大象传媒

I lived in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire when I was a child. I was born in 1934 so was 5 when the war started. During the war, we kids used to collect rose-hips. We used to go round the wild rose trees collecting them and putting them in a big bag. Then we'd take them to the chemist where they would be weighed and we would be paid for them. They would then be used to make rose-hip syrup. We also collected newspapers. Depending on the amount of newspapers you collected, you got different badges - sergeant or corporal or whatever.

We used to have air-raid practices at school. A pretend siren would go, and we would have to troop out and sit in the air-raid shelter with our gas-masks out. I don't know what would have happened if the real bombs had dropped because those masks were no good at all! They didn't fit at all tightly so you would have got gassed even if you were wearing them. The shelter was a proper brick one but it was horrible in there - cold and wet.

I remember we were rationed and we didn't have ice-cream, sweets, or crisps, and there was no fast food. You didn't have butter on your bread, only jam. We used to eat cattle cake sometimes if we were hungry - it looked and felt llke hard toffee and was quite good! However,I don't think I would eat it now if it were offered to me!

Otherwise, life was quite normal because where we lived there wasn't much action, although we could see London when it was burning. We did get a few bombs but they were strays, and we got machine-gunned once. It was so drummed into us that anything we found lying could be explosives and should not be touched, that we would not even pick up a sweet if we saw one on the ground - even a sweet could have been a butterfly bomb. We used to collect ammunition as souvenirs but that was used stuff. I don't remember ever beng bothered by the war or being afraid but just accepting it all. Maybe it was because I was too young to be really aware of the horror of it all whereas if I'd been a teenager I would have understood more about what was happening and then been afraid.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.