, and street names were removed along with sighnposts in the country. Car headlights were blacked out except for a small slit,trams were compleatly blacked out,we had to take our gas masks with us wherever we went, thank goodness i never had to use the baby size as my daughter screamed herself into hysterics every time i tried to test it!.
It took a long time to get back to any thing like normal life,even after hostilities had ended food shortages went on with rationing, as for things like sweets, ice cream,fresh oranges, bananas, we still had to wait for for a while,but we were healthy on our rather sparse diet -though not being able to find a dentist left me with problems for the rest of my life,a lot of young people just had there teeth removed.
Ordinary people had little idea of what was really going on in Europe, we were quite unaware of how close we had come to being defeated,which was just as well i guess, i have found out so much since and still feel that whatever Churchill was he certainly kept us going through those years and we owe him a great dept for that.

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