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AT GRANDMA’S…

This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by Three Counties Action, on behalf of Marina King, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I lived in Hertfordshire during the war; I was born in 1934; so I was quite young when the war started. I remember wearing a gas mask; and doing ‘gas mask drill’ we were taken outside and told to crouch down under the small bridge in the field near to the school.

Later when we moved to my Grandma’s house, having been turned out of our small holding; my Dad was in the Army and his brother who was renting the fields wouldn’t pay rent. I remember my father polishing his uniform buttons; he used a special brass template (a cleaning guard) that slotted under the buttons, to stop the metal cleaner getting onto the uniform.
At Grandma’s we used to sit up, looking out through the window, watching the searchlight as they roamed the sky over Worcester, so maybe it was a target. An aircraft came down near the station and we all walked down to see it, another one came down just above our house, and my mother was nearly injured as she threw a bucket of water over some of the flames. We had some parachute silk from that crash.
During the war years, we picked foxglove leaves, hip’s haws, horse chestnuts and black berries, which were collected by Mr. Peachey of Ludlow. They were all used to make medicines and drugs. Mum earned money to buy new school clothes each year by working in the fields, and by hop picking. When we all went to farm near Tenbry, being taken by there bus. I believe the holidays were adjusted to fit in with the picking. The hops were cut down by the foreman in charge and stripped by the pickers into a crib made of hessian, when it was full another man came round and emptied the crib measuring the hops, and payment was made by how many bushels were picked each day. We also helped to pick cherries for Colonel Hill.

When the corn was cut on the local farms all the neighbours stood around the field and as the remaining area got smaller, rabbits would try to escape. The men would hit them of the head to kill them and we would be allowed to have some of the catch. In those days a man on a bike was normal sight around the village, carrying lots of rabbits whose legs would be threaded together, ‘then threaded on a hazel stick, and slung over the man’s shoulder.

I remember my first banana; it was given to me by an American soldier. He was in a company who used a nearby quarry for hand grenade practice.

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