大象传媒

When I can actually remember when war broke out. I was in London in No 5 Highland Avenue, my father brought that house and we moved into it before my seventh birthday. We sat in the front room and my mother was very stressed, very apprehensive. I was sitting on the settee beside my Irish grandmother, they had brought her over because of her 13 children. We then heard Chamberlain鈥檚 voice on the radio. My father鈥檚 face fell and my Nan still kept saying she was very positive and I can鈥檛 remember very much about that particular day. The war came and life went on, my father had his own business as an electrical contractor. He was exempt, he had a knee injury but because of his qualifications he was very necessary, my mother carried on with her housewife duties, my father found it very hard to maintain his business. People were afraid to have work done because of the blitz. He turned to the government to help with ammunitions. He would borrow my bike if his car didn鈥檛 work. He was contracted. My mother found the war terribly hard to tolerate because she had a difficult childhood. We remember the big things like air raids, we used to go into our neighbour鈥檚 Anderson shelter, it was very primitive and things like spiders they were part of our family. My mother and Pat Nigh would sit on their deckchairs, my dad and Reg would stand outside, you could hear the thud of the aircraft. My mother would call out now and again to come in. They were watching the bombers. We had several landmines drop near us. It affected me, one of my schoolgirls lost her life. People were very positive in London. The London spirit is still there and I miss it, we have a different attitude to things. I was the only child. I carried on going to school, my mother was unique, she had this fear of being bombed in the house we lived in. During the blitz she would run out of the house and go into any neighbour that would let her in because my mother was Irish, everybody loved her. I wasn鈥檛 terribly keen of being dragged on, I had my homework to do. From my own part of it, the two times I felt the most terror was one when the doodlebugs started because you would hear it and then it would cut out, most of the time you could see them but some were out of view. They had a particularly eerie sound and the second thing that caused me most the distress was the V2 and that landed with this almighty 鈥渃rump鈥�, it travelled faster than sound. I found it quite horrendous and we did have some dreadful things happen around us. I believe it was a Packard Car Factory and it took a direct hit, some of the workers were burnt alive. The opposite of that were the funny things, the things that had been blasted.

My schooldays were good because I went to a convent, we used to spend most time in the chapel and say our little prayers. The one time I became hysterical was a rocket when it dropped on the Western Avenue. All our windows shuddered and I had this vision of it having been my own home and my parents buried under debris. I supposed it was the tension that we built up inside. I left school at 17 and I wasn鈥檛 academic. I was a very naughty pupil. My mother when things got really hairy, she came down to the convent and spoke to the Reverend Mother she would say for us to come any time for comfort. In the middle of the night my mother would get more frightened about a mouse scurrying across the floor.

When the bombing in London was at his intensity in early 1941 my dad decided then to get my mother and I out of London. We lived in the centre of it all. With one of my mother鈥檚 friends, I remember us being put on the train, which way we went I cannot remember. Clapham Junction was on fire, from there I assume we went to Paddington, we ended up in Axminster, Devon. We went to a village called Tytherley, I can see my mother walking up the path of this lovely house and asking the occupants if they could help us. It was a Mrs Pratt and she immediately said come in my dear. It was a beautiful house, her husband had a garage next door but he also had a gravel pit somewhere in that vicinity. Tytherley is actually in Devon between Chard and Axminster. I think there was just a pub. Mrs Pratt kept us there for about two to three months. She treated us like our dearest family. We used buses, they were not important things in those days. Mrs Pratt was pregnant and she was getting nearer her baby so it was obviously very amicable, she and my mother talked her over. Our next abode was a farm and it was a turning off the main Tytherley road and it was on the way to a village called Chardstock and it was a Mr and Mrs Beer. Farmer Beer was a lovely man. He used to call me the 鈥減urdy maiden鈥�. They were so kind, so warm and so caring, that was one of the happiest times of my life. I loved the farm, I love animals, I have no fear and Farmer Beer took a shine to me and he would wake me up in the morning and he would tramp me through the field picking mushrooms and we would wash them and cook them in butter. We shared our meals with the farm workers. It was fun living, I loved it. I helped out on the farm, I milked a cow, I had one or two mishaps and I also had a nasty scrape, I went off with one of the farm workers and we were going up this narrow lane, it was one of these carts that had a dropped down back with a shire horse. He was one side of the horse鈥檚 head and I was holding the bridle. The whole cart went over me, I was covered in mire and muck, I didn鈥檛 realise then I had badly damaged my ankle. He took me into a field and he rinsed off most of the muck. I was then patched up and put to bed waiting for the doctor. I find it sad now that I have got nobody to talk to about it. We were on the farm probably the best part of a year, they had another farm which was nearby which their sons ran and that was actually the real working farm and it also had a cider press. I was found in a ditch once, I was drinking this cider. I believe we were found sleeping soundly in a ditch.

From there because my schooling was in danger, we were not very welcome in the school. We were bullied, we decided we needed to live nearer a school, the next abode was in Chard, it was a stone cottage. I spent probably eighteen months there and I went to the convent in Chard which was called Hilders, it is no longer there. I used to travel on a milk float, otherwise I used to walk or cycle. The nuns would give me breakfast, I loved that little cottage. We had open fires for which we had to make sure we had logs, we had no heating only a couple of old paraffin lamps. We shared the cottage with a French woman, Amelie, she had no children but she had a little West Highland. Some mornings the milk would be frozen so we had to unfreeze it on the Prima stove. The cottage was very primitive, I could walk up the lane my mother was never afraid to send me out. To me it was a different life. That is what I find sad so many triviliarities have now become part of our life. I was on my own, no other children in the village. When I married for only four years, the big problem for me is being housebound. The fact that I use naval language when things go wrong. The hardest thing of all were the chilblains. The cold winter nights in that cottage, we would have every coat. We used to have to push against the door past the snow. You had time to listen if the sun was shining or if a bird was singing. I had an old bicycle, when the weather was fine, I used to cycle up the lane, there was a manor house up the lane with an lady who was disabled, very beautiful young woman, I was always a nosy parker. I had been picking flowers and she asked me if I would pick the daffodils for her.

Dad used to come down when he could spare the time but I do remember by dad coming down. I remember once Amelie鈥檚 husband came down, I believe it was Christmas. He was in the Merchant Navy. I can鈥檛 remember what we had to eat but I was grateful because we were on rations. We came back to London when Dunkirk was mentioned on the TV. I can remember the miracle of all those boats going out and bringing those exhausted soldiers off the beach. There was no change in our old house. Our street was more or less intact. Ours was only a short road, very hilly. The old milkman still delivered on a horse cart. The horse was called Rosie. It must have been after I was 12 onwards. I returned to the convent in London which fortunately was still there. I was coming up to higher classes. The government sponsored restaurants. I think you paid a shilling you got the main meal and pudding. If you had another penny you could have a cup of tea, it was like a community restaurant. The war must have finished when I left school. I remember VE days, I remember the street parties. That is what is missing today, the community spirit. Mothers would be all night making all the food for the street parties. That spirit has gone and I find it rather pathetic now. I was short on clothes. I used to make cami-knickers out of parachute silk. My mother used to make nighties. I also made a black circular skirt and my mother made me a blouse with gold lace. We were short of things but we improvised. We would have all these lovely patterns. I would not swap one hour of today for any part of my past life. I have had a lot of sadness but I like to remember the sad things as well as the happy things.

It would have been Dunkirk and my mother was bringing me back from school and we were walking up Greenford Avenue, my school was on the other side of the station and this man must have come off the train, he was in uniform, he was covered in mud and blood and he could hardly drag one leg in front of another. He looked as if he was just about to give up the ghost and I can remember my mother taking pity. It seems to me we are losing our history. I think there have been too many changes in our generation.

I have always lived in London, I used to get round London a lot during the war. You never felt threatened or afraid to go out on your own. We would look around St Pauls. I missed my sweets when rationing came. We knew somebody from Lyons, the main confectionery factory, we had some of the reject sweets. Sweets rationing was one of the last items to come off the rationing.

I worked in a chemist, I used to make suppositories, tablets. My boss used to order this paper and he had a guillotine and he would cut them certain ways and each square used to fit a certain medication bottle. If I didn鈥檛 do it properly he would undo it and make me do it again.

My father was in the Home Guard and he had a rifle of some sort, he kept it at home in the garage. He had a khaki uniform. My cousin, she was up on a holiday from Bournemouth and it was a summer evening and my father was cleaning the rifle and I could hear the sound of this gun and he must have pulled it back and it snapped and it trapped his fingers. Apart from that, that is the only thing I can remember. They had men patrolling the streets with the green hat with a 鈥淲鈥� on them. When we had the blackouts they would come round and say there was still a glimmer of light showing. I can remember stirrup pumps and buckets of sand everywhere. The trains and buses, they had green mesh on them and were very hard to see the station they were going to. The mesh was fixed with very strong glue. It isn鈥檛 until you talk that you remember. I travelled on the underground but never stayed in the underground. Life went on as normal in the city. We had a Morrison shelter in the dining room, so the table must have gone somewhere. They were about six foot long and they were steel and there were girders on the bottom with two inch caging and when you were inside you fixed up the last narrower piece, my mother would never go in it. My mother had claustrophobia. I do not remember ever using it. I may have done but it was the Anderson shelter I used more. It was a better attitude then because we used to share next door鈥檚 Anderson shelter.

My mother had every ailment that ever existed and she lived to her nineties. She had a gen-aspirin bottle and it was a company those days. They were a little round bottle and you could buy twenty tablets. Mother kept these gen-aspirin, she had an empty bottle and kept 鈥渁 piece of the crater鈥� in it. When a bomb dropped, my mother would panic and with that my mother picked up this bottle and would drink it. My father used to laugh over that for years to come.

I have no regrets, there are a lot of things that happened in my life, I would change the structure of my life. I would love to go through all my photographs and keep them as history. I think all these projects are good because we need to keep all our history for others to learn. I think it is sad because we have lost our sense of value.

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