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Peggy's Wartime Memories
I am not a writer by nature so this is as memories come into my head…
I was eleven and a half years old in the autumn of 1939. My mother, father and my brother Dick, who was nine years older than me, had moved from South Woodford to Ilford, both in Essex, the year previously. My brother was in the Territorial Army with the Essex Regiment and had just returned from a month's training when he was recalled to his Unit a few days before the outbreak of war.
It had been arranged that I would go and stay with friends in Dumfries, Scotland for the duration of the war. My mother took me by night train, a nightmare of a journey and I remember hearing the news on our arrival that war had been declared on Germany. My mother, who had been a typist before marrying my father, stayed for a month helping with the paper work for the evacuees from Glasgow before returning to London. The little Scottish town was bursting and the schools over flowing, so the town children went to school in the morning and the evacuees in the afternoon. I had a lot of time for roller skating in Dock Park and going to the pictures but at night I wanted my mother! I wrote awful letters home, badly spelt I'm sure, saying I would start walking or throw myself in the River Nith if I could not go back to London. I was so lucky as the people I lived with and called "Uncle" and "Auntie" were kind to me and I loved them dearly but I wanted to go home! It was the time of the phoney war and I did return to Ilford before Christmas and back to my old school in the New Year.
At home, my mother wrote to the council for permission to keep chickens as she had paid one shilling an egg in the WW1! She had stocked up the cupboards with tins of anything and everything and the only tins we used were the ones filled with cream. After the war we found seventeen pounds of tea in a banjo case in the attic!
Things were fairly normal until the Blitz started. We shared a cement underground air raid shelter with our neighbours, paid for by both families. They eventually evacuated and my family used it until the water started seeping up through the concrete floor. Nearby, Redbridge Station, which had been under construction before the war started and not completed, was opened to the public as a shelter which we used for three nights after the flooding. Dick was home on leave and thought we would be safer there but on the third night a bomb dropping behind us on the way to the tube made us feel it would be safer to stay at home. Later Plesseys took over Redbridge Station to Gants Hill Station section of tunnel for use as a small arms factory and upright shelters were built on the vacant land both opposite and next to our home. But I am getting ahead of myself! Wooden shutters were made for the inside of our sitting room windows, so after the bomb episode, for the rest of the Blitz we slept there. My godfather and his family had been bombed out so they stayed with us. One of our friends from Dumfries, Tom, was now in the RAF and stationed nearby so when my godfather's son and my brother Dick came home on leave, the room got pretty crowded. Some nights when the raids were heavy, people going to the Tube also joined us and all their bedding was left with us during the day and we became a half way house. The first few nights of the Blitz were frightening. With double summertime, the nights were bright and the weather perfect. One night, every other house in our street had an incendiary bomb with an explosive dropped on it and the fields both in front and behind our house were alight. I was told to stay in the house whilst my parents and the other neighbours went out fighting the fires. Anything that could hold water was used - saucepans, buckets, even my mother’s beloved marmalade pan and that wasn’t returned which upset her greatly. Another time, a Spitfire came down near us and the sky was glowing red from the fires in the dock area. Many people in the street were away so those left became firewatchers and took shifts to stay awake each night. My father worked for a brewery in the Mile End Road and one night, the stables were hit. The workers there went back to help save the horses. My neighbour had printing works which were also bombed. During the Blitz we would have a meal while listening to the radio and when it went off the air we knew the raiders were at the coast and soon the siren would soon be sounding. People became very 'rundown' with the stress and little sleep and would get boils. Dad would bring home brewer’s yeast which taken internally seem to heal them very quickly.
I'm not quite sure when it happened but the brewery supplied cars and trucks to help move beds, equipment and instruments from the London Hospital relocating it to the Good Shepherd Convent in Wanstead thinking the hospital would be safer there.
One day, a couple passing our house started talking to my mother who was weeding the front garden. They explained they had been bombed and had twenty-three chickens and two ducks who were now homeless, so mother, who now had her council permission to keep them, bought them and we became chicken farmers. Mum was happy as there were always eggs and chips for the family and for my brother and his friends on leave. At the beginning it was easy, we could get grain but as the war progressed it was vegetable scraps, fish heads and bran cooked in the kitchen for the livestock. Real organic eggs!!! The ducks had an old tin bath for a pond and my father had to break the ice during the winter for them to swim. When the hens were laying and the eggs plentiful, the eggs were dunked in a sealer which kept them fresh longer. At one time we had 12 baby chicks living in the kitchen and as they got older they were put in one of bedrooms with a light bulb to keep them warm until they were strong enough to join the others in the chicken house. The houses were made of breeze blocks with an L shaped run round the garden.
We had a gas stove in the kitchen but also a triplex fire - an open fire with ovens and a hob. When the gas mains were hit, mum cooked for the neighbours, putting their casseroles in the oven.
During the Blitz our school days were reduced from 10am until 2pm and with the double summertime it was great. We had an air raid shelter at school and I recall the elocution teacher reciting poetry to us whilst down there. I also remember looking out the bus window, across the fields, on my way home from school to see if our house was still standing after daytime raids. My father had told me to whom I should go to for advice should anything dreadful happen to the rest of the family. Not a good thought at twelve years of age. I used to pray that if one died we all died. I was always dramatic, so much so that I went to Italia Conti's stage school giving me one day off from normal school each week to learn to dance, sing and act. I didn't become famous but I enjoyed being a 'wannabe'. With other children from Conti's I was an extra in three classic Ealing Films, "The Forman Went To France", "The Bells Go Down" and "The Goose Steps Out" and had a great time on set. In "The Forman Went To France" I was a French refugee and in "The Goose Steps Out" played a German child making a Nazi salute at Will Hay!!!
In 1942, I was in J. M. Barrie’s "Peter Pan" at The Winter Garden Theatre in London and it was policy never to stop the show even if the bombs were falling! After an air raid one day, a parent who had been with his children in the audience wrote saying he thought the young actors had been terrific carrying on with the play during the raid. In our production, Ann Todd played Peter, Joyce Redman played Wendy and Alistair Sim was Captain Hook and Mr Darling. With a chaperone to mind all the kids playing the Darling children, Lost boys and some of the young Redskins we did a ten week tour around Britain — and in wartime when transport was hard going! The worst train journey was from Liverpool to Aberdeen which seemed to last as long as it takes me by plane to get from Melbourne, Australia where I now live, to the London I still call home! And no buffet car!
Before the war, my brother Dick was "articled" to a firm situated above the fire station opposite Liverpool Station learning Architecture and Surveying. The ground floor is now a Tesco Metro. Later, he tried to transfer from the Search Light Regiment into the RAF as he wanted to fly. Whilst waiting to hear, he joined the Maritime Ack Ack as machine gunner on a Merchant Navy Ship. He went to St. John, New Brunswick in Canada and was held up there for about two months but made some great friends who, unfortunately, I have lost touch with over the years. He sailed through the Caledonian Canal and crossed the Irish Sea to Larne. I think he accompanied a Russian Convoy but I have no real facts on that. In 1942 he was told about The Glider Pilot Regiment so joined up, still wanting to fly. He learned to fly in a Tiger Moth and eventually was trained to fly gliders. He missed out on going Sicily with the regiment as he was in hospital with jaundice but pilot friends who stayed with us told stories of British gliders being dumped in the sea by the American planes that were towing them. Many British drowned. ( Operation Ladbroke) Dick flew out the night before D. Day with explosives, stores and personnel aboard his glider for the purpose of blowing up certain bridges at and near Troarn and east of Caen. Even though the landing zone had not been properly prepared, he managed to land in exactly the right spot without landing lights and no direct moonlight. For this he won the Distinguished Flying Medal. He never knew about this as he was killed in Operation Market Garden at the Battle of Arnhem a few months later. He was twenty-five. Visiting the war cemetery near Arnhem many years later, it is sad to see he was one of the oldest men buried there. Of course I wasn't the only person to lose a loved one. A friend's brother died of yellow fever; another went down with his ship and then nearing the end of the war, a close school friend of my age — by now sixteen - died with her parents when their home was hit by a V2 rocket in Wanstead. Their names are on the civilian casualty list on the Commonwealth War Graves web site, so they are not forgotten in this modern age.
I suppose there were bereavement counsellors but I hadn’t heard of them until more recent times. There were so many other families suffering in the same way, you had to get on with your life as best as you could. The day after we received the letter saying my brother had been killed, it was business as usual, Dad off to work and me to a ballet class. No funeral, no ending just later receiving his ‘effects’ in the post.
Everybody tried to live a normal life. Everybody grew tomatoes and vegetables. Tomato sandwiches were very popular in the summer!
Picture Houses were wonderful and one could forget the outside world and London was alive with theatre shows. Lyons Corner houses were still going strong and served really good meals for wartime although some other restaurants had horsemeat on the menu. If you were at the pictures, a notice would flash up on the screen saying there was an air raid on the way so you would stay until the "all clear" sounded. If the electricity went down, there would be a sing-a-long. My mother and an aunt were at the pictures during a raid. On arriving home and making a cup of tea in the kitchen, Auntie was cold, saying how draughty it was sitting at the table in front of three windows. It was then they noticed all the windows had gone. Four bombs had dropped in the fields behind us taking the windows with them! My mother was great at putting in windows as my brother, a keen sportsman, was always breaking them as a young boy! She was well practised by wartime!
We did have fun and one Christmas had the usual party with lots of singing as one brave soul stood out doors listening for the German bombers. The sound of their engines was very different to the British planes but it is hard to explain the noise. Not only the sound of bombs permeated the air but also our own Ack Ack. A travelling Pom Pom gun would settle in the lane at the back of the house and the noise was horrendous. You got used to it. I would wake up, turn over, and go back to sleep. Now I can sleep through alarm clocks, thunder storms, TV but only wake with the telephone bell. Then there was the shrapnel and nose caps from our guns falling from the sky. One set of friends had three nose caps land on their bed but by now no one slept upstairs and the safest place in the house was under the stairs. My mother and I were under the stairs when a German bomber came down a few streets away killing a woman and her three children who were in a Morrison shelter. Her husband had just returned to his unit after being on leave. It was such a sad, sad time. Another neighbour stayed all through the Blitz with her baby daughter, under the stairs. Even when there was a lull in the raids your clothes were always by the bed for a quick exit.
My mother put zips in the sides of my brother’s old trousers for me to wear. They were handy and warm for the shelter which was now next door. In those days, girls’ slacks only had openings on the left side, never in the front like the boys! After another bout of raids I went to Dumfries for a holiday, which I loved, and remember the fantastic feeling getting into clean sheets and only wearing pyjamas.
Many hours of work were lost in the factories because workers went to the shelter as soon as the siren sounded, so three blasts of a very loud whistle was introduced to warn the population that the enemy planes were approaching their area and it was time to take cover.
On the first night of the "doodlebugs" we were in the shelter. Usually the raid was over by early morning but by 10 o'clock still no "all clear" as nobody knew what they were. Well, we couldn't sit there all day so we went home and had breakfast. The doodlebugs sounded like a loud rattly motor bike and mostly it was okay while you heard the noise but once that stopped you ran for cover or hit the ground.
When the V2 rockets started everyone returned to normal life, going to bed upstairs etc. There was nothing you could do, no warning with those, they were so swift. I remember seeing one, whilst chatting to a friend on a street corner. It was so weird as all you could see was the flame at the back going across the night sky.
The day war ended I was in Southsea. The ships in Portsmouth went nuts, "oopp oopping" all day. Then V.J. Day and our friends from Scotland were staying with us. We all went to the Palace to see the King and Queen come onto the balcony. The crowd was huge, the whole of London alive with people. A sailor climbed along the buildings in Coventry Street, every one singing, dancing and so happy. Trying to stay with your friends was hard so a meeting place was arranged should we get parted.
It’s odd to think back on those dark days and know we still managed to have fun. Somehow one does adjust and at least we weren't occupied like the rest of Europe, which made things so much easier for us. There was a great barter system going on and I am not talking about the 'black market' which was rife. Just ordinary people who would exchange goods with each other. Like most girls of my age I had my crushes on this boy or that and loved going dancing. At sixteen I went with girl friends to the Majestic Cinema in Woodford which also had a ballroom, that is until my brother home on leave told my mother I was too young. Of course, he liked to go dancing there and what brother wants his little sister hanging around!
When my brother came home on leave, our dog Gyp would always know when he got off the bus a mile away, because my brother whistled. Dick was very musical and played the Trumpet and had a tin whistle in his uniform pocket. Harry James, Louis Armstrong, Lilly Palmer and Betty Grable were among his favourite stars and one of the last films he would have seen before being killed at Arnhem was Danny Kaye's first film, "A Kid From Brooklyn", which he raved on about.
Making do with clothes was difficult and there wasn't any 'teen wear’ in those days. Like Judy Garland sang you were, "Just an In-between". I got very good at mending my stockings, picking up the stitches and closing up the ladders. My mother made me a dress from a Paisley shawl. I think now what a waste; it was a beautiful shawl.
My parents always had an open door and like many other families tried to return hospitality to servicemen from other countries as their children were receiving while serving overseas. I seem to have written so much and could still write more but I think enough is enough. Other people in my age group — I am seventy-five - also have memories but these are mine. I am grateful for my time with Dick and I think my parents coped so well in such difficult times. Something I remember my mother saying is "fear is fear" and the Zeppelins over London in WW1 were just as frightening!

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