大象传媒

My grandma was just 9 years old when WW2 broke out. She lived in the small countryside village of King's Cliffe. She attended the local primary school where, as she says, life wasn't that different to normal. There were some differences in school life though - the children had to carry gas masks in boxes everywhere with them and during classes they sometimes had to wear the gas masks which made some of the children feel claustrophobic.

Her home-life was quite altered. All her brothers were away in the Marines and her father was in the Royal Artillery, her sister was also working away from home. So living in quite an empty house was sometimes lonely for her but, with all the spare rooms, there were many evacuees to be hosted.
The family hosted many Jewish evacuees, along with a boy from London who she grew to be very good friends with.

There were no shelters in her village but because it was a small village, no bombs were expected to drop there, although one did drop on a nearby village. She sometimes could hear the whirring of overhead planes at night and she described this as eerie. She was very frightened of them dropping bombs on her house.

The rationing was definitely the worst factor of the War, although she had enough food. She grew food in an allotment and kept pigs and chickens. People used to shoot rabbits, pheasants and almost anything they could get their hands on.

There was an Italian prisoner of war camp on the outskirts of the village which really brought the war home to her, along with soldiers marching through the streets and American soldiers being stationed nearby.

It was hard for her to keep herself entertained during the War with no television and the wireless always covering the war news. She kept herself busy by picking blackberries, peas and potatoes from the nearby fields. Her school provided the children with wool to knit scarves, gloves and socks for the soldiers. She also played games with the evacuees and, every now and then, she had to queue up for half a pork pie.

She told me that many days she arrived at school with wet feet due to not having enough money to mend holes in her shoes so she had to have cardboard put in the bottom of her shoes.

The blackout rules were hard to cope with, all the windows, even in the schools, had to be blacked out with black curtains and when you rode a bike at night you couldn't have your lights on properly, you had to have black boxes around your lights with just a faint glimmer of light showing.

She didn't know much about Hitler or really anything to do with the War and so she was not really affected by news of things such as the Holocaust because she didn't understand them properly.

She was always overjoyed when her brothers and father came home on a few days leave. She says it was wonderful to see them and to know that they were safe and well. She says that listening to War coverage on the wireless made her more scared of the War and bombing and what could be happening in other countries.

Neither her, nor her mother, were involved in any of the women's activities during the War but her sister, Ivy, worked near the American camp where she fell in love with an American soldier and eventually married him.

At the end of the War, she felt relieved and glad to have her family back at home. They had street parties that lasted through the night but even though it was over, as she grew older, she still used dried milk and still ate Spam!

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