大象传媒

1939 - 1945 World War.
George Wigglesworth (born 10 7 1931, Leeds)

This is the memory of one who escaped all the traumas so many experienced during that war and being young took for granted the colourless existence necessarily imposed at that time.

Being in primary school I was evacuated, in my case to Burley in Wharfedale - 7 or 8 miles from home, where I was billeted along with two schoolmates, studying half time at the nearby school. It was there I was registered - KNKD 204/5. Rural Wharfedale was the next valley to the industrialised River Aire flowing through Leeds. At Christmas, despite the efforts of authorities to persuade parents to leave their children away from home, as many were, I was permanently brought back. My cousins were variously evacuated to Bolton Abbey, Burnsall and Buckden all up the River Wharfe. (R C Bond's book "The great exodus," [Thoresby Soc, Second Series, vol 10, 2,000] gives a full account of this process by Leeds Education Authority). After Dunkirk soldiers were billeted in our neighbourhood and I also recall two Canadian soldiers came to lunch. They could be relied on to give you army badges and insignia to go with the shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells which small boys collected as wartime memorabilia.

Leeds, despite being an industrial city, was only briefly bombed (nevertheless inflicting some serious casualties). Its escape was attributed to the pall of smoke it generated obscuring it from German bombers which seems not to have been as great a problem at nearby Bradford. My older relatives did voluntary service in the Rescue, the ARP, Fire Watching. My father was an Air Raid Warden and I recall a tin shed at the bottom of our garden he was in charge of where civilians could familiarise themselves with gas masks in an atmosphere of tear gas. There was little demand made on them for their services or the gas masks. They volunteered to manage monthly visits of amateur concert parties to the local old people's home at Cookridge Hospital which was in their "sector". This necessitated erecting a wooden stage, carrying patients and so on. At Christmas they performed carols for them. Funds were raised by a garden party when the open air swimming pool was surreptitiously filled.

One cousin became a land girl, two men served in the Royal Signals in the Far East after briefly studying at University. I can recall my grandfather plotting their movements and the war in general on a large map. The older cousins who were teachers were required for that task. My sister, as a nursery teacher, administered orange juice and cod liver oil to her young charges. The orange juice, though unsweetened, tasted superb; egg bound hens seemed to dislike the cod liver oil my mother thought would help their disability, regurgitating it all over the one holding it - usually me. Perhaps this was retribution for our purloining of Ministry of Health provision for others.

We had a big enough garden to dig an appreciable portion up to grow vegetables and fruit. The hens were Rhode Island Red x Black Leghorns. Neighbours, in exchange for the eggs they laid, like us gave up their egg ration so we could get extra bran to feed them. Quite a responsibility to sustain their egg supply. The smell of boiling potatoes and the red Karswood Spice remains with me, I hope it was appreciated by the hens. I never proved Karswood Spice stimulated egg production.

My mother had, prior to her marriage, been a cook and I was not conscious of the limitation caused by food shortages but did know about rationing. We were served for a time by a visiting representative who took our orders for groceries to be delivered from the Co-op (our number was 53339, it surprises me and many others how numbers are remembered from so long ago). Bread and meat we had to fetch from shops half a mile away and the responsibility of being entrusted with Ration Books while running these errands still lives with me. Our nearest sweet shop (also half a mile away but in the other direction, at the bus stop) was run by Mr Webster. He determined that he could redeem customers' time-expired coupons and enhance his stock; even so I recall the gritty, bitter "Ration" chocolate we were reduced to at one stage. "Victory V" cough lozenges were off ration, but excess, when bought to supplement sweets, caused strange effects, maybe it was the chloroform.

That time was a strange experience for me, remote from the actualities of war. The numbers of planes shot down in the battle of Britain were more like a cricket score. Battles were only seen in an insular light. Maybe I was too young to see it otherwise, influenced by the newspapers. Maybe grown ups shielded you from it. My parents both were adults in the first war in which my father served throughout in the infantry and they had a private view of hostilities.

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