大象传媒

I was 10, an only child, on September 3rd 1939. My mother, father and I sat by the wireless listening to Mr. Chamberlain telling us that war must start. My mother cried. This brought home to me what it all might mean, as my mother was a reserved woman who did not cry.

There are vivid snapshots in my mind of incidents in the years to follow. We lived in a town in the Derbyshire Peak District so we were not bombed until the very end when a stray V1 or V2 fell a few miles away. It landed on some old farm buildings and harmed nobody. My memories are largely domestic, of family and friends and neighbours, and the impact of the war on them.

The boy across the road went down in the troopship 鈥淟ancastria鈥� on the way to France; his mother said she would never go to church again. My cousin was rescued from the water at Calais after the 1940 retreat. A young man who used to lark about with my aunt and me at the baths was killed. Our next-door-neighbour was missing in North Africa for a long anxious time. The brother of a boy I used to play with lost his life at Arnhem. My father took me into the middle of the road at night to see the flames from blitzed Manchester lighting up the sky.

But there were some odd delights, very often provided by the wireless. In spite of the seriousness of the news, I loved the strange names from battles in North Africa 鈥� Mersa Matruh, Benghazi. I would say them in my head. Every Sunday evening all the national anthems of the Allies were played, each introduced by a native speaker. I could say 鈥� Hier ist Nederland鈥� with relish.

We had a wonderful visit from two Australian soldiers, distant relatives. I sat entranced, especially by their hats and the fact that they thought nothing of going 60 miles to a dance at home. Sadly one was killed.

In 1940 I started at the grammar school. One of our teachers went in the holidays to help in the Underground shelters in London. She went up even more in our estimation when she married a Free Frenchman. Our Art Master went into the RAF and was a Japanese prisoner-of-war. He came back when I was in the Sixth Form, a shocking, wrecked figure to those of us who knew him briefly when we were eleven.

On a lighter note, there were slit trenches dug in the girls` hockey field. We had to jump in if the air raid siren sounded. But they were full of frogs! Thank goodness we never had to do it.

Being in a safe district, we received evacuees. At the beginning of the war they came from Manchester, but soon went home again. Then we had evacuees from Lowestoft. We shared our schools with them and it was great fun. At my elementary school we went half-time to our own building and half-time to a local chapel, change and change-about with the Suffolk school. The chapel must have been difficult for the teachers. There were no desks, no blackboards, no library cupboard. We children loved the change 鈥� it was like a series of mini-holidays.

At the grammar school, the elements were blended, pupils and teachers. We could not understand the Lowestoft speech and they couldn`t understand Derbyshire, but we made good friends. One boy I knew came speaking broad Lowestoft and settled in so well with his new family that he ended up speaking broad Derbyshire.

As a child who loved her food, I really felt the rationing. My mother would mark out with a knife on the block of margarine what the day`s allocation was, so you knew the reality. We had always had lots of milk but now the farmer`s daughter measured out a measly half-pint into the jug each morning. My grandfather was manager of a large grocer`s shop but he kept rigidly to the law; we did not get a sliver of anything above our rations, and I never heard my mother even mention it, let alone complain.

School dinners, an innovation, were so awful that I begged my mother to be allowed to come home and she agreed. They were provided by a local confectioner`s shop and served in a chapel near the school. I recall endless sausage rolls and blackened, bruised potatoes.

When I was 13 my father was called up into the army. I remember vividly the lurch in my stomach when I came home from school one dinner time and my mother showed me the call-up papers. He survived the war but not without damage to himself and the family.

At last it was over and we visited London on VE Day when people danced in the streets. I also saw the Victory Procession. The Royal Navy were the best marchers and the Greek soldiers in their frilly white skirts were a delight. A thing that shocked me was that the King was obviously wearing very thick make-up, presumably for the cameras. He hardly looked real.

Looking back, I realise I had no doubt at all that we would win. At the time of Dunkirk I had been sent on an errand to the local chip-shop. Everybody in the crowded shop was talking about what would happen, what they would do, if the Germans came. But I never heard anything like that again.

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