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15b - [ Mike Gerrard's schooldays continued]

Neville Usher: What about food, you and your sister, were you always hungry or weren’t you really conscious of it?

Mike Gerrard: We didn’t really do badly as far as food was concerned. Bread as you know wasn’t rationed so we could have plenty of bread during the war, meat was rationed, butter was rationed, eggs, milk and so on and we accepted that rationing as just part of the facts of life. We found ways, like using lard and using dripping and that kind of thing to make the butter or the margarine go further, and my mother used to mix butter and margarine together so that you had a kind of spread that was what probably not unlike Flora, but of course the margarine was rather cruder in those days than it is now, so we didn’t do too badly for food. We could get vegetables, in those days vegetables and fruit but fruit didn’t come very often but vegetables were very cheap and we could get vegetables. My mother used to get funny cuts of meat, and we had as you know, we had rabbits, we had veal, (not veal, we had rabbits, we had whale meat). We had beaver meat was another thing that was offered to us during the war. We didn’t so much go in for the whale meat, but we did eat some rather strange meat, notably it was rabbit, and you could get that in the butchers without compromising your weekly meat ration.

Neville Usher: What about snoek?

Mike Gerrard: No snoek! Snoek was a post-war thing, and I don’t recall us ever eating snook to tell the truth, but no we didn’t have that and we didn’t have peanuts and ?? I can tell you, but we did quite well for food.
Something I did want to tell you about was the underground system, because that again was interesting to us. It began when the blitz started and we had an underground station near where we lived, people used to go down with sleeping bags and sleep on the platform there, that was accepted by London Transport.

Neville Usher: And you never did that?

Mike Gerrard: No we didn’t do that, my mother was always one for dying in her bed, and so that was what we set out to do. We didn’t have any choice in the matter, but we agreed with her that it seemed a sensible thing to do if you were going to be killed anyway you might just as well be killed comfortably!

Anyhow a lot of people went to our local tube station and slept in sleeping bags on the platforms. Now we liked a lot, mother liked as well going up to central London, she liked the noise, the bustle, the kind of excitement, she used to walk round places like Swan and Edgar’s and Harrods and Pontings, and Derry and Toms and so on; not necessarily buying anything but just enjoying the business of going round these big shops and in any case, she hadn’t got the money or the coupons to buy what she wanted I guess.

But it was an outing, and she enjoyed it and we enjoyed it as well and we saw all round the centre of London, people were doing the same things, sleeping on all the platforms, and after a time London Transport or whoever, Morrison, whoever was responsible at the time, introduced bunks, frameworks for bunks into the stations, so that you had two or three tiers of bunks and people slept in those. Now we were quite interested to see people sleeping in the stations, including our own local station which was …, that really was quite something because we knew that the war was coming out as far as us, and it was quite interesting to us. We never had any desire to do it, and one of the reasons why I guess was after the event, but the next station down the line was a ground level station and the next but one from us was underground again. You were talking earlier about people getting confused on the escalator and getting killed. Well people slept on the underground level of that station, and they had a bomb that came through the top of the ticket office area and bounced down the escalators and exploded at the bottom and a lot of people were killed, and then we thanked our lucky stars that we hadn’t considered going to the underground. We knew that there was risks, because for example there was one terrible disaster in London during the war when a bomb broke a water main and people who were in an underground area shelter in Lewisham were killed in hundreds because it was flooded, and we could see that there were some drawbacks to going to shelters, and I think my sister and I were convinced by that, that my mother’s idea was better! But that was a very interesting, and for us novel part of the war. And we were constantly aware of the danger of it, because you would be going along a street which you had gone along every day of the week, and suddenly a building wouldn’t be there. You’d find a mangled bus lying on its side halfway along the street and that kind of thing, and those quite shocking images that changed the face of the places you knew. And of course once that happened, they stayed like that for the rest of the war, so I wouldn’t want to go through that again I tell you.

Neville Usher: And your father, did he go all over the place?

Mike Gerrard: Well my father was most of the time …, half the time he was in this country, yes I was listening to Channel 4 last night a programme called Spitfire Ace, he wasn’t a Spitfire Ace, he was in the RAF but he was at Uxbridge when one of the Fighter Command Control units was at Uxbridge. He was at Uxbridge, he was at Gloucester, he was at Sutton Coldfield, he was at Lynham, he was at various other places around the country and he went to Prestwick as I mentioned earlier, and that was the end of his time in this country. He was shifted from Prestwick to Gibraltar, and he then started to live probably the best years of his life because he had been trained in airport management, airfield management I suppose, didn’t consider themselves airports. He was trained in airfield management, and he went out to Gibraltar where he was the officer in charge of the airfield, he did the same job in Rabat in Morocco, he did the same job in Heleopolis in Cairo, he did the same in Sharba in Iraq, he did the same job in Lydda, which is now the Tel Aviv airport, and he finished up in Malta, where he was in charge of all the Mediterranean zone airports on behalf of the British services and the French services and the American services as well, and they kept him in the RAF for a year after the war, until that job was run down, and he was demobbed in 1946.

Neville Usher: When he was in England, was there great excitement for you and your sister when he came home?

Mike Gerrard: Oh huge, I can’t tell you. When he went off to Gibraltar also, he was supposed to fly from Portreath in Cornwall, and he got up, I remember he got up, it was just after Christmas in 1943, and he got up and he went off to catch the train to go down to Portreath at about five o’clock in the morning, and we all got up to say goodbye to him and at eleven o’clock that night he re-appeared you know; this happened for two or three days and my sister and I thought to ourselves well this is going to be good, he just spends his days going backwards and forwards to war on the train and he comes home every night. But of course the fourth day he didn’t, and so yes I mean when he came home it was always huge excitement for us, and I don’t suppose we gave my mother and him too much time alone together because we sort of clamoured around him and were very pleased to see him, yes. And he was fortunate in a way because he, generally speaking, had quite a good… as I say quite a good war and I think he had more influence and more responsibility in the RAF than he had ever had in his civilian job, and it’s another story but when he came back after the war, there was a huge problem of resettlement between him and my mother, because he went back to a civilian job which wasn’t nearly so well paid, he didn’t meet the same kind of people he had when he was in the RAF. As the station manager, he used to meet Churchill if Churchill was flying through, or The King, or Roosevelt or anyone like that, so he moved in circles we had never even dreamed of, and that also from a childish point of view was quite exciting. You would say to him, we saw Mr. Roosevelt, or we heard about Mr. Roosevelt and he’d say oh I met him, you know when he passed through Casablanca, so, yes, he had a good war.

Neville Usher: One thought, about your schooldays again. Were your teachers mainly elderly?

Mike Gerrard: We had a very, very strange collection of teachers. Yes they were, as teachers went quite elderly, of course to us they seemed ancient. There were a number of youngish Irish teachers that came, that were not British citizens that came from the Republic of Ireland and they taught in schools in England as they weren’t of course called up because they weren’t British citizens, so we had a few young Irish teachers, but we also had some weird and wonderful teachers who disappeared at the end of the war, and I suppose quite rightly so.

Neville Usher: Possibly been brought out of retirement?

Mike Gerrard: Possibly brought out of retirement yes, possibly fired from public schools that kind of thing. Yes, that was one of the aspects of life.
We conducted a quite normal school curriculum during that time, and we, as you know a lot more attention was given to things like grammar and spelling and arithmetic in those days, so conducted a normal school curriculum.
The only funny thing about our school curriculum was right up to the time I left school, just a year or so before I left school, my school flatly refused to offer German as a foreign language. It offered French, it offered Latin, and that was pretty well all, but just about 1952 or so, a teacher was appointed to teach German and that was the first time the school offered German. We had an old clergyman who used to teach at the school and he taught Greek if we wanted to do Greek, but you couldn’t do German.

Neville Usher: No, how strange. I think now if you took a poll among the British, the least popular race might be the French.

Mike Gerrard: Oh, that’s possible yes.

Neville Usher: Yes, and when I talked to Helmut and Susie Schulenburg who live in Stratford, I said do you have any hostility and they said absolutely none, and they are German. But a Japanese friend of mine said one day, does it make any difference to you that I am not white English, and I said no, why should it, do you find any hostility? And she said oh yes, and I am surprised about that.

Mike Gerrard: There were people that we knew who had been prisoners of war in Singapore or Burma or whatever, and came back with huge hostility to the Japanese, they felt that they were treated brutally and they saw comrades die, they saw comrades die painfully, they saw comrades die of the torture and that kind of thing, and they resented and hated the Japanese for that for the rest of their lives.

I think it is instructive when you look back on the Second World War as a piece of history, to see that both the Germans and the Japanese defeated themselves by their own success, that the Germans were able to open second fronts in North Africa and in Russia and so on and by the time they had done that, they had, I don’t know, perhaps 250 million sullen and angry people under their control, and they had to maintain supply lines, they had to garrison, they had to do everything that an organization does to keep its troops happy and of course all the odds were against them. Now similarly with the Japanese, they are not a very large country, like us
and when they spread right the way down through south east Asia down to Singapore, practically to Australia, their supply lines were very difficult to manage.

Neville Usher: And China as well of course.

Mike Gerrard: Yes that’s right. But the Japanese also by virtue of their own success defeated themselves, because they couldn’t get supplies to their troops in the furthest reaches, frontiers of India or New Guinea or somewhere like that and the Americans were giving them hell in the Pacific, so they really didn’t stand a chance.
It's reflection on that has lead me to conclude that a war of conquest is just a losing battle anyway, because the people that you conquer never cease resenting and disliking the fact that they have been over-run, and you could never win their hearts and their minds. I mean we can see that with the curious hostilities that exist between ourselves and the Irish and the Scots, but there are reasons that you can’t fathom, that the Scots don’t seem to like you, and similarly with the Irish. But I have firmly come to the conclusion in my lifetime that the war of conquest is an absolutely futile activity.

Neville Usher: Were you at school when VE day was announced?

Mike Gerrard: Yes I was, you did ask me about VE day. Yes I was at school when VE day was announced, I think the most exciting day we had at school, and I mean this in every sense was D day, June the 6th of 1944, we didn’t know it was going to happen but it did, and when the teachers came in and told us that British troops had landed in Nantes, and we saw the newspapers in England, the Evening News and the Standard and then it really was exciting. There were odd little high points along the way, one was the sinking of the Bismarck, I remember that particularly because that happened quite early on didn’t it? And I remember my father coming in and saying that the Bismarck had been sunk, we had been chasing it all round the north sea. There were other events of that kind, Bismarck, Tirpitz was another one, but as far as the really big event I think when I was at school, was D day, and we read every newspaper, we listened to every news broadcast - of course everybody did, right through the war, but at the D day period particularly, we followed every bulletin that they put out, bulletins more or less every hour of the invasion, what had happened since, and so we listened to those things avidly.

Ah what else, yes, coming to VE day, that was a big event. We had had D day, then we had the lights going on in the streets and then came VE day when the Germans gave in, and there was, as you know, there was huge celebration in London, big parades and huge congregations of people on Piccadilly and Leicester Square and in front of Buckingham Palace and that sort of thing. We didn’t get involved in those events, but we watched them from a distance, we read about them in the newspapers, we listened to commentaries on the radio and we joined in the general pleasure that it gave.

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