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Memories fade or exaggerate. It’s hard to tell where a child’s vision of fact melds into imagination. So, the History of the War According to Me is a collection of scenes, hopefully not too dramatic or inaccurate. None of us try to compare to our heroes — like those in pale blue uniforms with VR on a lapel.

This boy was 11 when war was declared and its immediate effect on us kids was a rush of patriotism, God Save the King and look at the anti-aircraft guns on the playing fields of Clifton.

Hoarding sugar and tinned fruit became a parental pastime that soon became quite useless; it wasn’t very patriotic to produce peaches when there weren’t any around. I remember the sudden drop in Mother’s availability of butter. It wasn’t until a year later that I found out how little meat and butter we did get — but then that’s a story later on. Soap wasn’t rationed at the beginning but I grew up with the ‘don’t waste’ firmly and permanently implanted in my brain. Dry the soap after you use it and don’t leave it in a pool of water. Clean the remains in the butter dish and wipe your finger on the toast — never mind the manners. And good grief, don’t ever cut the fat off the chop; save it for best at the end!

We kids were all staunch monarchists and held for the Empire; after all our Dominion was part of it. Dunkirk happened then and my father taught me the words to the Marseillaise; and indelible they have been. I suppose There’ll Always Be an England was another one.

Our road in Stoke Bishop was a 2d ride in the bus from school across the Downs. So was the cost of Beano and Dandy. So once a week, I walked home. Whatever rationing brought, the King had obviously decreed that the comics were moral boosters and sacrosanct. And Rowntree’s Fruit Gums were still around — probably another Royal Decree. Even ‘Stop Me and Buy One’ used to cycle along the road on my way home from school; but then, I only had tuppence.

My father had fought in places like Cambrey and Paschendale and Ypres with the Canadian forces. He had firm ideas that a slit trench gave a better chance of survival than an Anderson shelter. So I helped build the shelter in the back garden, a long thin effort a yard wide and four people long for the three of us and Millicent, the maid. My war wounds come in this period when a sheet of corrugated iron slipped through my clenched fingers; I have the scars to this day. We had electric light and tubular heating and lay on my Mother’s favourite Chinese carpet. The damp rotted off a corner of it, but we repaired it twenty years later!

The war came to Bristol in June, when air activity became quite noisy and my father went off to do his ARP work most nights. All I remember was the noise and rumble and stories of young ambulance girls tearing through the streets on incendiaried wooden cobbles; the faster they went, the flames would be extinguished beneath them.

Then I was sent off to Canada, the land of milk and honey. We left Liverpool at night rushed out by the Luftwaffe who came to call before the tide was fully in. I can remember staying in the Adelphi Hotel beforehand and having scrambled egg or omelette from dried Chinese powder; it had a gritty feel to it. Out of context, but we also had mushed parsnip with banana essence for banana sandwiches at school in Bristol. But, in a typical English way, we had strawberries and cream after cricket. A five day crossing on the Duchess of Bedford through the northernmost Atlantic at flank speed brought us to Montreal.

At every meal at St Andrew’s butter was placed along the centre of the tables in those little pats. We were limited ‘to show solidarity with Britain’. But each day we were offered as much as those we left behind in Britain had in a week. Later, when we were fourteen or fifteen we were all mustered into the cadet corps. Proud we were, going on War Bonds and Victory Parades in Toronto, winter kilts swishing across our knees keeping them warm in sub freezing cold. God Save the King.

And so, four and a half years later, I came back to the British Isles; I saw my father for an hour in all that time, my mother not at all. Our ninety-six ship convoy took fifteen days to cross, during which time twenty something went to the bottom. Usually, our ship, the 6,000 ton Rangitata, a New Zealand meat carrier was posted to the outside of the convoy. Carrying only 800 civilians in a cabin space of 100 and meat, the ship was more expendable. The centre was taken up by troop ships. Our little ship didn’t throw depth charges, sailors just rolled them over the stern. The ship lifted in the air!

A number of us, between 16 and 17 years old volunteered to assist those on watch. The quiet, the phosphorus spray, the moon which everyone hated, black ships as far as the eye could see, stand out among the memories; oh, yes and banging my shins against the Oerlikon ammunition boxes on the unlit deck. We managed one or two watches until the officers looked at our passports, all held in the captain’s safe. We were all hauled onto the foredeck, ticked off for lying about our ages ….. and thanked. God Save the King; we’d done our bit.

People were still British when we came back; very quiet, self controlled and winning. Streets after streets of houses seen from the train window coming into London stood with only two walls. And a Union Flag or two. God Save the King.

I brought nylons for my mother and packs of Chesterfields. But I must have forgotten what things had been like; when I bought a tube of tooth paste and waited for it to be wrapped, I was asked whether I knew there was war on.

I was fortunate to be in Piccadilly Circus the night of VE day. The British weren’t quiet that night! I had fallen madly in love with a girl on the way over and brought her parents some tinned salmon and peaches and we all trooped in on the Underground.

Bribery paid then; but who give me the time of day now for a tin of peaches from Loblaw’s or a can of Restigoose from the Gaspé?

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