大象传媒

MEMORIES OF LIFE AT PLYMOUTH HIGH - 1940 to 1946

Those were six very important years of my life at a time when Europe was in turmoil.
I had passed the Scholarship and could go to the best school in Plymouth, but could we afford it? That first term was very hard on family finances. On top of a school fee of four guineas a term, the fee based on parental income, there was the school uniform. Nevertheless, it was a very proud first former who entered the school at the top of North Hill in September 1940 and who had in her school satchel, amongst other things, an initialled knife, fork and spoon, for use at school dinners and a pair of house shoes. My pride received a blow a few days later when another first former, whom I passed on the stairs, said, 鈥淥h! Are you one of those scholarship girls?鈥� in a rather detrimental tone. I should have answered, 鈥淵es and proud of it,鈥� but I was rather a timid soul and felt diminished. Later we became good friends, but I never told her how hurt I had been.
I seem to remember that the school was draughty and cold. When the opportunity presented itself, we rushed to the radiators and sat upon them. In the winter our 1/3 of a pint free milk (or did it cost 2陆 d per week?) which stood in the corridor until midmorning, used to be full of ice crystals and the taste was horrid.
The air raids in Plymouth increased and in May 1941 those who wished to were evacuated to Fowey in Cornwall. We were billeted out with various families. I was to go with a pretty girl called Sheila Kelly and who was in a form above me. We were driven to the end house of a stately terrace high up over the town. From our room, which had a bay window, we could look out over the harbour and see Polruan village over the other side.
The lady who owned the house, a Miss Wheeler, was over 90 years old and confined to her bed for the most part. We were looked after by Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan who were her housekeeper and chauffeur respectively. It was not long before we were calling them Auntie Rose and Uncle Phil. Uncle Phil was a coastguard and shared his duties with Timms, the chauffeur for the Treffrys, a very 鈥渘oble鈥漟amily, who lived at Place House. It was a beautiful building in a walled garden near St. Fimbarrus Church.
The coastguard post was above the beach in the grounds of Menabilly House, the Mandalay of Daphne du Maurier鈥檚 鈥淩ebecca鈥�. We often drove there with Uncle Phil and played around the house which was empty and seemed sad. I can remember the wild cyclamen we picked in the surrounding woods. Auntie Rose helped us to pack some in a little box to send home to Plymouth. The Postal Service was remarkably efficient in those days despite the war.
Daphne du Maurier owned a house in Fowey called 鈥淔ive Farthings鈥�, where she lived at that time, very near Readymoney Beach. We found that amusing. Another famous writer, who had been an English professor at Cambridge, was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (鈥淨鈥�). HE lived in 鈥淭he White House鈥�, which was situated near the jetty for the Polruan ferry. He had called his daughter Fowey. We saw her often crossing the harbour in a small yacht with red sail.
Along the Esplanade we could look over a low wall down to Polly Foot鈥檚 Cove where a young girl of that name had thrown herself over the cliff many years before.
A little farther along, up the river Fowey, was another ferry for cars and horses that crossed from Fowey side to Bodinnick. It was rather like a huge raft. It caused quite a sensation when the horses from a small platoon of Indian cavalry panicked on the way over and sprang off the end to swim the rest of the way!
The classrooms were spread around the town and ours was a room behind the Methodist Chapel. I do not know who persuaded us, but Peggy Hill and I sang in the choir there on Sundays, Even so, we were allowed to help decorate the lovely old St. Fimbarrus Church for the Harvest Festival.
Fowey was certainly the place to fire my young imagination, but after about 18 months there it was rumoured that American serviceman were to occupy Fowey, so we were quickly removed to Newquay where we were all installed in Cliffdene Hotel.
It was wonderful! "The Girls Crystal" come true- we were at boarding school!
Rather ironically, some time later, Newquay was invaded by American servicemen
(in the hotel next door ), the RAF (the hotel on the other side), and the Turkish airforce (down the road). There was not much danger. The Americans were friendly and treated us like younger sisters, throwing chewing gum from their windows over to ours. Our teachers, understandably, were nervous all the same, and fraternization was forbidden.
Girls in the smaller rooms had bunk beds. The rooms that were large enough for three or four had proper beds. The bedrooms were not heated at all and how we froze! We were allowed one blanket from home and I think we had just one blanket distributed to us. They were grey and coarsely woven and certainly not wool.
Our lives were ruled by the gong. It was a saucer of black metal, about the same size as a small coffee table. The striker was a log of wood and I am sure we wore out quite a stack of logs. We heard it all day marking the beginning or end of lessons.
I am not too certain of the times, but I think we were awakened between 7-7.15 am. Another gong went at 7.30 am. so that the girls who had to lay the tables could go to the dining room and breakfast was at 7.45 am. We were given a small ration of butter and margarine each week. The bread was usually a couple of days old so that we would not eat too much, but occasionally we planned an eating orgy and
ate so much that the kitchen staff had to start on the new bread!
We took it in turns to have potato duty. A group of us sat in the kitchen in the evening to cut the eyes out of the potatoes that had been peeled by the machine.
The kitchen was our place of refuge when the air raid warning sounded at night. We were very near St. Eval air field, a German target, but as far as I remember, no bombs fell on Newquay. We had another horror to face though. At night the kitchen floor swarmed with small beetles or maybe cockroaches. Then the heroine was Miss Trenchard (Trenchy) our French mistress, who did a war dance on them whilst we sat on the benches with our feet up!
Marie WaIter's (now Hussell) father was in the Air Force on barrage balloons, so she came with aeroplane recognition charts. We never saw any German planes, but plenty of Spitfires, Hurricanes, Liberators, Lancasters and Dakotas.
When the Allies began their attack on Sicily we had a large map in the front hall where we could mark the line of advance. The war was very much with us as a lot of the girls had fathers in the Forces.
Our class was lucky as we had a large front room on the ground floor. The dining room was also on the ground floor, as was the playroom, once the lounge, and the gymnasium, which had been the ballroom. We had our supper of cocoa and a bun served there at the bar each evening before bedtime. The Reception was, turned into a library. I think I must have read almost all the books we had. We did our homework under supervision in the dining room. At the weekends we were given permission to use the dining room for other things if we wished. It must have been on Saturday evenings that Marie and I tuned the radio in to the American Forces Network to listen to Glen Miller and his orchestra. The signature tune was "String of Pearls" and then the programme always continued with,
"This is Sergeant Ray McKinley saying, "How d'ye do"
And the boys in the band saying, "Howdy" too."

We danced all around the tables and chairs with Marie leading as she was taller than me.
We had to go out at lunchtime every day unless it really was pouring with rain or blowing a gale, as it often did in the winter. The hotel was on the sea front above Tolcarne Beach and sometimes it was impossible to stand. From our classroom window we once saw several American soldiers forcing their way along to rescue a young mother who was trying to prevent her baby's pram from overturning.
In the summer we played rounders on the nearby Barrowfields and in the winter we played hockey on the beach. The RAF did too. We had the field measurements and drew up the lines on the hard sand when the tide was out. It made a fantastically fast game.
Occasionally in the autumn we were given the day off to go potato picking. An open lorry would come from a nearby farm and we were driven off through the raw air. Our pay was 6d. an hour, a real fortune, but we wondered if it was worth it. There was often a ground frost and we felt as though our fingers and toes would fall off with the cold. Many of us developed chilblains, something one never sees nowadays, and they itched interminably.
We were allowed to go to the cinema on Saturday if we had not been given any order marks that week. There was the New Cinema and the Victoria. The latter had a corrugated iron roof and if it rained hard one could not hear the dialogue!
We had a bath once a week in 6" of water and the matron de-bugged us all about once a fortnight. I was the first to get head lice just before we left Fowey. It is strange how lice and fleas become rampant in times of war.
About one third of the school went down with influenza one winter and our teachers had to do nursing as well as adjudicate the examinations that were going on at the same time. When I look back I realize how wonderful they were. These ladies devoted a great deal of their free time to us. There was dinner duty, lights out, inspection of each room to make sure we all went out when we should and were not hiding there, homework supervision, evening duty to see that each form went to bed on time, and many other things. Miss Saville (Savvy - we were not very imaginative!) our English teacher, arranged debates and play readings. I remember we read the radio play "The Man Born to be King", by Dorothy Sayers not long after it was published, in 1942 and T. S. Elliot's, "Murder in the Cathedral". We also had a drama group and I can still say the four lines I had as the Bloody Apparition in the Witches' Scene from "Macbeth". Savvy had a fiery temper and could make us quake, but she was an inspired teacher and we loved her.
We were great walkers and went for miles on Saturdays and Sundays. A favourite
tour was down to the River Gannel. There was said to be a bird called the Gannel Shrike whose call gave warning of a death. Luckily we never heard it, but the thought gave us the shivers. Anchored by the river bank was a houseboat, an old sailing ship. The owner had a marvellous collection of musical boxes and for a small fee we could go on board and he would play some of them for us. Sometimes we continued to the village of Crantock where we could buy a cup of tea and a homemade bun or maybe a scone with jam and cream in a little cottage. That wasn't very often because it cost 6d. But it was the form two years ahead of us who as 5th formers made the biggest impression. Diana Rowell (who died almost two years ago), Marjorie (Skippy) Rowe, Iris (Bandy) Bendall, Beryl Nance and a few others, walked from Newquay to Truro and back!
The war ended in Europe in May but we stayed on until the end of the summer term. On the very last night our class crept down to the form room at midnight for a feast of sardines on cake. All except me. A couple of days previously I had slipped on the marble floor when coming through the front door. I managed to put my knee through the glass door and cut the back of my head on the door's metal edge. Luckily it was not too serious, but I was rather incapacitated.
There was more, much more. I see now how lucky we were. Our teachers seemed
unreasonably strict with us on occasions, but I think it must have been a very special time for them too. They dedicated those years of their lives to us, maybe not realizing to begin with what it would mean in time and energy. They gave us a firm basis of values on which to build our lives. I remember them with gratitude.

Jean Elizabeth Tucker (Liz or Tuck, now Lind)

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