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Waving Dad goodbye

I lived in Newcastle too, my father was a Master Mariner he was away for the whole war, I hadn’t realised that he was in so many important places and convoys. My mother was absolutely fantastic, the war made no differences to us, we just carried on and were absolutely the same as ever. But she must have gone through a hell of a terrible time, as I do remember that we didn’t hear from our father a lot, and I do remember very much standing in the porch of our house watching him walk up the road and he would turn around and wave at the top of the road and then he would go on to the train, and I can remember that as absolutely awful moments, him going away. But similarly, the excitement when we had the telephone calls, we had a telephone in 1940 because my father could be anywhere and he would ring up and let us know that he was either going to come back or we were to go wherever he was, because if he was in Scotland, he used to go there a lot, Grechen Granech and we would go there and he would say that there was no time to get home so we would go. I can remember the trains being all black, and the blinds down on the train and travelling on the slow steam train. I know we were very young, so all the people in the compartment were soldiers, sailors, going to various places and I was always very rightly treated and spoilt rotten by all these young chaps. I can remember climbing up on to the ship on a rope ladder; I was quite an expert at climbing ladders!

I can also remember, when we were sent back, going back home and they were going off wherever the steward would always make sandwiches for us and they were always Spam. They were really lovely. I remember that particularly, and the other thing I remember was the house in our road that wasn’t occupied, so it was darker than dark, and as kids aged 7-9, we could play in the dark. We would go into the porch way and we would sing songs in the porch way for no good reason. I can’t remember any of the song names, but I remember one which went: ‘I see you by that cigarette glow but the picture fades too soon, which care if we’re without a light because you can’t black out the moon.’

Wartime school

Another war time memory is school, I don’t even remember if it was bombed, but we used to have to have classes of about ten in each others houses, and the teacher would come around, the teacher came to our house and the teacher was called Miss Foster, I can remember saying to my mother ‘don’t give Miss Foster a cup of tea because she only drinks Bovril.’ My brother was 6 years older than I was, he used to go to the grammar school by train, I remember what was our dining room converted into the room where we go if there was an emergency such as gas, it was a totally blocked up room. We never used it.

We were asked whether we would like to go to South Africa where we had relations and they said no. My father said ‘Stay all together.’ One of the places you never went was South Africa, anywhere else but not South Africa.

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