大象传媒

Lunch time on 20th December, 1940 with carol singers outside the door (no good carol singing in the blackout!). Suddenly from inside no. 26 the cry of a newborn baby.

I was always told that I arrived during a dayling blitz but have no official record of this. (It would help me if someone knew when all the daylight blitzes were.) That would have meant all the carol singers had to scarper to a shelter, just across the road.

Naturally, I had to be called Carol, fortunately for me, with a name like that, I was also a girl.

I can only remember once going into the shelter of our next door neighbours, built into a bank, and once into the public shelter across the road. Other than that we stayed indoors. Apparently I slept in a drawer while still small enough, under a table. It was a pretty solid table, though I don't think it was a morrison shelter.

My mother was very criticised for not having us evacuated. I am so very glad she took that decision. Even if we'd gone to a happy, caring place we'd have been separated from her and that always makes such a difference to relationships. Not usually good ones.

There was one day, sleeping in my pram outside - not done these days - I woke to see a dog-fight in the sky above me. I was fascinated, then my mother's face appeared in the space between the hood and the cover. She picked me up and took me indoors. I didn't want to go in I wanted to watch what happened, even though, I'm sure, I had no idea of what was really happening.

There is a cine film of my learning to walk, actually in Kew Gardens itself, my father panned down from a barage balloon to me trying hard to stay upright, not helped by my older brother prancing round me. Sadly this is the last day for writing stories and I haven't got around to finding out how to get the (now video) onto DVD to add to this.

Also other photos of holidays in Margate with the barbed wire on most of the beach. My father was a conscientious objector and was very brave in the fire service, in Margate, though my mother was taunted for being married to a conchi. Fortunately we were too young to be affected by such taunts.

Margate, apparently, got a lot of left-over bombs so my father was kept very busy. He was the one to be sent sky-high on the extending ladder.

My brother and I were both in school by the end of the war. The school had a policy of putting siblings in the same shelter if there was an air raid. In retrospect I feel that was not a good idea. Had one shelter had a direct hit all the children of one family could have been wiped out. Anyway, my brother couldn't have cared less whether I was with him or not! He loved me, but away from home other interests took precedence over me!

VE day. I remember well being woken some time after we'd gone to bed to watch all the searchlights playing across the sky with no enemy planes to try and catch in their beams. I couldn't really take in what it all meant, I'd never known anything other than the war.

A little later, after my dad had left us, we moved to Hampshire to live with my grandmother. We were there when sweets came off rations. We lived about a mile and a half from the nearest village and we'd pestered our mum to get us to the sweet shop really early on that wonderful day. But she couldn't make herself get going till mid morning. By the time we got there there was a huge queue, and when we got to the counter there were only toffees or boiled sweets left, and I hated them! Oh, the disappointment, it was almost too much to bear. We had to wait for weeks before they got any more stocks in!

My grandmother arranged with friends to meet at the local garage, with their cars, on the day fuel came off rations. Most illegally, they danced round their cars ripping up their ration books! The books were supposed to have been handed back, though I can't think why.

Just a few little memories of a rather little girl during, and just after the war.

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