大象传媒

I was born in 1936 in Formby on the Lancashire coast on Easter Monday in a snowstorm. Shortly afterwards, my parents moved to Crayford in Kent and my paternal grandparents moved from Formby to Litherland,a northern district of Liverpool.

A year later saw the birth of a brother and,before the outbreak of war, a third brother was born. The Crayford house was crowded and dad left to rejoin the RAF in 1939, so it was arranged that,as the eldest,I would be evacuated to live with my grandparents in Litherland.They were kindly,resourseful folk and my aunt,their daughter, kept a small shop nearby.

My earliest memories of that period are of happy times exploring my grandparents' bungalow and large garden, but individual events and impressions are hard to place into an accurate timescale.

I remember my grandfather digging a large hole at the top of the garden for something called an Anderson shelter which I took to mean some kind of adventure house for me. I was puzzled when he fitted it out with bunks and a small cupboard. There was family talk of a war and air raids but I didn't really understand it until one night my aunt suddenly made me get under the living room table and we heard the crash of bombs outside. I then remember we spent quite a few nights in the Anderson shelter and I became used to the dark as we were not allowed to show any light. I was sometimes left alone to sleep in the shelter after the all-clear when the family had gone back to the house. I remember waking from such a sleep one night and walking down the garden towards the house and being frightened by the sight of what looked like a giant red donkey in the sky; my grandfather explained that this was the reflection of fires at Liverpool docks on the clouds.

When bombs were falling we could hear the whistling noise they made and hear and feel the explosions.As a child,I did not appreciate their danger fully and
thought that the act of putting your head down would protect you from harm. One night my grandfather left the shelter after a raid only to return a few minutes later to urge us all to get ready to leave in a hurry as a parachute mine had landed in the vicinity. We wern't allowed to get anything from the house but were taken at once to a local church hall where there were already lots of other people.We were housed there for 3 nights while the mine was made safe. When we returned home I was allowed to see the mine before it was removed and its shape has always reminded me of the type of large roller used on cricket pitches. I didn't appreciate it at the time,but it landed only 30 feet from our shelter;thank goodness it had a delayed fuse and thank heaven for the bravery of the men who made it safe!

I remember that the trams served this past of Liverpool during the war and seeing large bomb craters in the road with tram tracks sticking out of them at all angles. The craters were not there when I returned a few days later and the trams continued to run as before.

I remember Bryant and May's match factory right in the middle of an urban area which was hit early in the war and the casualties and devastation this caused.

Evacuees like myself arrived in our road,mainly from the south of England.There were kids from the "east end" (wherever that was!) who spoke a strange language and a boy and girl who were Jewish.The east enders were billetted with an Irish family while the brother and sister went to live with a Jewish family across the road;clear evidence of the policy of placing evacuees in appropriate social and cultural contexts.

Rationing was a feature of the war with which I was acquainted at an early age. Every Sunday afternoon while listening to the radio we all sat down after lunch to spread out and count ration coupons which were clearly very important pieces of paper as we had to be careful not to lose any in the process.It was a while before I learned their relationship to ration books and my aunt's grocery shop.I often visited the latter with my grandmother and I remember vividly my surprise when,one day, we arrived to find the large plate glass windows replaced with wooden sheets which had a tiny window in the middle through which hardly any of the stock could be seen. I do not remember feeling undue hunger as a child, most probably because my grandmother had been brought up amongst a large family on a farm and had learned to grow,prepare and cook food from an early age.Thus, her garden became an efficient food production unit with vegetables,fruit,chickens and rabbits. We had not fridge so most food was fresh, although she did preserve and pickle large quantities;her old kitchen cabinet smelled of vinegar long after she died!

Mention of the radio reminds me of the pleasures of listening to the 大象传媒 and programmes such as ITMA,Monday Night at Eight,Workers'Playtime,Appointment with Fear and Children's Hour.From the latter began my enduring love of music and it was only many years later that I learned the titles of many of the theme tunes used by the programmes. I still have the old Zenith radio, now rather battered, bought by my grandparents new in 1936, and the longcase clock handed down through the family which ticked reassuredly away in a corner of their living room right through the war. The local cinema was another source of entertainment and I vividly remember the interruption of a film by the manager with the announcement that the war in Europe was over and the applause which followed.

Two POW camps were built late in the war on derelict land opposite my aunt's shop. My memories of them are indistinct,but I vaguely recall that one camp contained Italian POWs whilst the other was for Germans. There were rumours that the Germans would come to the camp boundaries to barter things but that they never left the camp. The Italians were said to leave their camp each day to work on the Liverpool docks,apparently without a military escort!

As regards shortages, there were some things which,to us children at the time, were only figments. For example, there were bananas whose photographs we had seen and which the adults assured us tasted nice and would one day return. Likewise, a rumour spread that balloons could be obtained fron the local rubber works and that led to a gang of us stationing ourselves outside the gates for many fruitless days. Later in the war, one of the boys at my primary school turned up at the gates with a lolly ice. It turned out that his mum's boyfriend was an American and that he had got them a fridge;they were the only people I knew at the time who had one. That school brings back happy memories and one event in 1943 filled me with pride; that was the day I won a bottle of coffee essence in a school raffle. It tasted awful but it was to be my last win for a very long time!

Forgive the ramblings of nostalgia. I owe so much to all those who made my childhood such a happy and safe one and I offer the above musings as a small repayment of that debt.

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