大象传媒

This story was submitted by Robin a pupil from Cedars Upper School on behalf of Cynthia Shuttleworth and has been added to the site with her permission. Cynthia Shuttleworth fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was about eight-and-a-half when war started.

The first memory I have is when evacuees arrived in our town, Aylesbury. People would come to your house and measure how much space you had, the more space 鈥� the more evacuees you had to accommodate. At first we had to take two.

My mum went to the top of our road where we had to collect our evacuees. There were hundreds of them waiting for homes, they looked pathetic, sad and very frightened. Some of them were very poor, much poorer than anything I had seen before in Aylesbury. Most of them having come from the East End had lived in dire poverty.

Choosing which evacuees to take was like choosing something from a shop. No one wanted a poor child and the ones that looked healthy were taken first.

Houses all down my street became very overcrowded. This overcrowding is something I remember very strongly. Evacuees had been squeezed in to every space in every home.

Adults also arrived in the town needing homes. They had important jobs in communications, radar, radio. We took in a couple who had a child. We had to make space upstairs for them and we lived mainly in the downstairs of our house.

One of our evacuees decided to stay in Aylesbury even after the war.

I also remember the rationing during the war. I never went hungry but there was such a lack of food. Mothers would cook up such strange things with what little food they had. As a girl guide I was entered into a cooking competition where we were supposed to make dishes that made good use of what rations we had. I made a Marmite and lettuce sandwich! I won a certificate for it. I still eat marmite today, just without the lettuce!

As well as food coal was terribly hard to get hold of. I remember going and queuing at the train station to get some. Lack of fuels meant buses had to change; I remember seeing buses running with gas carts towed behind them to keep them going.

When the Americans arrived the food situation changed a little. They brought food with them that our sweet tokens couldn鈥檛 get like lots of chocolate and chewing gum. We would go to their houses hoping they would give us some.

My father worked at the Air Ministry. He would come home on some weekends and I remember one distinctly. He arrived home and called to me 鈥淐ome out into the garden, you are going to see history being made鈥�. When I stepped out into the garden I saw the sky was almost on fire, bright pink and lit up. It was London burning; you could see the sky alight from the bombings even in Aylesbury, 40 miles away.

My Auntie lived in Luton and I would often spend time with her. One day, workers at the Vauxhall factory were shot down with machine guns during a raid. My uncle told me not to go down to the end of our garden (it was very close to the factory). But being nosy as I was I ignored him and I found bits of bodies there. Fingers, arms, legs and feet all scattered at the end of our garden. What surprises me now is that I didn鈥檛 find the body parts shocking.

I remember two bombs falling on Aylesbury. Of all places the country town of Aylesbury! One hit my friend鈥檚 house. They lived in one of many cottages around a large pond. I remember thinking 鈥淲hy didn鈥檛 it hit the pond? Why did it have to hit the house?鈥�

In Luton there were smokescreens used. By the side of the road, near the Electrolux and Vauxhall factories, fires would burn thick black smoke to the aid the blackout. I remember they were terrible things. You couldn鈥檛 breathe near them. The smoke clung to your lungs and made you choke. You couldn鈥檛 see anything near them.

I remember the preparations that were made in Aylesbury for an invasion of Britain. I saw the home guard training in local parks, I was quite proud of the volunteers, seeing them as the final soldiers who could save us.

As a girl guide I was told I would be needed if an invasion happened. I would have been, along with other guides, used as a messenger girl across the town.

I also remember doing night watches on large buildings.

Whilst I never had to be a messenger girl I did complete other voluntary work. I would very often go to visit the Stoke Mandeville hospital. It dealt mainly with RAF pilots, first as a paraplegic unit but later as a burns unit as well.

Working there I saw pilots coming in to the hospital with injuries fresh from battle. Seeing these untreated injuries is one of the things that upset me most about the war. However working there had good points. The great benefit I saw was watching the patients recover over time, I liked that very much. I would sometimes take some of the more stable patients to the local pub. I was also lucky enough to meet the hospital鈥檚 founder, Sir Ludwig Guttman, on many occasions.

I continued my work at the hospital even after the war was over.

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