大象传媒

WHAT I DID IN THE WAR

I do remember 鈥渢he day war broke out鈥�, that
is of course the second world war. I was just 10 years old.

First of all the air-raid sirens went almost immediately, shortly followed by the 鈥渁ll-clear鈥� - a false alarm. Secondly I remember being quite upset and crying after I had gone to bed, because I was afraid.

It must have distressed my parents. We already had our gas masks and our identity cards - I still have them both.

We had to carry the gas masks with us all the time. Later on, an additional section was added, due to a new potent gas.

Nothing much happened in the first year, except that our schooling was interrupted. Ann and I and a few others living locally went to school at the house of a teacher who lived nearby (about a half-a-mile away instead of 1 1/2 miles).

I think that lasted for the first year but then we went back to the school, just in time for the real war to start.

The Blitz

The battle of Britain started in August 1940 and we saw some of the dog-fights high in the sky. Also the bombing started and we spent some time at school in the air-raid
shelters. Mostly we sang songs. There were benches to sit on, along the walls.

At home we also had a shelter - of sorts ! Our house was a mainly wooden bungalow with a corrugated-iron roof, raised on stilts (for flood protection) and the shelter was built under the only room which was made of concrete blocks with a tiled roof - which happened to be my bedroom.

The floor of the room was laid with old
mattresses and there was a trap-door in the floor to getinto the shelter (there was also access from outside). Underneath had been dug out a bit and sides had been
added (of wood).

We had a paraffin stove for heating and cooking and took down hot-water bottles and blankets, because we had to spend nearly every night in there during the autumn of
1940.This was because the German planes attacking London headed for the River Thames and had the extra land-mark
of the large reservoirs in our area.

So in fact although we heard the planes going over we didn鈥檛 get bombing - except once. We had our local 鈥渂litz鈥� one night. My father put out an incendiary bomb which landed in our garden and there were a number of small high-explosive bombs around the area. We explored the craters the next day.

Apart from that, we had the noise every night of the anti-aircraft guns. There was a box barrage fired from nearby, which made a tremendous racket. (Shells exploded
in a cubic area of sky and nothing in it could survive - but there was never anything in ours!)

We collected lots of shrapnel from these affairs. Shrapnel could kill - one of the reasons air-raid wardens and others wore tin hats.

My father was an air-raid warden and was based at a post near our house. He was on duty some nights of the week.

He also did night duty at the Natural History museum in London, where he worked. They had much more bombing and the museum suffered a lot, with incendiary bombs and high explosives, including a very big one called a land-mine.

Many of the books from his library had been evacuated to the country, but some rare ones were caught in the fire and we had individual pages of unique books pinned
on a clothes-line in our kitchen, to dry out.

Before the war there were 15 staff, but during the war there were only two of them. They did have to provide information for potential targets from time to time.

I think it was for his devoted work during the war as much as anything that he was awarded an MBE when he retired.

Incidently he cycled to work throughout the war - 16 miles each way.I went with him a few times when I was big enough. It was exhausting.

There was one occasion when he and two friends were in a fishing punt near the weir in Sunbury that they saw three planes going in to land at Vickers factory at
Brooklands and they saw that the last one was German ! It had sneaked in that way and dropped its bombs on the factory.

My mother was in the WVS (Womens Voluntary Service). On one occasion she mentioned in conversation that her father-in-law was an air marshall. She had missed out two words, because he was an air-raid shelter arshall!

One of the things she did was to accompany evacuees on trains - this was while we were in Blackpool.

The flying bombs

I remember the flying bombs very well and, in particular, the night the V2 rockets started. They were very frightening because you couldn鈥檛 hear them coming - just the explosion when they landed.

One Sunday we had a lot of people at the house and we went on an expedition up the river where we lived. At the end was a weir called Tumbling Bay and it was an exciting expedition because you had to get out and push the boat over shallows.

After we had started back, the air-raid siren went, which in those days meant a flying bomb was headed our way. As we arrived back at our house we heard the bomb
coming (Ishall never forget that noise) and heard the engine cut out. That usually meant an immediate vertical drop and so safety for us as we could tell it was still
some distance away.

I rushed to the top of the bank to look for the explosion and I saw the flying bomb apparently coming straight towards us - it was of the rarer glider type. I shouted a warning, then realised it was not heading
quite our way.

Well, it hit that weir at Tumbling Bay where we had been thirty minutes earlier. Two people were killed and the weir flattened , causing the river to flood.

Of course we realised afterwards that we would have set off for home when the siren went, anyway, so would have been safe, but a Dutch merchant sea captain visiting us that day, who had been through numerous
convoys, said he had never been more frightened.

I think it was that event as much as anything that caused my parents to arrange for my sister and I to be evacuated to Blackpool to my aunt and uncle, where we
stayed from August 1944 till March 1945.

The German prisoners

Our house was almost beside the Thames River Board offices and one day agroup of men appeared working in the grounds. Their working clothes had large coloured patches on the jacket and trousers: they were
prisoners of war.

My mother made them tea and gradually my parents became friendly with them - one in particular named Eric, who in fact was nearer my age than theirs.

Their camp was about 10 miles away and my father, my sister and I cycled there once to visit them in the camp. We were allowed in without any difficulty.

After the war, Eric brought his wife over to visit my parents and they remained in touch for many years. I think all the prisoners appreciated meeting some
ordinary English people, on friendly terms.

Food

As a child my diet was normal. My mother prepared the food and had the problem of making do during the war, when there were shortages.

We did not have sugar in our
tea and always had a surplus which could be exchanged with other people for other rationed foods (this was the fringe of the so-called black market).

We had ration books, which were partly for portions of specific food, such as butter (two ounces a week) and partly for a choice of less basic items (such as tinned food) by use of a points system.

The only eggs were dried eggs, in powder form. Some people were favoured by shop-keepers, hence the term 鈥渦nder-the-counter鈥�.

We always ate together as a family although there was a time when my father had a special diet to try to cure or avoid attacks of migraine - he suffered very badly from these in middle age and could be prostated for two days at a time, about once a fortnight at the worst.

He had always been keen on dieting for health, but didn鈥檛 inflict it upon the rest of us.

School dinners started at primary school, just after the war started, presumably as government policy to ensure an adequate diet.

Certainly I never remember not having enough to eat, although I have a
recollection of seeing oranges for what seemed like the first time when visiting a Dutch ship in harbour in London near the end of the war.

Immediately after the war food was just as short. I remember going to what were called British Restaurants, where the food was a bit like school dinners except that there was some choice.

These were again Government policy. Rationing still existed when I got married in 1954, but only for clothing, not for any food.

D Day and after

D day caused great excitement, We had a map of France on the wall, with coloured flags for the Allies and the Germans and we listened to the news to find out how
to move them.

I remember seeing American bombers flying back from daylight bombing raids, sometimes with huge chunks missing where they had been hit.

VE Day

This was the day to celebrate victory in Europe. I think it was in June 1945. We had a big outdoor party at our house. All the scouts and guides were there and lots of other people.

We had a bonfire on which we burned an effigy of Hitler. My parents obtained from somewhere a large number of coloured jars in which they put candles, so that we had
coloured lights. All the flags that could be found were flown. It was a great occasion.

VJ Day

This was in August 1945 and I was at school harvest camp. We joined in the celebrations in the Berkshire village where we were billeted. They had a huge bonfire and we
boys had great fun with the local girls.

I had no understanding at the time of the horror of the atom bombs which had achieved this victory.

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