大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jenny Christian of the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library on behalf of Bridget Patrick and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

At long last springtime came and it became warmer. My gran took us on country walks where we played in meadows and picked wild flowers. The ditches were bright yellow with primroses and patches of blue violets were all over the banks. Later, nodding cowslips carpeted the meadows. We picked these and made them into cowslip balls. I have forgotten how we made them, but in any case today we are not supposed to pick wild flowers at all. In 1941 they were very plentiful, whereas nowadays many plants have been destroyed by chemicals sprayed on to fields and from fumes from car engines. We leave any wild flowers there are for the bees and for birds and other insects to use for food, and for us all to enjoy when we come into the countryside.
We could hardly believe that early in the summer of 1941 we were to move again. This time our gran found a few rooms in an old farmhouse in the next village. A very old lady, always dressed in black, lived in the rest of the house. We hardly ever saw her but when we did she reminded me of a witch, and I really thought that she had a black cat and a broomstick hidden away.
My gran did not seem to mind the messy, smelly oil lamps she had to light because there was no electricity. She had electric light in her home in Norwich, but could remember very well the gas and oil lamps when she was a young girl at the end of the nineteenth century.
Our lavatory was outside in a little shed. There were no flush loos as we have today - just two buckets side by side under a wooden seat. This was sometimes called a 鈥榩rivy鈥�. As it was nearly 25 metres from the house my sister and I would wait and go together especially when it was dark and creepy. As paper was rationed there were no proper toilet rolls. Newspaper was cut into small sheets and fastened with string on to a hook behind the privy door. It was very uncomfortable to use. The smell was extremely unpleasant and we got out as quickly as we could.
This village was called Carleton Rode, but this time I did not change school. I walked more than two miles every morning along the country road to Bunwell school and back every afternoon. It was a really hot summer and it seemed a very long way all on my own. On one of my walks to school, I remember a low flying aeroplane roaring over my head. I thought it was a German 鈥榩lane so I jumped, terrified, into a ditch and crouched there until it had gone over. I am fairly sure now that it was not an enemy plane but it certainly frightened me at the time. This was a very lonely time for me - walking miles all by myself each day and not making any real friends with the children at school. How I longed to be back home in Lowestoft playing on the beautiful sandy beach as I did when I was a very little girl during the summers before the war. My gran found it very tiring looking after two little girls and at the start of the summer holidays she decided to go back to Norwich in spite of the air raids. Her house had been bombed so she went to live with a friend where she spent the rest of her life. What was to happen to my sister and me? Not another move surely. Well it certainly wasn鈥檛 safe to go back home to Lowestoft so another new home was found for us - back again to Aslacton, not to my auntie and uncle鈥檚 shop, but a few hundred metres away to the old Manor House built at least three hundred years ago. Here lived some very kind people we were soon to call auntie and uncle. They had a twelve-year-old daughter called Margaret and we soon became firm friends. The next two years were a happy time for my sister and me.
The autumn of 1941 saw all of us back at Aslacton school. It was my third return there and my sixth change of school. Because of all these changes, I was not learning as much as I should have done but I can remember enjoying reading and writing stories. One day my teacher pulled a rather dirty piece of sewing out of a fusty smelling bag and handed it to me. 鈥淩ight, you can finish this,鈥� she said. What a boring thing to have to do - this was a piece of sewing I had started two years before in 1939 during my first attendance at Aslacton School. I had forgotten all about it and I certainly never wanted to see it again. I think it put me off sewing for the rest of my life.
By 1941 food and clothes were rationed which meant that we only had a few things to wear and only small amounts of meat, cheese and butter to eat and hardly any sweets. Some of my dresses and skirts were made out of curtain fabric that felt horribly rough and itchy. If I could have seen into the future into the year 2000 when all young girls have a wonderful choice of such attractive and comfortable clothes I think I would have felt very envious.
At least we didn鈥檛 go hungry. Living in the country we had plenty of eggs and fresh vegetables as auntie and uncle kept chickens and also had a large vegetable garden. I think we also had enough meat. Chickens and ducks were killed to eat and the poor old pig, of which we had grown very fond, ended up as bacon and sausages. All our food was home cooked. Auntie had an oil cooker as well as a cooking range set in the wall and fuelled by coal and wood. She baked her own bread and cooked puddings and pies and delicious cakes as well.
Margaret and I had competitions as to how many rounds of toast we could eat at one meal. I can close my eyes and still remember that delicious smell of toasted bread that we held on long toasting forks in front of the fire, and the wonderful taste after spreading the toast with lashings of pork dripping instead of butter. This would be considered very unhealthy today, but nobody knew then that fatty things like pork dripping were bad for us.
The two of us had lots of good times. We both had bicycles and could cycle around the countryside quite safely. There was hardly any traffic as not many people owned cars and in any case, petrol was rationed. On one of these cycle rides Margaret and I were going down the village street and turning right into a side road. I turned on the wrong side of the road, and facing me was an old gentleman with a basketful of flowers on the front of his bicycle. As we tried to avoid each other his front wheel wobbled, and my front wheel wobbled, and then - CRASH! We collided, with me flying into the air over his handlebars and landing on the road. It was all my fault and I thought I had hurt him badly. Fortunately he scrambled up and seemed to be all right. He was very cross with me especially as his bunch of flowers was completely squashed. I had a deep cut on my knee (the scar of which I still have) but the awful thing was that my beautiful new bicycle was completely twisted. I was in a bit of trouble over that as it had cost 拢8 to buy which was a lot of money in 1942 and I knew I could not have a new one. However, all was saved as the village blacksmith managed to repair it for me. He could do anything at his forge from shoeing horses, repairing tractors, making iron gates to straightening out twisted bicycles.
There are still blacksmiths鈥� forges today and I wonder if they look the same as they did sixty years ago? Black grimy walls were hung with bits of iron, and a great roaring fire bellowed out choking smoke where the blacksmith heated the metal that he used on the nearby anvil. The anvil was an iron block where he hammered the hot metal into shape and the clanging noise was deafening. Although it was not a comfortable place to be, it seemed to be one of the places in the village where farmers and farm workers met to chat to each other and keep warm.
Another favourite pastime was using an old-fashioned wind up gramophone to play old records of dance music. This was really a wooden box with a turntable for the record, the sound coming by means of a special needle fixed at the end of a rotating metal arm resting directly on the record. Often the music sounded very scratchy and the needles needed changing frequently. However we had great fun with it. We made up our own dances and gave displays to anyone who would watch us. We had very few toys but we were lucky to have some books to read. A kind friend gave us books of schoolgirl stories written about girls鈥� boarding schools and the exciting adventures that happened there. I remember writing my own schoolgirl story at this time. It kept me busy during the long winter evenings. There was no television and we never listened to the radio.
In September 1942, I thought these make believe schoolgirl stories were about to come true for me. It had been arranged for Margaret to go to a weekly boarding school in Harleston - a small town not very far away. How exciting I thought - surely it would be just like those stories I had read - so please, please could I go too? To begin with my mum and dad were doubtful about another change of school for me but I think they knew I would be miserable without Margaret. Finally, they agreed that I could go for one year until I was old enough to go to Secondary school. By now I was eleven years old and I had changed school seven times. Being a weekly boarder meant living at school from Monday to Friday and spending the weekend back at Aslacton. My little sister must have felt very lonely while we were away. The school was in a big house in the middle of Harleston and we often cycled the eight miles from Aslacton on Monday mornings returning on Friday afternoons. If the weather was wet we could travel on the train which ran on the Waveney Valley Line from Tivetshall in Norfolk where we got on, to Beccles in Suffolk. This line has been closed for many years and is now a busy road. The journey seemed to take a long time as the train stopped at every station. After Tivetshall came Pulham Market, next was Pulham St.Mary and then we arrived at Harleston. However, if anyone wanted to travel on to Beccles they had to stop at Homersfield, Earsham, Bungay, Ditchingham, Ellingham and Geldeston. Some of these places still have the old station buildings, which have been restored as homes or offices. They remind us of a long forgotten railway.
My new school wasn't quite like the adventures in my schoolgirl stories. Many of the children were younger than I was and the older ones had to help to wash and dress them. We played games with them and read them stories.
After breakfast, and before school started, all the boarders went for a short walk with one of the teachers. We chose a partner and walked in twos in a "crocodile" around the town.
In the afternoon before tea we went for a much longer walk, through the town and out into the countryside. We were used to walking and never complained that we were tired. It was good exercise and kept us fit. It also helped us to notice all the sights and sounds around us. I can remember that one of the walks on country roads just outside Harleston was called, "Up Donkey and Down Donkey." It would be difficult to trace that walk today as probably that name is not used any more. I expect we just walked up some kind of hill and down the other side.
In my schoolgirl stories there were tales of secret tunnels and midnight feasts, but I am afraid in real life there was nothing like that. I quite enjoyed that year at a boarding school even though sometimes I felt that I didn't really belong anywhere. However, I had been to so many schools that one more didn't seem to matter. During that time here are some of the things that I can remember very clearly.
I remember sitting around a very long table at mealtimes eating very plain and boring food. As we were often really hungry, and as we were made to sit there until we had eaten everything, we usually cleared our plates. I can still recall one small girl sitting over a bowl of porridge from breakfast until nearly lunchtime because she refused to eat it. Food was strictly rationed and children were not able to choose as they do today.
I remember playing on the recreation ground which was opposite the school in Harleston. It is the same playground where my grandchildren and their friends play today. It has hardly changed in fifty-five years.
I remember one really awful day when I tripped and fell into the fireplace in our classroom. A coal fire was burning and the fireguard was not in place. I burnt my fingers quite badly and they were extremely painful. Fortunately, my teacher knew that the correct thing to do was to run my fingers under cold water for at least ten minutes, and this prevented bad blisters. On that very same day, I had to go to the dentist to have some teeth out. At the time, it seemed the worst day of my life.
I remember a very rare trip to the cinema to see 'Gulliver's Travels' - a story about Gulliver's adventures in a country of little people. This was a great treat in the middle of the war. The cinema in Harleston has been closed for a long time now.
I remember being dressed in green tunics and learning to dance barefoot on the big lawn behind the school. We gave a dancing display and a lady called Constance Clay came to watch us. She was quite famous for starting new kinds of dancing and Keep Fit for grown ups and children. We were lucky to have her as a visitor.

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