大象传媒

The war had been on a year when I started school. It was at the original Temple Farm School, on the estate of that name, and now the site of the two Sherwin Knights. A grown up sister took me the first day, then the big boy next door said I could go with him but only if I walked a few paces behind. After the first week he walked faster so I couldn't keep up with him. From then on I was on my own. Mums didn't take children to school in those days and most Dads didn't have a car.

I had to negotiate Darnley Arch with its traffic coming in four directions. Not as busy as today, but still dangerous. Plus half an hours walk with the possibility of the air raid siren going off at any time. If it did, I always seemed halfway there; never sure whether to run back home or dash for school. As I was just as scared of my mother (if I dared to miss school) as I was of Hitler, I flew to school!

We had very large shelters in the school grounds and when the siren sounded we were whisked down to them while the raid lasted. We chanted our times tables and sang 'Ten Green Bottles' and 'One Man Went to Mow'. The more verses the song contained the better.

Sometimes, we didn't have time to get to the air-raid shelters, and were made to put our heads inside our desk and pull the lid down as far as we could get it. We all had gas masks in a cardboard box with strong string handles which we wore across our shoulders and accompanied us everywhere. Lots of children were bombed out in the night, as we would discover next day at school, with Jean or Mary's desk empty. The main targets being Chatham Dockyard and Short Brothers. There was a barrage balloon tied down in the school field. It was huge and when the wind got under it, it racked and swayed and made an awful eerie noise. I was terrified of it.

Although we had disrupted nights (it was nothing to be woken up from a warm bed three times in one night, to go down to the 'dug-out' in your back garden) and interrupted lessons at school, we seemed to learn a lot and quickly.

At six we were reading Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows and Alice in Wonderland. We knitted dishcloths and even blanket-stitched around the edge. We made oven gloves and an apron out of Hessian, for which we had to master the art of sewing bias binding around its edge. The egg-cosy we did out of scraps of old material in the shape of a chicken's head, sits on the dresser in my kitchen, albeit somewhat faded now.

For a long time we only had half day schooling. I often wonder how we learnt all we did. We certainly had to grow up fast, although we remained very innocent. At seven we were transferred to a junior school, which again meant quite a walk. Mostly I was happy there. At one point we had a teacher with a very German sounding surname. She spoke with an accent and would walk up and down the rows as we worked. It must have been winter because I can only remember seeing her with her coat on. It was a long, heavy grey thing with very wide sleeves and she would have her hands hidden up them, mandarin style. If you made an ink blob or spelling mistake, she would pounce and whip from the sleeve a wooden coat-hanger which she brought crashing down on the back of her hand. You never did it again. She always looked so grim, I never once saw her smile, and we were all frightened of her.

The children next door were evacuated to Wales, but I didn't go with them. 'If we get hit, we'll be wiped out together', I can remember my mother saying. 'I can't bear the thought of you becoming an orphan', she added. When the children came back a long time later, they constantly sang in Welsh.

When the raids got worse and even more frequent and it got dark earlier, we spent every night in our 'dug-out'. That grave like hole dug deep in the ground, with its arch shaped corrugated metal roof. The walls were lined with sandbags and homemade wooden bunks were around the walls. Crude mattresses turned them into beds and these also served as our seats. We had a small oil lamp for light, and a large old suitcase packed with our clothes and parents most precious, but few, possessions. When it rained it trickled down the sandbag walls, and if it poured, it came like a stream down the cut-away steps and in round the wooden door of the opening. It always got in the suitcase; and coats, etc; ended up with a water mark, two or three inches up the lining, which was heartbreaking, as clothes being on ration we had very few.

Being unheated it was very cold in winter. Even in the summer it felt very damp down there. It was in the bedding and in our clothes, and it hung in the air. So we had to put an extra layer of clothes on, and a hot water bottle for cold feet to hug. I blame this for my arthritis and osteoporosis, plus the poor diet we had.

When the doodlebugs, which were flying bombs, like pilotless planes, started coming over, that was very scary. I can still hear the heavy drone they made, and I suppose that wasn't so bad. At least that meant they were on the move. It was when they would suddenly go silent. That awful silence, when you held your breath and waited, because you knew it was coming down. And it always sounded as if it was overhead, as it whistled to its landing.

Early in the mornings and before breakfast, I would be out searching for shrapnel. That was fragments of bombs or shells, scattered by the explosions. And I didn't have far to look either. Our small street alone usually gave me around a dozen pieces a week, which grew larger if you ventured further. Other children also added pieces to my collection and the old biscuit tin I kept them in got very heavy. I was fascinated by the bent and twisted shapes, with each one so different. You could certainly tell we had very few toys to play with.

Sometimes we would pass someone's bombed out home. There might be just one bedroom wall standing and it always had floral wallpaper. The rest would be in ruins. I thought it was the saddest sight of all, and I always cried, even if I didn't know the people who had lived there.

Of course our families never went out at night. Not only because of the raids, but because the blackout also made it unsafe. No street lights or chink of light from a window was allowed; so blackout curtains were added to our windows. Some people had no choice but to be out after dark; it was amazing how may sported black eyes after bumping into lampposts in the pitch black. Sometimes searchlights criss-crossed the sky as they searched for enemy aircraft.

Clothes rationing meant lots of hand-me-downs and swaps with neighbours, and patches and darns, too. Frocks made for us from an old one of Mum's, and auntie's skirts, which had seen better days, were transformed to a new skirt for me for Sunday school. I can see them now, sometimes we looked awful. Sweets on ration too meant we really appreciated them. Saturday night was bath night and while the water was heating up in the copper - and then only six inches (we were lucky to have a bathroom) - we were allowed to go down to the corner shop for our sweets. Your allowance was a quarter a week, so what you bought and how long it lasted was up to you. You might spend it all and eat the lot over the weekend, or two ounces for now and two for the week. You knew when it was gone it was gone. Never chocolate though, we never saw that. The only soap we had was really rough stuff, but from a long bar, I believe it was green for doing the laundry and yellow for personal washing /bathing. Your hair would also be washed with it, no shampoo then. It may have given you clean hair but it messed it up, and you would see it at church the next morning, when a line of children all with frizzy sticking up hair, passed through the door to Sunday school.

Our back garden was used solely for growing vegetables and soft fruits and as my father also kept chickens, we had to give up our egg rations, as we had our own supply. Until you have experienced food rationing in particular, it is very difficult to imagine how hard it is. Our diets, therefore, were monotonous. There was no room for picky children. You ate what was put in front of you. We didn't know what bananas were, and it was long after the war had ended, before we found out. As it was with white bread. All we knew was a dull grey substitute. And the queues - whatever you wanted you queued for. Grown ups moaned about them so I suppose that's why children were sent to do bits of shopping at times. It certainly taught me patience, and I never found the time spent in them boring; there was so much to see. All those little drawers with dried prunes, rice or sugar, which had to be weighed in blue square paper bags, so strong they never tore. The wooden cup with the lid, which scooted along a line above your head, carrying your money to the lady with the till, hidden in her cubbyhole, high in a corner of the store. People talked then. Such interesting things too. Like who had been bombed out in the night and who had hits. What they found when they opened up poor gran, and what they didn't find when they searched someone's' house for stuff on the Black Market (illegal goods). Who was expecting and how to impress the butcher in two easy stages. This enabled his favourites to have one of those special parcels to be kept under the counter, which he always handed over with a wink of his eye. One that fascinated me was what to add to your non-meat, meat pie, without feeling guilty. That's if you hadn't passed stage one with the butcher - I suppose!

How different it is now, nobody talks. And if they did, what they watched on TV or how much their new loft conversion cost, it just wouldn't have the same interest for a child's young ears. Some of my friends' fathers were in the Navy, and didn't see them for two or three years at a time. Other children might lose their Dads on active service, or be reported missing. Whatever happened, no father figure at home didn't turn them into uncontrollables. Whether men were in the services as regulars, or as call-ups, they knew the possibility that they might not come back. Adults and children alike accepted this. There was a war on, and war changes everything. If children needed trauma counselling, it was us. But it was unheard of in those days, and no one has ever cared enough about us since.

A well-known brand of cigarettes around at the time were called 'Weights'. If we saw an empty packet on the ground, we would kick it along the pavement and chant 'When England Invaded Germany Hitler's Troops Surrendered' and hoped it would come true soon.

One day a German pilot landed with a parachute at the bottom of Darnley Road, Strood, just before the arch. We children went tearing up there to have a look. Some ladies with floral pinafores and hair in curlers had formed a circle around him. He lay in a crumpled heap in the middle of the road and had broken his legs. I remember thinking; he only looked like a boy; like someone's big brother. He also looked terrified, which isn't surprising, faced with this formidable bunch of women, standing arms folded and menacing above him.

When the war ended my biscuit tin of shrapnel was thrown out with the rubbish. 'Don't want any reminders of the war', my mother huffed. I was upset to see my collection go, and knew it would take more then the dustmen to take away such forceful memories.

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