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Growing up in the War

When the war broke out I was a child of eight, playing with my toys. When it ended, I was in my teens, engaged in the futile pursuit of girls.
I attended Grove Street school, which we could see from the flat roof of our house. They started to dig air raid shelters on its playing field, and in New Ferry Park. We would go into the shelters when the sirens sounded and play word games with our teachers. We each had a gas mask and they gave us lessons in first aid. The mortuary was outside the school gates and you could see the bodies in there through a crack in the door.
In 1940 We had a visit from one of mother’s cousins, Harry Green, who was a petty officer aboard HMS Ajax during the battle of the River Plate, when the German battlecruiser Graf Spee was sunk. He gave us a brass ashtray nearing his ship’s crest as a souvenir.
My brother Lawrence and I were evacuated to Portmadoc. I loved climbing the mountains and playing in the woods and the big caves at Black Rock Sands, but we were not well treated by our foster parents. After less than a year, my mother brought us both home, just in time for the big 1941 raids on Merseyside. We slept under the stairs, where there was no room for our parents. My father was in a First Aid team. Every morning after a raid, we went out collecting the shrapnel that had fallen.
On night, we were woken by a terrific bang, and Lawrence started to cry. I comforted him, then the cloakroom door opened and my father’s face appeared, all blackened. They had heard a flapping sound outside and went to the back door. Just as they opened it, the bomb went off, blowing them on their backs. They were only bruised, but the chairs in which they had been sitting in the morning room were pitted with glass from the smashed windows.
Nearly every window in the house was broken and many doors blown off their hinges. It was two years before everything was mended, because materials were so scarce. The last items were the curved glass windows in the lounge. A parachute mine had landed in soft soil in nearby allotments which had absorbed much of the explosion. One of the men there complained that all his manure had been blown away, and my dad said it was now on the walls of our house and he was welcome to scrape it off if he wanted it back.
As the war went on everything became very scarce. There was no chocolate or sweets at all and no imported fruits like bananas. We were lucky because my Uncle Harry still had the grocer’s shop and we got a few things extra, and my dad was now salesman for a wholesale grocer calling on shops in Liverpool. He had a car with a petrol ration and quite often came home with scarce things, like a sack of white flour that must have come from a ship, for we could only buy grey stuff. I can still smell the lovely bread Mother made with it. You couldn’t buy toys, but I had a lot of toy soldiers and tanks from just before the war, Meccano and a lovely electric train set. As I got older, we sold them all.
We always listened to the radio in the evenings and I liked Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey and Jack Warner in their comedy shows. We all played cards games, and board games like Monopoly. Lawrence and I always went to the pictures on a Saturday afternoon, when the big picture, nearly always cowboys, was preceded buy an interminable number of ‘shorts’. As I got older, my mother took me in the evening, usually to see love stories and musicals.
I enjoyed my comics, first Dandy and Beano and later Hotspur and Wizard. I developed a great love of books, visiting New Ferry library every week. Starting with all the William and Biggles books, I gradually worked my way through a long list of authors, from H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan) to O. Henry’s short stories and Stephen Leacocks humorous writings. I always read the Daily Express, which we had delivered. This did not take very long, for as the war went on and paper became scarcer, it gradually shrank to four pages. It was all war news.
I took schoolwork seriously, working hard at my lessons, and was always in the top half-dozen out of forty. We had assembly every morning and we chanted our times tables while we waited for the headmaster to come in. We sang a lot, songs such as Strawberry Fair, Men of Harlech and The Lincolnshire Poacher. Our teacher in the top class, Mr. McEvoy, was strict, often using his cane on the hands of the naughty boys. He got me through the scholarship for Wirral Grammar School. One day, walking home from school, one of the girls told me how babies were made.
When the war ended, all the church bells were rung and ships on the Mersey sounded their sirens. I went round the house drawing the curtains back and putting all the lights on. I was told off for wasting electricity. I went to my first ever funfair when it visited Bebington. The local council gave children vouchers to spend there. They also held dances, and as I watched pretty girls dancing with their mothers, I decided to take dancing lessons.

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