大象传媒

I used to cycle from home to school (Kendrick Girls School). I started in 1939 and left in 1945. We had another school evacuated with us from London. The first winter 1939/40 all the boilers burst and there was no heating; it was freezing. But I took blankets and went to school. I didn鈥檛 know any different. The classes were all doubled up. I took the school certificate on June 5th 1944, which was D-Day. A lot of my friends had brothers and fathers landing in France. They didn鈥檛 know if they were dead or alive. I just had to get on with the exams.

I lost my teenage years because we could not go out of an evening because of the Blackout. There were no meetings. Looking back we realised what we missed. I used to cycle backwards and forwards to school. I remember one day, it was about four o鈥檆lock, I looked up and realised a plane was machine-gunning the road. I thought I heard a dogfight, we had that regularly. I was amazed my mother was more shocked than I was. No one was hurt. Reading was very lucky; we only had one lot of bombs.

I remember they had some oranges in one of the shops in Caversham and I managed to get an orange because my brother, George was home on leave. I gave my orange to him, as food was so short. But we didn鈥檛 know any different, young children didn鈥檛 know what bananas were. A ration of cheese was just a small block for a week. We couldn鈥檛 have proper cookery lessons either so I learnt to cook with dried egg. I found it very difficult to make scrambled egg with real eggs later.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.