´óÏó´«Ã½

The day war broke out I was a patient in the London Hospital, Whitechapel, (now the Royal London Hospital) suffering from the aftermath of rheumatic fever. As the hospital was being evacuated to Wales my parents were given the choice of my going to Wales or of taking me home and nursing me there. The latter was their choice and I was taken home to a rearranged bedroom on the ground floor of our house in Ruislip, Middlesex. As it was considered unwise to allow me to sit up my father improvised with an ironing board fixed to a pushchair so that my mother could take me out.

My father was a bank manager which was a reserved occupation and at that time also a fire watcher in the City of London — apparently I would not go to sleep until he returned from duty so eventually he had to give up this war work and became instead an ARP warden. Not before he had seen the Tate and Lyle factory go up in flames the night the bombing was very heavy on the docks area of London. He told me the smell was horrendous.

In 1940 we moved house to a large rented house in Ickenham, the next village to Ruislip. By this time I was back on my feet with the aid of a second hand dolls pram. We did not have a conventional air raid shelter but instead my father built two brick walls about six feet apart and braced with RSJs on the top and iron bars at the half way height on which I and my two brothers had bunk beds and with a double bed base and mattress for my parents below where we slept most nights for the first three years of the war. The theory was that because the walls were not fastened to the floor that they would take the blast of anything other than a direct hit.

The was fortunate as our house was only a few fields away from the perimeter of Northolt Aerodrome. We were very lucky and despite strings of bombs landing around us our house was never hit but we had good collections of shrapnel to find the next day and one day my brother bought home an unexploded fire bomb — my Dad was horrified when he found it in the garage!

At school a lot of our lessons were taken in the air raid shelter which at our school was the reinforced central corridor. We did lots of mental arithmetic and spelling bees which I really enjoyed. Ours was a quite old school building of four classrooms, another classroom formed by the stage in the hall and two further classrooms in the playground used by the infants. I attended the infants for a few weeks before I was taken ill with rheumatic fever and I distinctly remember the plasticine and also the slates and chalk we used to learn to write.

I remember sitting next to Michael Noad in class, his father was in the African Desert in the RAF, and Michael could draw lots of the plane shapes. I imagine a lot of my school friends had fathers in the forces but we never seemed to speak about it at all, despite the map on the wall showing the positions of the armies and with flags and drawing pins which we moved every time there was a victory in Europe. I cannot remember any mention of the war in Asia.

We didn’t have school dinners — I cannot remember there being any but as we all lived locally we cycled home to lunch. Although we were allowed a lot of freedom I do remember one occasion when I was very late home from school — I had stopped to watch a white wedding in the local church. I was in real disgrace when I arrived home — what really annoyed me was that my parents didn’t believe me about the wedding. Looking back I presume they had not heard that the hours during which a wedding could be held had been extended during the war and it was possible to get married after 3 p.m.

The most frightening experience I had during the war took place when I was riding home from school on my bicycle — suddenly over the trees came a German plane at tree top height with its guns blazing — going in to strafe Northolt aerodrome. Needless to say I fell off my bike! The underground railway ran between our house and Northolt and at night a mobile gun would run up and down the tracks. In complete contrast the lane which ran over the railway immediately opposite our house lead to a farm and we picked pounds of blackberries along its length.

My parents kept chickens (for eggs) and bees (for honey). I think we had to give up some of our sugar ration to make sugar water for the bees in the winter but this was more than compensated by the hundreds of pounds of honey we collected the next summer. There was a bee keeping association who owned the extractor for removing the honey from the combs and everyone in turn borrowed it. When we had it a very sticky time occurred as we all helped pot up the honey. My mother also bottled fruit and vegetables like runner beans and put down eggs in eisinglas. We were very lucky in that we had an acre of garden, one third of which was orchard — apples, plums, pears, damsons, etc. and one third was laid down as a vegetable and soft fruit area. This still left us a large lawn to play on.

My route to school took my passed a large munitions store belonging to the RAF who provided about the only traffic we ever saw on our way to school — apart from an occasional bus. This was about the only sign we had of war other than the raids and later the V1s and V2s not many of which got the north west corner of London — or not in my memory.

My father often told the tale of the school caretaker who, when one evening there was a civil defence lecture in the school hall, tried to make everybody go into the shelters when the air raid siren sounded in the sound track of the film that was being shown. He took a lot of convincing that it was on film.

I think the thing that has lasted in my memory of WWII is the siren which makes my stomach sink every time I hear it and as we live only 500 yards from Wattisham Air Base we do hear it from time to time. Otherwise I remember a time of great freedom — a lot more than the children have today — as there was very little traffic on the roads and we were able to cycle wherever we wanted and often took food out for the day and went miles. This was, of course, once the main Blitz was over when I was about 8 years upwards. These were the days when we collected the strips of reflective material dropped to cause chaos with the primitive radar of those days.

I can remember the day we had a banana. My father was then a bank manager in Kingsbury and the local Chamber of Commerce arranged a children’s party for deprived children and they were each given a banana. Where they came from I have no idea but maybe the American forces helped but Dad bought us one each home.

With no TV, etc. we made our own entertainment and listened to Childrens Hour on ´óÏó´«Ã½. — Uncle Mac (from whom I received a pen just after the war after winning a competition), the Castles of England series I especially remember and Larry the Lamb. Later, after the war, I think we had Dick Barton, Special Agent.

Another vivid memory is the day we each had to take a tin container to school (mine was an old powdered baby milk tin) and we received an allocation of a mixture of milk, sugar and chocolate powder sent from Canada, I think. How much of it got home I don’t remember but its amazing how much stuck to a licked finger and could be conveyed to the mouth.

My final memory is of VE Day, we all cycled to Ruislip in the dark and there was a huge bonfire in Pinn Meadow and great rejoicing all evening and we went to bed very late.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.