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My mother had run a butchers home in the First World War so she was very particular because she was feeding seven always and if my brother or sister came home it would be nine so she was quite a good person to have in the shop unless she was so particular we certainly used to die a thousand deaths because she would go into the butchers shop and we would have to go in with the ration books and he would say what would you like she would say I will have a leg of lamb I think and out would come the first one from the window, second one, third one and then he would say just hold on a minute, I will just go out to my store at the back and eventually she would use the leg of lamb or liver or whatever it was and then on Friday night we would rush home from school and then we had a chips sandwich, crisp sandwich and onion sandwich and then we had to go meet her from the Greenline bus because she was told to work in the hospital, if your children were a certain age you had to be directed even though she had the five and she did the prescript medicines and she took them to the ward and dealt with all the orders that came through from the wards because this was the biggest thing that happened to our life when the D Day landings started they built a huge almost within a week or so a hospital and then that became my life because my mother having worked there I went up there and I was pushing boys not much older than myself that had had their legs blown off in great big cane baskets. We took them down in the village or the town every Saturday so that they could shop, I do remember before they were sent home, I wasn’t much younger than they were and they had all their limbs lost or burnt, things like that and then the grounds that they used to put the hospital up was next to a huge psychiatric hospital and they had a dance floor and a stage so they put on a show and then they invited the local people if they had got anybody to do anything and unfortunately for me our mother being an amateur operatic singer and my father being a pianist for the same group and that was how they met and my mother pushed me forward and I sang in my sweet little alice blue gown all dressed in blue to the D Day troops and I swear they all volunteered to go back. I explained to a chap when I was queuing outside Windsor Castle last year my mother was sitting in the front row going open your mouth and this chap grabbed my arm and he said my mother used to do that to me but I was a choir boy.

I went to the hospital a lot with my mother, you see everything was easy. I helped out at the hospital, whatever you could do within yourself and you just went round and sat on the ward, you sat next to people, they were missing their families and another part of it, I really had a busy time, I started with my sister’s cycling as you got older you were allowed to cycle, we all had bicycles, we lived near the River Thames and between where I lived and the next town was a Canadian Army Camp ready to go over to France and so we used to do their shopping and we were just out cycling one afternoon just along the River Thames and they called out and we stopped our bicycles and they called us over and asked us what our names were and I told them and I said Oh you’re not English and he said No and I said where do you come from and so then we went every day and we started doing their shopping and they gave us chewing gum and they told us all about Canada and they were very nice men, nothing silly or anything. Then I did a week for ten shillings for Warship Week, these are all the things, you see when the war started all the fences round schools, churches and the graveyard were taken away because of the iron. I was going to church then so I had communion at eight, family service at eleven and evening song at half past three and every Wednesday in the evening I walked up this long road that I lived in to the church and I made knitted squares or patchwork for the black poor people of Africa but I had to go past this graveyard so I used to breathe in, hold my breath, get into the middle of the road and shut my eyes and I would run past the graveyard because I was absolutely sure there was a ghost or something and even when I left home to go off to London my father just said goodbye at the back door. Nobody took me, I walked out with my suitcase and on the train, we were a tough little lot.

I was weeding someone’s garden in a big house all day because I was buying a warship and the following week the next time I tried to buy a battleship I did spring cleaning in a big house and I worked my way round and the lady of the house asked me to go into a room and when I went into there it was a library and sitting in the room beside the fire was a little tubby man, he looked like a Toby jug and he had a Chinese mandarin collar smoking jacket and a little matching hat and he was so sweet and as I polished all the books and dusted them all he was talking to me asking me about my brothers and sisters and he was an absolute darling but he was just a little Toby jug. I remember my mother heating my father’s clothes and then he would knock on the floor of the bathroom and she would go up with his clothes on.

My father was working in a factory making parts for aircraft. I know more because in this Rayburn cooker were two little fireside seats, one had coal and the other had wood to start it and if I sat there quietly I would hear things and the others are all in bed at six and I was allowed to stay up until seven, you could hear little snippets that my parents were discussing simply because the other people had taken our sitting room so we were all in one room and if I said one little word my father would say thank you, off to bed so I learnt to sit there and say nothing. He did run his tool club so he must have been taught to use them because he couldn’t have taught me. We all stayed together, my sister went out to work at 15, she didn’t want to go to the same school as me, she didn’t like the homework I did so she became a secretary. My brothers were called up with National Service but I cannot remember, John would have been so I was 12, Elizabeth was 10, John was 8, David was 6 and Margaret was 4 and so I was 18 when the war ended, Elizabeth and John was 14 so he joined up when he was 17 because my husband was doing National Service as well but he was out in Palestine when Israel was founded in 1947/48 so I was the eldest and you see there is a lot of difference between four, six, eight and twelve and ten and Elizabeth and I, the boys don’t remember much. There was a club that was run by adults, a sports club that I belonged to. When they came home on leave the people who belonged to the club before the war they came home on leave, a lot of them were not married but they kept the club running, it was in a beautiful old barn that had been converted with lattice windows way before the war and they came back and there was a few people around there and they taught us how to behave, how to act with decorum and they had a great huge inglenook fireplace. So we learnt how to play badminton but they had a dance floor so we were jiving as well and then we used to do Harry James and all the singers, Frank Sinatra and there was a microphone down the end of the room and we used to sing in little turns, I actually met my husband there when I was 16. It was a tithe barn, funny enough years and years later my father and I were moving company and it was still there and my sister took me over there. We were taught manners by the people in the forces, there was no wild behaviour but if you sat quietly again, perhaps I got more out of it because my travel as a story teller and I love telling stories and I have six grandchildren and they know everything about the history of our family and I have said to them they are all at university now but I said to them last year this is the last story you are going to have to listen to from grandma because now whatever you remember, I know you have got good memories and you will never forget it so I won’t bore you and they say we haven’t been bored grandma so that was very sweet. There was a centre that was bombed locally and people were outside with nowhere to sleep, the back of the library upstairs was full of mattresses, a mound was built high and it left a gap. We learnt afternoon tea, we would have tea in this room with the inglenook fireplace and then you would sit quietly and I always sat near the burnups so I could hear these stories. The club was held mostly at weekends and then we were caught scumping with my knickers to grow into but very handy when you are putting apples and pears up your knicker leg so my father paid for me to go to this private school and I had only been there for a week and I came out, we had all gone a group of us about six I suppose and we had gone into the hole in the back of the fence into the little orchard that was attached to this tithe barn so we did our scumping and we were honest enough just to take the ones off the floor I have to say so there I am all loaded up and the boys have got their pockets full. We got caught by Miss Eastaugh and she told us to put them back where we found them.

The only problem with clothing is that you didn’t have any and my mother used to buy from the Co-Op and used to have a man to come to the house to take the money. My sister used to come home from London and take measurements and we used to dress up in parachute silk. My sister made them. She became a seamstress and when she got married she lived eight miles from us and she made all her daughters’ clothes who became an amateur dancer so she learnt but she didn’t like doing it so we never used her but she did do it then and she made my little blue gown for my song. The family would all then give a coupon if there were anybody or anyone. We had no problems with meat or food. If you had a number of children I think it was probably four or more you apply to have a food parcel and they came from Canada, Australia as well as your ration coupons and so I was brought up on that. A lot of it was Australian because I can remember the Australian currants and sultanas, they were larger and softer and I have never had the like and then the jam was apricot and half of the apricot was in the tin and then we had a fruit cake and I can remember some form of butter but it was in a tin and it wasn’t really nice. These parcels perhaps came once or twice a year but it was quite a big parcel. You were given a chart, you had to go to the clinic and the nurse would weigh the baby and even if you were in the fifties, if your baby hadn’t put on a pound, you better go and see the doctor and so my children were as fat as butter but in actual fact that was wrong. We actually brought cod liver oil because my father could only afford that. We also got vitamins from the clinic, they were syrup and blackcurrant something, that was vitamin B and the syrup was vitamin C.

I used to do the shopping for a lady that was completely bedridden and I saw the first television set that was just one before the war and then it went off because this lady was bedridden and what actually happened, this is real honesty you never locked your doors, you could go and drop a parcel on somebody’s front door and it would be there six months later and the man of the house with this completely disabled wife used to leave me a shopping list every day and the money on his front doorstep as he went off to work so I would go off to school, go round past his house, pick up the list and the shopping and then when I finished school I would go down to the shop which was about ten houses away from where the house was, do the shopping, came back and put it on the front doorstep and left the change there and that went on for four years and I was doing it just before the war so I was 12 and then he brought her television because she was bedridden and she invited me, sometimes I went in, sometimes I didn’t mostly I didn’t and then I think I went up on the Saturday once and she asked me if I wanted to see the television it was a boat race and the mannequin parade and as far as I could remember it went off for the war and then I was moved and doing other things. We had wireless at home because my father used to test us. The whole of my life you never ever go to bed without hearing the news because the next day my father would say what did Mr Churchill said yesterday and what was the battle that was won yesterday and where were our troops, which country have the Germans taken over so you don’t miss the news and he made all five of us sit there and even the toddlers and listen. We had a lot of books and the funny thing is that my father was unemployed and he went two years without a job so the family story goes and he just spent the whole day at the library reading and he had outstanding cards that came that he hadn’t taken them back quickly. He was always into biographies and non-fiction and so we knew about Mr Rockefeller, Mr Ford, Mr Morris, all the car manufacturers, all the inventors because my father would tell us the story, he would condense it all down and we used to sit around listening to them so we had books around the home all the time. All the libraries were still open during the war, we didn’t go so much because we were so busy. My father brought my mother a washing machine because when she started working at the hospital it was impossible to get all the washing in but I do remember just before the war we left Southampton when I was about 10 but I can remember on a Saturday morning my mother washed every day and on Saturday mornings I had to light the boiler in the corner of the kitchen and get some kindling wood and then eventually it would catch on and then I used to have to use at the end, all my knuckles were bleeding because I have got very sensitive skin and I use to be rubbing up and down a board and I always missed and took all the skin off and I would keep going and then I used to have to put the blue bag into the white washing and I got smacked if I hadn’t made it blue enough so that was just before the war.

We had no power point in those days so we had to take the electric light bulb out of the ceiling and then put the plug from the washing machine which had a sopping great piece of wire that went right across the scullery and you have to attach it to the cold water tap and then you were not allowed to do the washing because of the mangle and the water used to trickle down so there was a puddle and so my father made us wear Wellingtons. Then in the corner of this scullery was the big Morrison shelter this cast iron thing with mesh.

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