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Potter’s Bus

I was born in Portsmouth in July 1938, a few hundred yards from the dockyard, and memories tend to hinge around events rather than dates. My father was called up early in the war and my memories of him do not start until he returned some years later.
Early in the war we were bombed out and the whole family, including mother and grandmother, was evacuated to just outside Petersfield, some 30 miles away. Our host was a retired tea planter and his wife who lived in a large country house, deep in the woods. Our arrival was, I believe, somewhat traumatic for him as our ages ranged from 3 to 6 and his own children were grown up and were in the forces.
My elder sister and I tended to join forces in roaming the woods and gardens to the constant consternation of old Moss (?) the gardener. Moss had a large water butt that he kept full of limewash for painting the greenhouse windows in the summer. Being at a curious age my sister and I wanted to know what was in the butt and subsequently managed to fall in. Fortunately, old Moss was at hand and managed to pull us out, looking rather like the ghosts of Christmas past. Our host’s bellow …’Mrs Stratford, come and see what these children have got up to now…’ still lingers on. As a result of this we were given our own small garden to tend and a love of the country and gardening has stayed with me ever since. On Saturdays I would buy penny packets of seed at Woolworths in Petersfield and I remember the day that a bull got loose at the town market in the morning. In the afternoon we went to the annual gymkhana and sang ‘I’m H A P P Y’. I guess we were in our own innocent way. So was the bull for a few brief minutes.
At that time I was too young to realise the significance of what was going on in the world and the planes high in the sky were the only real pointers to the misery that the war was causing. The son of the house, ‘Master Martin’, was a spitfire pilot and during the Battle of Britain he would fly low over the house and do a victory roll to let his parents know that he was OK.
I started school at the age of 4 when I would go each day to the converted chapel at Rake some 3 miles away. I passed by it last week and noted that it is still a small primary school. Our teacher was aptly named Miss Churchill and her teaching gave me a firm foundation and a love of reading, so much so that I was delighted when I received two copies of Enid Blyton’s ‘Sunny Stories’ as compensation for not being able to go to the ‘twins’ birthday party because of measles. Next to the school was a fruit farm, now a garden centre, and at lunch times we would buy a penn’orth of redcurrants to get rid of the taste of the school lunches that were nourishing if nothing else. We would go to school on ‘Potter’s Bus’, when Potter could get the petrol. When he couldn’t we walked there and back. Coming home we would pick wild strawberries and violets, avoiding the two Scotty dogs that lived in the woods and which barked and barked, much to my dismay.
I believe we were there for some 3 or 4 years but for me the summers seemed to last forever.
A change and a cold chill came over the proceedings when one day, walking to school, we found the whole 3 miles lined with lorries, tanks and other armoured vehicles on both sides under the camouflage of the trees. They were there for a few days and then they were gone as suddenly as they came.
A few weeks earlier we had seen a flying bomb, a ‘doodlebug’ swoop silently across the sky to explode further up in the woods. I remember my grandmother’s warning, when you can’t hear them, you are in deep trouble, or words to that effect.
Around the same time my mother let us stay up late and we all stood in the garden watching as wave after wave of planes shook the ground in what I later found out was the first of the 1000 bomber raids on Germany. It was not until many years later, as a photo interpreter in the RAF, that I saw the sobering results of those raids.
Eventually, when it was considered safer, we returned to Portsmouth, but this must have been before the end of the war as VE day was yet to come.
We had an uncle from up north who was on minesweepers and I remember how gray his face seemed to be when he came to stay with us after convoy duty in the North Sea. At that time the days seemed always dull and wet, the trudge to school on Monday mornings always brought a smell of washing and soup from the open doors down the street. Doors were not locked then; there was nothing to steal.
For several years afterwards our playgrounds were the bombed out buildings that were never more than 3 or 4 doors away. If we had disputes with neighbouring gangs the weapons were invariably the half-bricks that were there for the taking. Most of the neighbourhood (including me) would come out to watch and the police rarely intervened until there were one or two hospital cases. In the mornings we would put a hot penny on the window to melt the frost to see what the weather was like.
We did not complain. We did not know of any other way of life.
I guess these were ‘the good old days’. It is a pity that some of today’s politicians did not live through them.

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