大象传媒

"This story was submitted to the People's War site by CSV/大象传媒 Radio Nottingham on behalf of Mr Skeats with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions"

In 1939 I living in the east end of London in a district called Hoxton part of a borough of Shoreditch. In Harman street which was about 300yds long on each side of which was a unbroken terrace of houses
Each house had an excavated basement, which butted out into the street and had a boundary. This was fenced of from the street by railings with a gate in it for access to 6/7 steps these led down to a paved area and access to the front door of the two basement apartments. Entry to the rest of the house was gained by going up a wide flight of 6/7 steps to the main front door this was the entrance to 6 more apartments. Two one each side of the hall and a further four flats two on each of the floors above, also of the hall going to the back of the house was a flight of seven stairs which led to a half landing, off the landing was a toilet and another flight of six stairs going towards the front of the house which led to another landing off which was a further two flats. this sequence was repeated to the top floor.
Each apartment had two rooms one of which was fitted with a sink and a cold water supply. The only toilets were the two on the half landings and one in the hall. It was quiet common for large families to live in these two rooms in fact in the two rooms on the opposite side of the landing were we were their lived a family of ten SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 3rd 1939, is etched in my memory for two reasons;
(1) It was a nice warm late summers day and myself and a few more children were playing in the road, when a lady who was more affluent than most of the residents of the area and had a radio, opened her window and made us all sit down on the kerb, she then turned her wireless up loud and we all listened to Mr Balbwin announce that England was at war with Germany.
(2) In 1938 my father got a job with London Transport as a trolleybus driver and joined the London Transport T A Division as a gunner in their artillery regiment. In the last fortnight of August 1939 my fathers battery were sent down to Bude for a 14 day training camp they arrived back at Padington station at 12 o/clock. The Military Police were waiting for them and rounded them up as they came of the train and sent to a school at Arnos Grove were they slept for the night and sent back to Bude next morning.
My mother did not know anything about this till 5 o/clock when a lady from S.S.A.F came round to help her fill in the papers for her army allowances.(I later heard this caused some problems on Monday morning, because the spare crews who had been sent to Stamford hill depot to work the duties of the crews who were away at Bude, had moved on to Wood Green depot on Monday to work the duties of another group of T. A. men. This left the Stamford Hill garage short of crews to service there routes which mainly ran to the London docks.)
My next memory is a bit vague, after all I was only just 7 years old and my younger brother was only 4 years old. I know we were evacuated to Bedford and were there about 3 weeks when my mother who had been evacuated to Leyton Buzzard
came to visit us. She was appalled to find that six of us were sleeping in one room on the floor, so she had us moved to Leyton Buzzard. We did not stay there long and were back in London before Christmas.
London county council was perturbed about the number of children who had returned from evacuation and were running around and not getting any education. So they tried to open up some of the schools, but found that due to the number of teachers who had been called up for military duty also the large number who had been given places in the country were, extra teachers were required because of the number of evacuees who still remained where they had been evacuated to. That they found they did not have sufficient teachers to run full time education, so they started half day schooling. To get a balanced education we went to school in the morning one week and in the afternoon the next. This came to a end when the B.E.F. was evacuated from Dunkirk.
Some time between Xmas and May I was taken to Millbank military hospital to see my father who had been seriously ruptured while loading guns at Tilbury, while at Millbank we were told not to make a noise as there was a Polish air force pilot dying in a bed close by he had been shot up in dog fight
Our lives changed again when the B.E.F. was evacuated from Dunkirk. My brother and I were again evacuated, this time we were taken by bus to Paddington railway station were we were put on trains to Witney in Oxfordshire. When we arrived in Witney we were split up into groups and sent to different villages. My aunt and cousins were sent to Woodstock, my brother and I were evacuated to Minster Lovell.
One point I shall always remember about that train journey was at a place I later found out to be Didcot were the train was shunted into a siding along side a train full of wounded solders I remember some of them having their heads bandaged and some of them with blood seeping through the dressing some did not even have their wounds dressed
At Minster Lovell we were billeted on a family who had a small holding. The head of the family was called Steve his wife was named Winney, and they had two children a son called Wallis and a daughter called Doreen. . So began one of the happiest times of my life, all though to begin with it was quite a shock to find that there was no electric light to switch on, that lighting was by oil lamp. There was no gas the lady we were evacuated to had to do all the cooking on a range. That there was no running water, the water was pumped up from a well in one of the fields and if you wanted to go to toilet you went to a wooden shed in a field and did your business on a seat over a bucket.
However, we were very well looked after and Steve bought us Bicycles and some times on Sunday afternoons he took us out if the weather was fit, for bike rides
and walks. On most Saturdays we all used to walk into Witney to go shopping. On the small holding they had two cows one a Jersey and the other a Gurnsey, also there was a family of goats, some pigs, a lot of pullets, and two dogs. We were not allowed to drink cows milk but were allowed to drink as much goats milk as we liked. The cows milk was skimmed. of its cream and the way was then fed to the pigs, the cream was then churned into butter.
While we were their Steve took a litter of pigs to market he got a docket to have one slaughtered but had to hand in all our ration books to have the meat and lard ration taken out. There was also a lot of pullets on the small holding and on Friday mornings Steve who also worked as a wine cellar man at a local brewery used to take a lot of eggs to work. The whites of these eggs where used to fine port and Steve used to bring the yolks home and we used to have them as omelettes for breakfast on Saturday mornings.
We went to the village school and had to walk there and back each day. It was a long and if my memory serves me right, it was about two miles which to a seven year old was a long way. Auntie Winney as we called her, used to prepare our breakfast on a primas stove and always packed us up with sandwiches for lunch some times paste some times jam. During the day auntie Winney would light the range and We always had a hot evening meal
My parents visited us several times while we were evacuated and while we were away my father was invalided out of the army and sent back to work on the buses. My parents also moved from Hoxton to Harringay which in those days was a very desirable residential area. The property they rented was a three bedroom terraced house situated in the middle of a terrace. Three bedrooms, bathroom and toilet upstairs , two reception rooms, breakfast room , kitchen and toilet down stairs their was also a small back garden. The thing that surprised us was that the house had been built in the early thirty's but was light by gas and we had to go to the gas show rooms to buy gas mantles to put on the gas pipe that poked through the room ceilings to light the rooms. Once these mantles had been used once and had burnt off you had to be very careful when you light them again because they became very fragile
While we were evacuated my aunty Beet my mothers sisters husband George Gering and my cousin Gladys Gering who was 15 years old lived in Islington London. My uncle George was to old for military service but was directed into work of National Importance during the day. At night he did his bit as a ARP warden and my cousin Gladys who was employed as a messenger by the G.P.O.during the day, acted as a runner for the A.R.P. during the night. After one particle heavy raid they went home to find a 40 Ft crater where there house had been it was made by a land mine They were found temporary accommodation for a few days and then sent to Huddersfield. The reason my uncle was sent to Huddersfield was that he had always worked with cloth and Huddersfield was a mill town. (I鈥檝e been told they found themselves in a strange town with no furniture and hardly any cloths, and were still sleeping on the floor with no bed's and little to no furniture a year later)
Another of my mothers sisters husband was a qualified motor engineer, they lived at Leigh-on-sea in Essex before the war and he used to make his living servicing the engines of the fishing boats around that part of the Thames estuary and also the engines of airplanes that used Rochford airdrome. As he was no longer able to continue this employment he was directed to work at Vickers in Manchester, after a short time he was transfer to the R.O.F in Nottingham were he had to prove the weapons before they were handed over to the army. When it was decided to clear all civilians away from costal areas my aunt and cousins came to Nottingham to join him.
Two incidents that I recall while I was at Minster Lovell
(1) when Brize Norton was bombed the German airplanes passed over the field in which I was playing they were so low could not have been much more than 40 feet above ground level.
(2) the small holding we were on was very close to a training airdrome.( Not much more than eight hundred yards). Now the aircraft used for training were not armed and one Sunday morning when we came out of church we herd that a German fighter had attacked one of these trainer planes and had so wounded the pilot that he had decided to take the German into the next world with him so crashed his trainer into the German plane.

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