大象传媒

In September 1939 we lived in Loughton, Essex. I was 8 nearly 9, and my sister was 12. I remember September 3rd. It was a Sunday and mum and dad listened to the radio in the morning - Mr Chamberlain's broadcast. I remember we were out in the front garden by the gate and neighbours were all speaking to each other. Later that morning the siren went off, the steady "all clear" sound, and we all could hear it loud and clear - positioned by the high street I believe.

I think my parents were very shocked - memories of the first war (the Great War they called it)were still very much with them. Although my mum had been at school 1914-18, my dad had been in Ruhleben internment camp in Germany the whole war and had a bad time, never spoken of but never forgotten. In 1919 and 1920 he had worked with the Friends Relief Service in Poland. He always said that after the war is over, things would be worse for a long time (they were, food rationing etc).

We were issued with gas masks, each one kept in a brown cardboard box with a hanging strap. You had to carry them everywhere. At school we had "gas mask practice" and we had to sit in the classroom with them on for various lengths of time. They were quite suffocating and smelt rubbery. We also had to practice going to the air raid shelters at school which were built in the grounds. Most people got nicer gas mask boxes later on or made covers for them. We all had Identity Cards with numbers. Our family numbers were CCFS/2231, 2, 3 and mine was CCFS/2234.

Barrage balloons appeared in the sky everywhere, tethered all round London I suppose. I thought they looked like elephants without legs. My sister and I went to the High School which was just a walk round the corner and up the road, less than a mile. The school field became a searchlight base, so when the bombing started in 1940 it was a target every night. All the h ouses round about were damaged, and the house next to the field had a direct hit.

The air raids came every night I remember. The sirens would start (wailing up and down for Alert, and a steady wail for All Clear). My dad (a tailor in his youth) made us "siren suits" - woollen one piece suits with a zip up the front - mine was green. We wore them at night, and during a raid my sister and I were put under the piano (a Bechstein grand) in the drawing room but mum and dad stayed in their bedroom, when they weren't walking about. One night my dad got a sliver of glass in his eye from the broken windows, but it wasn't serious. Every morning all the houses round us had broken tiles and broken windows and there was shrapnel all over the road. We used to go out and collect, all funny twisted shapes of metal large and small and keep it in a shoe box - most children did this.

We soon got to recognize which planes were coming by the sound of the engines, bombers or fighters, Germans or ours, spitfires, messerschmits etc. You heard the alert, then the sound of the engines coming. The air raids usually started about the same time in the evening, and the all clear wouldn't go until the early hours of the morning. In the morning my mum and dad used to walk down to see my grandma at her bungalow to make sure she was alright. After a while the continuous raids stopped and I don't remember gas masks any more - I suppose that was the Battle of Britain but it wasn't called that then. I remember being quite frightened by the bombing raids. The All Clear was a great relief. The wailing of the siren still brings back that feeling of fear and relief - you hear it sometimes in war films and TV. The noise of ack ack (anti-aircraft fire) was everywhere. I think that Loughton was part of the outer ring of searchlights and ack ack round London.

In September 1941 I and my sister went away to boarding school. My parents moved for work reasons to Birmingham, and the Loughton house was rented out and after the war sold to the tenants. Our new home was quite large, detached, with a big garden. A concrete air raid shelter was built underground at one side. The bombing of Birmingham was very heavy, and we were near a railway line and the Longbridge aero works, so our district was a target.

I remember the summer holidays of 1942 and 1943 particularly. My dad wasthe group leader of the fire watchers in our road, and the duty wardens came and signed on the rota at our back door every evening. When the raids were bad, we spent many nights in the underground air raid shelter in the garden - playing cards, usually rummy, and wearing our siren suits.

The worst night was when a string of bombs unloaded down our road - we heard the whistles and thuds getting louder and louder. One was almost a direct hit -it fell outside our front door. We were all standing together indoors in the breakfast room pretty frightened, expecting to be blown sky high. Nothing happened. It didn't go off. A little while later somebody came and told us to evacuate immediately. I suppose the parents picked up some valuables (I don't remember) but I know they were cross with my sister because she wanted to find the cat. We walked up to the car at the top of the back garden and drove to a neighbour and sat in their sitting room for the rest of the night - there were others too. We weren't allowed back to fetch things, and next day we went and stayed with friends over at W. Bromwich. The bomb never went off, and after a day or two we were allowed back. There was an enormous crater outside the front door.

In the school holidays in 1944 after the Normandy landings I remember we put up on the breakfast room wall a big map of W. Europe, and put in flags as the allied armies advance - the paper each day gave a map on the front page (I think we had the Daily Mail). When they discovered the concentration camps, it caused great shock. Nobody had known about it before.

We listened to the wireless all the time. There was always Music While You Work, lots of dance bands, Joe Loss, etc. with crooners, Garrison Theatre (Jack Warner), and of course Tommy Handley ITMA (Its That Man Again) which nobody ever missed - we repeated all the catch phrases (still do). Before the war I think I remember Monday Night at Eight, and the Man in Black. Of course we always listened to the News bulletins. "This is the News and this is Alvar Liddell reading it..." the progress of the war was followed closely. It didn't mean much to me, except for following the Normandy landings in 1944 and then those terrible pictures in the paper of the concentration camps.

Another detail I remember about the war was that in Birmingham we had to have a soldier billeted on you if you had a spare bedroom. They must have tried to match the soldier with you interests and my dad was a keen pianist with two grand pianos, a Bechstein and a Bluthner. Our billet was a very keen musician, in REME at the time. We got on well with him and kept in touch afterwards.

All basic food was rationed during and after the War. We each had a Ration Book, and the shopkeeper had to cut out the coupons each time you bought your ration. The meat ration was very small. We never went hungry, and we used to eat out quite a bit - I remember the cinemas (Odeon or ABC) always had good cafes on the first floor - and we usually had fish and chips. Fish and rabbit were never rationed and yhou could usually get it if you queued for a bit. Tinned goods were on "points". They cut out the coupons in the same way for anything tinned. I don't know why they were called points. Tea, sugar, butter, meat, marg, bread, tinned things, sweets and of course petrol, clothes, everything was rationed including soap and soap flakes, and it continued for years after the war. I had a wonderful parcel of clothes sent by my American pen friend in Philadelphia in 1946. Potatoes and other vegetables were not rationed but most people grew their own in their back gardens. In our garden we had fruit trees, plums and apples, also raspberries and loganberries. We never saw a banana throughout the war (my favourite fruit when small), no ice cream, and only an occasional orange.

We cut the lawns with a scythe and sickle, and we kept chickens, about 6 or 8 Rhode Island Reds. You had to give up your egg ration in exchange for chicken meal coupons, but we were always self-sufficient in eggs. We fed the hens on boiled up potato peelings and chicken mash - I can still smell this cooking now, in our outhouse by the back door. We also tied up cabbages on the wire netting for them to peck. You had to cut their wing feathers on one side to make them lopsided so that they couldn't fly over the wire netting. I didn't mind holding them each in turn while someone used the shears. Each hen laid an egg each day in a nesting box, and when I was home I collected them up. We pencilled the day of the week on them, to use them in rotation. My mum preserved the glut of eggs in springtime in a bucket of isinglass.

I was nearly 9 when the war started, and 14 when it finished.

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