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Name Pamela Greenwood (neé Thomas)
Interview Date 7th June 2005
Subjects covered Blackout, Childhood (games), Evacuees.
Location Oxford, Port Meadow.
People Included

This is an edited extract of a recorded interview conducted by Museum of Oxford with Mrs Pam Greenwood. It has been submitted to the People’s War website with her permission. A full version of the interview transcript and audio recording will be available at the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies.

Blackout
Oh, we had blackouts, yes we had blackouts all the time. And we had these black curtains made of satien and we had our torches, we all used to think we were… with it if we had a torch of our own, but it was all blacked out and you only had about half an inch circle in the centre that you could see through.

Childhood
Hopscotch, two-balls, rounders, throwing the ball up into the sky. Spent hours just throwing to this one person from London, cos she was the only person who had two of these nice tennis balls.. and we used to see how high we could throw them to each other at the other end of the road. And then we played another game with six pieces of wood, six sticks. You played it similar to rounders er…two sides, and the one side was on the path, because we only had the road to play in, we didn’t have any playing fields or anything like that, and you put two sticks as you hit the ball, a tennis ball, and when it had gone away, see how far you could hit it… and you just put a stick up, then another stick, then two diagonally the other way and then two on top of the first two, to see who could make a square first. That was the game. And rounders, oh I can remember doing hand-stands. We were always doing hand-stands. And I thought I’d be clever and bend my legs back to put on the window-sill of the house opposite. Instead my feet went through the window! And so our mother had to pay for a broken window, which was quite expensive in those days. So I was told not to do it again! Well I can’t remember. …
My my main schooling was battling with these people drawing on my work I found. Oh, we used to play skipping in the playground I remember you…I had a long rope and everybody jumped in once and out, that type of game. Cos there was nothing mechanical or to look at … not in them days….
Interviewer: Did any of your games reflect the war?
Um…well, as I said. I was known and V1 and my friend V2 because that was when the flying bombs came and the story went round Tom Tom the Flying Bomb, because my name was Thomas, and then it gradually dwindled down then to V1 and V2 which was what the flying bombs were called…
Oh yes, yes. People did, yer. And then opposite the allotments was Port Meadow’s Sandy Bay swimming …we used to go swimming there and er…there was all horses used to come and take your sandwiches if you weren’t watching. And of course, in the winter it was nice at Port Meadow, when you went with a crowd, because it was all ice, it overflowed and there as ice and we used to make slides and you know really long slides you used to come down. Yer…that was quite fun. And we didn’t come home till it was dark.

Evacuees
….we had so many evacuees down here… all these London evacuees. I can remember them all coming to the parish hall, crying, coach-loads of them, and, because obviously they’d left their parents at home, and the people in charge would come round knocking on all the doors to see if you could take them in. It was, wasn’t very nice.

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