大象传媒

Transcription of a taped reminiscnece session at Chatham Library, 9th MAy 2005

Diana Dodd

When I was a little girl in the 1950鈥檚 Mum used to talk to me a lot about the Second World War. She said it was such an exciting time to live. I have read that people will never live again with such intensity and she agreed with that.

My husband and I went to the VE Day celebrations at the Chatham Dockyard this weekend and we went into the Admiral鈥檚 air raid shelter. We were all packed into the shelter and they played a tape of the Stukers and the Doodle Bugs and it must have been very frightening. I鈥檝e heard it said many times that apart from a few black marketeers and a few traitors, everyone was pulling together. Mother said it was the happiest time of her life in many ways. She always said we could never have won the war without the Americans, which may sound like a bit of a back-hander to my Dad and the rest of the British Army, but I think that is probably very true.

I saw the film the Longest Day when I was a little girl and more American Divisions landed in Normandy than all the rest and I think where would we be without them. When war broke out, Mum and her mother moved from Southhall, Middlesex, which used to be country and is now built-up and part of Greater London, and they moved to Bath to escape the bombing but there was a severe raid of Bath one night. The occupants of the house that backed up onto their house were killed. We don鈥檛 understand the great mysteries of life and death. Why were these people killed and my Mum and grandmother survived? Mum wasn鈥檛 called up into women鈥檚 service because she had to look after her mother. She worked in the Admiralty in Bath in a building, which is now a museum, which was dealing with naval pay. Of course everything was clerical, no computers then. A man was brought out of retirement to be their supervisor. He was puffing away on cigarettes saying 鈥渟how me your total, show me you total鈥�. Everything had to be mechanic and with mental arithmetic, very exacting work. On one occasion there was some bitchiness in the office and a girl tried to grab some papers, so my mother sat on them!
Mother went out with a chap called Lesley who she met at a concert I believe. She was late getting back home one night from a concert and there was a caf茅 for soldiers and she asked a soldier if he would get her a cup of tea. She felt it quite safe to be out late on her own. She also met an American called David Lawrence but that relationship didn鈥檛 go very far physically or in any other way, and she always said that the only man she ever loved was my Dad. My life has been shaped by the two wars. Dad鈥檚 parents met after WW1 and Mum鈥檚 father came back from WW1 and said you have a son, now I want a daughter. Mum was born in 1920. My parents met and married after WW2. Dad went to London as he鈥檇 always wanted to go to London. Mum and her mother returned to Southall and my parents met at a WEA evening class.

Apart from working on the naval pay, Mum was also a fire watcher and she was also in the Bath Choral Society 鈥� that鈥檚 very important, maintaining culture. Mother did say that sometimes they went to bed hungry.

On D-Day they crowded around the radio in the doorman's office at work to hear the news. Her brother, Captain Gordon King, who was with the 6th Airborne had parachuted into Normandy. The 6th Airborne stormed the Merville battery and took the bridges across the Caen Canal. He is named at the back of the Longest Day book as one of the British Veteran鈥檚 and he became a Captain in Denmark. When her brother was due back from Normandy she waited at the window for ages for him.

Peter Dodd

My mother was Dutch and came as an au pair girl to this country before the war, so she was here for the duration of the war, and says it was the best time of her life. There must have been a great spirit in this country amongst people. She worked for Jews, mostly in Finchley and Golders Green. Once she did decide to dig for victory and she and her friend went to work on some allotments and they were arrested as spies, not that they were spies, but someone had heard the foreign accents and had mistook them for German. Also just before the war, she and a friend went to market and the Jewish market trader had spat on the ground because they thought she was German. She met my father in the war, he was in the Royal Engineers. She had to have an operation and a friend sent a message to her parents via the Red Cross but it never got through. She experienced the Blitz and when she went back to Holland with my father, she discovered that the people there had been starving had been eating tulip bulbs and many had just dropped down dead in the street. My grandfather had to stay behind and work in the local brewery, whereas my aunt and grandmother were evacuated inland because they lived on the coast. She lived quite well because they were evacuated to a farm. One of aunts had to go out with prams to beg from farmers and sometimes they set dogs onto them, probably because they got fed up with people trying to beg food. They used to make coffee out of ground up acorns. If a horse died they would chop it into pieces to eat it 鈥� that sort of situation brings out the worst in people, its just survival. There was an area in the Hague where well-to-do people lived and they starved more because they weren鈥檛 on the coast where they could beg for fish from fishermen and they weren鈥檛 in the country where they could scrounge from the fields. People in the Resistance were just shot 鈥� young men lined up along the promenade and just shot. 1944 was called the Hungerwing winter and that was not liberated until after the war was over and people died of hunger except in the very far south of Holland. The Allies dropped food. The family told my father awful stories about what had happened to the Jewish people. One of my aunts said that lorries would arrive and a German soldier would have a Jewish child under each arm and bang the doors open with their heads.

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