大象传媒

My name is Brenda Woodward and I was a child of the war. I was exactly six and a half to the day when war broke out and I remember it very clearly. We were on the beach at Thorpe Bay, near Southend, and my mother - who was stone deaf because she had been injured during the Great war - had gone shopping. She had gone to get a towel as she had come without one and my feet were dirty. When she was in the shop she saw that there was a radio playing there, and when the man turned round to serve her, she saw that his face had gone white. She knew then that something had happened and when she asked him what it was, he said that war had broken out. She went back to the beach and told my father. Already the news had spread and people were packing up and leaving the beach, but my father said, "Hitler's not going to spoil MY holiday." So we stayed and had the beach almost to ourselves for the rest of that fortnight - there were very few people who stayed. We were staying with a family where the man had a wooden leg - he'd lost his leg during the Great War - and he was an ARP warden so was very full of himself. We watched all the dog-fights - it was terribly exciting and I thought war was great at that time! But I soon changed my mind!

Then we had what was called the Phoney War and nothing much happened for a year. We had the Anderson shelter put in the garden, we dug for victory and Father dug all his roses up. At one point, although I can't remember exactly when this was, we decided to keep rabbits for food. My mother was the one who did anything like that as my father had a bad heart, and she made a Rabbit Hilton! We had these beautiful rabbit hutches which were on stilts and sloped back so they drained. We put the rabbits in, and one called Eric went in the dog kennel - he bit me rather badly. Anyway, my father couldn't kill them when it came to having them for food so we had to pay a man up the road to dispatch them. When they were put on the table, I used to say, "That was my favourite rabbit. I'm not eating it." And my mother would say, "Harry, I'm not hungry." So my father would be left to eat the whole rabbit! So keeping rabbits turned out to be a bit pointless. We had chickens and their eggs too at one point but I don't remember them lasting very long, perhaps only for a couple of years. I expect the same thing happened with the chickens -we didn't like to eat them! On one occasion, my father had bought some pullets and he took them into the kitchen overnight because it was cold. He didn't think about the dog's reaction and the next morning we came down to a row of dead pullets. I think that also helped us to stop keeping chickens. My father dug all his flowers up and planted vegetables so we were never short of food. My mother was a cook anyway and she did wonders. She jammed and bottled, and we always had good food, which I don't think was the same for the whole population, so I was very lucky in that respect.

Then the war started in earnest and we were down in the shelter for a couple of years every night. One time, it leaked and when we woke up we had to wade through two feet of water to get out. After that, my dad concreted it and put in electricity. We had a little electric stove that was a heater one way up and a cooker the other way. I remember eating my 'white stew' (made with lamb and flour) there. My parents had a double bed with short legs and I had a little bunk bed above them. Compared to many others, our shelter was luxurious! When we first started going, the two people from next door came too, but the older lady had an injured hip and she had difficulty getting into the shelter. There wasn't really room for five of us; we lay right across the shelter, very close together. Then they got a Morrison shelter, the one you had in the house, like a great big cage, so she and her daughter used to go under that, leaving just the three in our Anderson shelter, although we were four when my brother came back on leave from sea. The first time he came back, he said, "I'm not staying in that thing," and he went and got into my parent's bed in the big front room. That night we had a direct hit a few hundred yards up the road and a row of houses were brought down. All our windows came in, all over my brother, and he came down to the shelter saying that he would rather be at sea any day! He thought we were having an awful time of it on land. We normally went down into the shelter at six o' clock whether there was a warning or not, because we knew the warning would always be coming. This night we were late and the raid started. My brother put me on his shoulders and ran down the garden to the shelter. We could hear the shrapnel all around us so we were very lucky not to have been hit. To stop the dog being hit by shrapnel, we built a little annexe beside the Anderson because he refused to come in until my father got home.

The worst thing about being in the shelter was the big anti-aircraft gun that used to run up and down the railway near us, after the trains had stopped. Our house faced down the road towards the arch (the railway was high) and when it was near us, I would be literally blasted out of bed.

My father used to walk home about an hour and a half after the raid had started. He had a long walk as the buses had to stop running because of the black-out. He had a collapsed lung and a bad heart, so he used to walk slowly down the road. He worked in East London and was often very late for work as he had to make his way across London and through the huge piles of rubble that were all over the place. Although he set off at seven in the morning, often he didn't reach his work until the afternoon because he used to stop to help dig people and bodies out. This meant that, whereas we had been quite well-off before the war, because he was only paid for the hours he worked, this changed and we became quite impoverished. In this we differed from the other families around us whose men didn't go to war but worked in the armament factories - they earned very good money. So the war affected people in different ways financially.

After a couple of years, we got quite blase about the raids and didn't go down to the shelter nearly so often - frequently we would just stay in the house. Later the flying bombs came over, the V1s or doodlebugs. My poor mother couldn't hear them so I used to draw my hand along and point up to the sky (I did the same for the 'all clear' but also said, "It's stopped.") My mother's face used to drain of colour and I used to get quite a vicarious pleasure at seeing this - I must have been a horrible little thing! When we got the next lot of things, the V2s, you didn't know they were coming - you just heard a 'whoosh' and a crash. We got very blase and used to go swimming and stay out. I must have been about 10 then, and I can understand the children of war becoming very hardened because you stopped worrying about it and just got on with life.

Then there were the wonderful celebrations at the end of the war. I remember very clearly we had a street party and we burnt a hole in the road! There was a very big man, Mr. Cooper, who I think was a blacksmith, and he came staggering along with a most enormous tree-trunk in his arms - how he lifted it, I don't know - and he dumped it into the middle of the flames, making such a bonfire that it burnt a hole in the middle of the road. Of course, we still had horses and carts in those days. Not very many, but the milkman and Grooms the baker still used them, and trying to get down the road with this enormous crater in the middle of it was pretty difficult for them, so the council had to come and fill it in sharpish to get things flowing again.

It was a long war and we were lucky that we didn't lose anyone close to us although we had family in London who were bombed out a couple of times but they didn't lose their lives. But what we did lose were the sailors. My brother used to bring home his friends as his was the nearest house to Chatham Dockyards where they used to go from, and of course I got to know all these lovely young men. I'd climb on their knees and they used to tell me stories and they'd sing. I used to wonder where on earth they were all going to sleep but they would sling their hammocks all round our large kitchen and would manage fine. Then they would go off and later I would ask my brother when Jumbo or whoever was coming back and he wouldn't reply. I would keep on and he would say, "Jumbo isn't coming back Jumbo went down with his ship." I was about eight or nine when we started to lose all our sailors so I understood perfectly what was happening as ship by ship went down. I knew someone who went down in the Hood who was only a boy of seventeen. He was little and blond and a dear little soul, and he stayed with us because his family was in the Midlands. His name was Cecil and I remember he had a big motor-bike. In the end my brother and one other, Jim Howe, were the only two who came back to us - the rest were all lost at sea. My brother was torpedoed three times, once on his twenty-first birthday He had already been through the Japanese-Chinese war at the age of seventeen so he was hardened by then. He ended up going with the Special Boats Patrol right across Europe. My mother couldn't understand why he, as a sailor, was on land. He came home with souvenirs such as German helmets with the dried blood still on them. It sounds horrible now, but we considered them trophies and my mother used one as a coal-scuttle That sort of thing was quite normal during the war but looking back, people had become quite hardened by living through the awfulness of the war.

There were two German families living near us but people just used to say they were naturalised so they were all right. One was a lady who had lost her husband and she lived at the end of our road. The other was called Schnarbel and the little girl, who was about my age, went to the same school. Sometimes you would hear someone say that she was a German but then others would pipe up and say naturalisation made all the difference. I don't know why the Germans weren't interned - perhaps it was something to do with British citizenship - and the little girl continued to go to school throughout the war. Nobody took it out on them and I think the local women realised that the German boys who came over in the planes were just other women's sons or husbands who had no choice in what they had to do.

Our neighbours on the other side had an Anderson shelter in their garden in the same place as ours and one day my mother saw Margaret Fairlie running down the garden to the shelter. Margaret was only chasing a cat out of the garden but as my mother couldn't hear, she thought the siren must have gone off, so she rushed down to ours. The Fairlie family saw this happen and threw stones at the shelter until they got my mother out. They all had a good laugh about it but none of them realised that the poor old lady on the other side of us had also seen my mother running into the shelter and, believing that there was a raid on, she spent the whole afternoon in her Morrison shelter. She couldn't believe how long the 'raid' had gone on for! My mother used to keep an eye on what the neighbours were doing so that, if a raid came, she would see them going to the shelter, but otherwise she just carried on with what she was doing.

In school we spent a lot of time in the shelters, and we also had to go to the local dance hall to be fitted for our gas-masks. I remember that very clearly because I had seen the Mickey Mouse ones and wanted one of them, but I was told I was too old. They were much nicer than the ordinary ones and had a nose and ears shape with a bit of red colour that made them look a bit mouse-like. They were for the two to five year olds, and I was over six. I went into a strop and had a bit of a tantrum! Because my mother had lost the bridge of her nose when she was injured, she couldn't breathe properly in the ordinary mask. She had to have an awful thing that she had to put her arms through and then do it up. It had great big sort of goggles and a kind of elephant's trunk which had to be pumped. Even the Imperial War Museum didn't have details or one on show so they must have been fairly rare. I knew that if we were attacked by gas, a man would be running along the road with a rattle but I knew my mother wouldn't hear that, so I would go back home if there was the sirens ever sounded when I was going to school. That caused problems and the school truant person came round on several occasions but I could never tell anyone why I did it. For some reason I was ashamed (just as many abused children can't tell what is happening to them); although it was known that my mother was deaf, nothing was set up apart from help from friendly neighbours. We were never gassed but the thought was frightening, and I was convinced that if we were, my mother would need me to help her to safety.

I remember that when I met my late husband after the war, we were still rationed and his father used to drop a toffee into his tea as he couldn't get enough sugar.

We lived about twenty miles outside London but we were quite heavily bombed because the barrage balloons were up on the hills all round us If they didn't manage to stop the planes getting through to London, the bombs were dropped anywhere between us and Dover. A lot of bombs fell on the go If course behind us and early in the war a German plane crashed on it. I saw it coming down but I didn't actually see the crash. A lot of young men rushed over to it and pulled the pilot out, but he did not survive. The plane blew up and several of the men were injured, and the young shoe-mender was killed, leaving a young family. It was a dangerous thing to do but at that stage, people were not aware of what could happen. I think the pilot's grave is in the churchyard at Crayford.

We had a very heavily laden plum tree in the garden one year and a branch broke when the plums were still green. My mother said we had to gibe up the little sugar we were allowed so that she could use it to make jam. I used to have a plate of plum jam sandwiches when I got home from school and as I ate them, I use to wonder what the night would bring. To this day, when I eat plum jam, I feel little shivers of nerves.

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