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World War Two.

by John Ringham

EARLY YEARS

The problem is memory. Unless someone keeps a consistent diary or record of their lives to jog the mind into recollections, memory has to be inaccurate at times. Even so, from experience I know that events and incidents from the past can find their way into the front of the mind. And what is more, while small detail may not always be strictly true, the broad narrative is.

Everything which follows carries that caveat.

I was eleven years old when World War Two began. All the war years were spent in my home town, Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.

Chamberlain’s voice announced the news on the wireless. I didn’t hear it. The morning was bright and cheerful and I came into our little kitchen and found my mother weeping at the sink, peeling potatoes. I asked her why she was crying and she told me the news. I was excited; not alarmed or agitated. Our little newly-built semi on the edge of the town had little to offer a young boy in the way of excitement. Our street was filled with respectable, house-proud lower middle class families whose unwritten code of behaviour was rigid and sometimes unforgiving. A war was, then, full of unimagined and exciting possibilities.

I went up to my bedroom and thought about buying a map of Western Europe and putting it up on the wall beside my bed. I would, I resolved, follow the news avidly and record our advance against the Wehrmacht with coloured pins and ribbons. That would be A Good Thing. It certainly never crossed my mind that we might lose, and I remained convinced throughout the war that we would win. Brighter more sensitive youngsters may have thought otherwise for all I know, but not this callow youth.

Cheltenham as a town reacted slowly to the implications of war. In London air raid sirens sounded very soon after the declaration of war. It was a false alarm but it must have brought everyone up sharply as they faced a possible reality of what their lives would soon be like. This was not so in Cheltenham.

How prepared our Councillors were I have no means of knowing. But everything in my own daily life remained unchanged – for the time being. Cheltenham still appeared to be the relatively prosperous island it had been throughout the Depression and unemployment which had plagued the lives of most of the rest of the country. It was still The Garden Town of England and the Gateway to the Cotswolds – parks full of flowers and cascading hanging baskets on lamp posts in The Promenade and Montpellier and Tivoli. We may be at war now but change in those early days wasn’t noticeable.

During those first weeks and months physical and material differences were slowly introduced and affected all our lives. The blackout was enforced; cars were fitted with metal plates on their headlamps with slits cut into them to provide some light to drive by; we were issued with gas masks which we were ordered to carry with us at all times; my school, the local Grammar School, had its corridors sectioned off by floor to ceiling sandbags with an access gap only wide enough for two people to squeeze by; we were to assemble in those sections when there was an air raid; we were all told to Dig for Victory and grow vegetables; in due course we were issued with ration books for food and later for clothes and petrol. There was still a dream-like quality to it all. Life went on much as it had throughout my short life.

My father, a commercial traveller for three publishing houses, left every Monday morning as usual and returned every Friday having spent the week selling books in some town or city south of a line drawn from Aberystwyth and Hull. My sisters, both married, lived in the town with their husbands and children. Alan, my eldest sister’s husband, sold tractors round the farms in the Cotswolds. He was never conscripted for some reason and in time became a special constable. Eric, my other brother-in-law, ran nurseries in and around the town and was therefore exempted from National Service. As a result we as a family were not ripped apart as so many thousands of other families had been. Little seemed to be different from our routine lives in those early months. That was soon to be changed.

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Evacuation of children and older people was already in hand throughout much of the country. The day came when a mild-mannered elderly man was sitting in our living room with his wife beside him. They’d left Birmingham and my parents had been asked to take them in.

I found it hugely embarrassing. The man was aiming to please. A friendly smile waited to emerge which it did whenever an opportunity presented itself. Then it disappeared nervously. Conversation between them and my parents had dried up into banalities about the weather. We seemed to have nothing in common to talk about except the war. Of course it was embarrassing.The wife sat, hardly saying a word, unable to cope with the situation. And so they sat, upright and awkward for the rest of that evening – and the next, and the next. And no one had the least idea of just how long this was going to go on.

In theory the kitchen was to be shared. In practice I knew that my mother wouldn’t be able to handle it. The kitchen was small, impossible for two people to work in it at the same time. Starting with a fund of goodwill my mother did her best to make the other woman feel comfortable. But the inevitable irritants quickly emerged and soon there was a tightening of lips and frustrated, reproachful looks. This state of affairs couldn’t last. And it didn’t. Within a very short time – I think not much more than a week – the couple had gone elsewhere and our house settled contentedly back into its routine. But this too didn’t last though the ensuing disruption was far less fraught.

Moseley Grammar School was evacuated to Cheltenham. Hundreds of boys suddenly arrived needing accommodation. We took one of them, John Worrall.

From the start he and I got on very well together and I welcomed someone young in the house. My mother was already in her forties when I was born, my father older. Both of them had been born in the 1880s and were thoroughgoing Victorians. They instinctively understood the complex class system; we knew our place and everyone else should know theirs. There were clear, unequivocal rights and wrongs in life and everyone should constantly try to do the decent thing, living by a defined moral code. I am not criticising them, simply stating how things were in our house. It was our clear duty to take John in and make him feel as much at home as possible. This was done with good grace and on the whole I think successfuly from his point of view. All that being said, sharing our house with someone of my own age was an unexpected delight.

All this is on a personal level. Moseley’s evacuation had a far reaching and fundamental general effect.

Moseley arrived needing teaching accommodation. It was announced at assembly that the visitors would be sharing our premises. Cheltenham G.S. would have their lessons in the mornings, Moseley G.S. would have the afternoons. The school caretaker Mr. Morris – small, always full of dignity in his fly-away collar, black tie and knee length frock coat with shiny brass buttons was too old to cope with this barbaric invasion. He retired shortly before that Christmas. Given the situation unheard of things were happening and there was little alternative to these makeshift arrangements. It is impossible even to guess at the academic effect it would have. In the event, and subsequently, I believe we had a unique, valuable though unconventional education.

Far from being left to our own devices in the afternoons, a wide range of activities was assigned to us all of which were designed to help the war effort. I, along with my thirty odd form mates were loaded into lorries, taken up into the hills and we harvested potatoes for farmers short of manpower. Groups of us joined a Council lorry to collect silver paper for munition factories from street upon street. God knows what they did with it but I assumed a use was found alongside all the iron railings around the town which were ripped out and sent to be melted down. The effect of these community activities - and others – may be imagined. Class-ridden peacetime Cheltenham wouldn’t have dreamt of sending grammar school boys out to do such menial tasks. We were destined for middle ranking civil service careers or to be bank clerks and managers, weren’t we? This kind of work is not ours. But in wartime it was and most of us enjoyed it all as something different, something of an adventure.

Moseley left us after a relatively short time – I forget how long, perhaps they were only with us for that autumn term. It was still the Phoney War when little seemed to be happening though I’ve no doubt thousands of merchant seamen saw nothing phoney about the prospect of a U Boat’s torpedoes ripping their ships apart. Nationwide air raids were still to come. Consequently thousands of young people from all over the country were returned to their homes in the large industrial areas, happier to be families again despite the risks of bombs. And we resumed our lessons from 9a.m. to 4.15 p.m. five days a week and 9a.m. to 12.15p.m. on Saturdays. But life in school was no longer the same.

The sandbags in the corridors needed replacing constantly as the hessian was ripped, either deliberately or by chance, and sand was crunched underfoot as we walked the corridors. A Victorian building, the school began to look dingy and forlorn. It remained so throughout the war.

Now young members of staff left to join the forces and they were replaced by older even old men. Teaching standards had been high and by and large continued to be so but some of the replacements should never have been allowed near a class full of boys. Right up to my departure in the autumn of 1946 the school maintained its good record of Exhibitions and University Grant passes and many boys went on to distinguished universities including Oxbridge. But I have no doubt that there was a decline in teaching standards.
In a class of thirty I was usually classified around the 15 mark. I made a poor showing with rather meagre results in our Oxford School Certificate exams and at the end of my first year in the Sixth Form I was politely but firmly told there was little point in my attempting to take the Higher School Certificate. A lot of this situation was down to me. I was easily distracted by succeeding events in my life which the war produced on a regular basis. Nevertheless I have some intelligence and guided with some understanding I could certainly have done better. Happily, today I am convinced that I benefitted hugely from all the extra mural activities the war provided for us all. To call all our wartime experiences the University of Life is too trite and simplistic but I have no doubt that it had value, even great value.

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