大象传媒

My name is Rachel and I was born in Stafford, Staffordshire, in January 1931.

I first wrote this memoir in 1995 for my granddaughter Sarah as she had been asked by her school to undertake a project 鈥渨hat happened to my grandparents during the Second World War鈥�. What follows is the result of my efforts to respond to this request. This memoir has also been used by grandson Dominic and most recently by 8 year old Amelia, for similar school projects.

I lived with my Mum and Dad and younger brother Clive. By the time the Second World War had started in September 1939 we had moved to Slough, which then was in Buckinghamshire and is now in Berkshire. I was 8戮 years old and my brother 5 years when war was declared. People were very worried about their families and what would happen. I remember going with my Mum to collect gas masks for our family; everyone had to have one and carry it at all times. The masks were not very nice to put over your face, but they would have saved our lives if the Germans had used gas. Fortunately we never did have to use them.

The other thing I can remember from those early days, was going with my Mum to an office in the Town Hall, called the Food Office. Everybody was issued with a book called a Ration Book. Inside there were pages of coupons which you had to give to the shop-keeper when you bought your food. The food was rationed so that every person would have the same amount and people with a lot of money couldn鈥檛 buy extra. In those days we didn鈥檛 have supermarkets, we had to go to the Grocer and he would measure the sugar, butter and cheese etc., on a pair of scales and wrap it up for you, same at the Butcher and Baker. We also went to the Fishmonger to see if he had any fish: this wasn鈥檛 rationed but we didn鈥檛 get fish very often as it was dangerous for the fishermen to go very far in their boats during war time. I remember that everyone also had to have an identity card that had to be carried at all times.

We never saw any bananas or oranges during the War as they had to come from foreign countries and had to cross the sea in big ships. Quite often they were blown up by German submarines: all the ships were needed for our soldiers and sailors to take tanks and equipment to places where the fighting was, like France, Holland, Belgium, Italy and so on.

Slough where we were living was very near to London. After the war started the Government said that people who lived in and around London and other large cities like Bristol, Coventry and Manchester, ought to send their children to the safety of the countryside. Hundreds of children were also sent in big ships over the sea to live in places like America until the War ended. Children who went away were called evacuees.

Our Mum and Dad thought it would be a good idea if my brother Clive and I could go and live with our grandparents (Mum鈥檚 mother and father). We had never stayed on our own with them before and had only stayed for a week鈥檚 holiday with Mum and Dad. Granddad and Grandma lived in a village in Shropshire, called Cherrington. It was a small place but very spread out. There were no shops, no churches, no hotels not even a pub. It was a long walk to post a letter, there being only one post box built into a wall in one of the buildings. If you wanted stamps or any little thing from a shop the nearest one was in the next village, Tibberton, 2 miles away.

The Post Office was part of the Postmaster鈥檚 house and it was run by Mr and Miss Pye. They were brother and sister. Miss Pye served behind the counter dealing with stamps, pensions and postal orders and Mr Pye delivered the letters and parcels on his bicycle around the two villages. The only shop was called The Stores and it sold quite a lot of different things. The church was All Saints. There were two public houses, The Stag and The Sutherland Arms. There was a tiny Butcher鈥檚 shop next to The Stag. The nearest town was called Newport and a bus used to come to the villages twice a week to take people to the market. The bus was always full because not many people had a car and petrol was rationed. I remember the Doctor had a car; most people had a bicycle. The Grocer and Baker had vans to deliver their goods to the people living in the countryside, like my Grandma. She used to give them an order one week and they鈥檇 deliver the next. The Baker used to deliver twice a week.

The school was in Tibberton. Clive and I had to walk 2 miles each morning and each afternoon 鈥� there were no school buses. In the summer we took short-cuts through the fields. My mother had a sister and she lived in Tibberton, we called her Auntie Margaret. Her husband was Uncle Arthur and their children were Kathleen and Barbara. Kathleen had just left school, Barbara was my age so we saw her at school. At the village school you started at 5 years and stayed in the same school until you left at 14. It wasn鈥檛 a big school and it was quite old. There was no hall and no kitchen. We used to take a sandwich each day and we sat at our desk to eat it. In the summer we were able to eat in the playground. Each morning at playtime, we had a bottle of milk to drink. Quite often in winter the top of the milk was frozen like ice-cream.

The toilets were in the playground, six of them built into one block. If it rained we got wet running outside. Auntie Margaret cleaned the school every afternoon when the children had gone home. She didn鈥檛 have any help and she did that job for a long time. After the War was over, the council built a kitchen onto the school so the children could have a proper cooked meal and Auntie Margaret was one of the cooks too.

She lived near the school in an old cottage with a thatched roof, two bedrooms upstairs and just one big room downstairs. There was no gas or electricity in the cottage. On one side of the sink there was a pump which when you pushed a handle up and down, water came out. Her lighting was an oil lamp and she did her cooking on a special fire called a range. She had an oven in the range where she could cook cakes and casseroles. She also had a stove that burned paraffin. There was a little brick building next to the house called the wash-house. Inside there was a boiler that you filled with water. You had to light a fire under the boiler with wood and coal and when the water was hot you could wash the clothes.

Clive and I used to walk to Tibberton on Sunday afternoon and would go to Sunday School in the church and sometimes we would go to tea at Auntie Margaret鈥檚. Uncle Arthur sang in the church choir. We often went to the evening service and heard the choir. After the War Auntie Margaret and Uncle Arthur were able to move to a different house that had electricity and gas connected.

My mother also had a brother, Tom, who lived at home with Granddad and Grandma. Uncle Tom wasn鈥檛 married at that time and he worked on the same farm as Granddad and looked after the cows. He ploughed the fields with a big horse pulling the plough. Granddad was the shepherd, so was always busy. When the baby lambs were born he quite often had some sick ones to look after. He would bring them home and feed them with a bottle like a human baby and then put them in the kitchen near the fire to keep them warm. Grandma and Granddad used to stay up all night sometimes in lambing season.

Each day we had to collect milk from a neighbouring farm in a special can with a lid on it to stop any dirt getting into the milk. We liked the farmer, he was called Mr Jones and he used to let us watch him and his wife milking the cows. They sat on a little stool with three legs by the side of the cow and then milked them by hand into a stainless steel bucket. The milk was put into a cooling machine, then into a big churn, which Mr Jones left outside the farm gate awaiting the milk lorry that collected churns from all the farms in the area.

Our grandparent鈥檚 house was bigger that Auntie Margaret鈥檚. It had three bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. Like Auntie Margaret鈥檚 house it didn鈥檛 have any electricity or gas, it didn鈥檛 even have a water pump. Outside the back door there was a well with a bucket on a chain. The bucket had to be lowered into the well by turning a handle on a big wheel and then winding it up again. The water was then tipped into another bucket and taken into the kitchen where it was used for cooking, or washing or even just to make a pot of tea. The buckets were made of metal and so were quite heavy when full of water.

In the kitchen there was a fireplace, table, a boiler in the corner like the one at our Auntie鈥檚 house, and a stone sink but no taps. On one of the walls Granddad had his shepherd鈥檚 crook and the special shears for shearing the sheep鈥檚 wool. On Mondays Auntie used to come and do all the washing for Grandma; it used to take all day. Can you imagine how many buckets of water were needed to fill the boiler and then to rinse the clothes afterwards?

The other room was called the living room and that had the fireplace called the range. Grandma did all the cooking on this fire: it had a big hook over it to hold the pots and pans. The kettle and frying pan were very big and had large circular handles that enabled them to be hung from the hook. Saucepans also sat on the fire. The range also had an oven for roasting meat and cooking pies. There was always wood drying by the fire and a big bucket of coal to make sure the fire didn鈥檛 go out. The Coalman used to come round to the house from time to time and bring sacks of coal from his lorry.

In the evening when it began to get dark, Grandma used to light the oil lamp. It was quite cosy with the fire burning. When we went to bed we had a candle in a candle-stick to light the way, of course we had to be very careful. During the War everyone had to have thick black-out curtains at the windows that wouldn鈥檛 let any light through. This was important so that no lights could be seen from the air. There were no street-lights in Tibberton or Cherrington, so it was very dark indeed outside.

Leading off the living room there was a small room called the pantry. It was about 5ft wide and 12ft long. There were shelves on the wall and about 3ft off the ground there was a wide shelf made from marble slabs. It went down all the length of one wall and there was a small window at the end. The pantry was always cold. Grandma kept all the foodstuff in there like milk, eggs, meat, cheese, butter and vegetables. There were no refrigerators so the pantry was very good. In the living room Grandma had a cupboard where she kept other food like sugar, flour, rice and sometimes biscuits. She used to keep it locked. Next to the cupboard was a corner where Uncle Tom kept his gun. He used to go out to the fields and shoot rabbits; Grandma would make rabbit pie. You might wonder, as there wasn鈥檛 a bathroom, how did we have a wash? We used to have a bowl of warm water and take it upstairs to the bedroom and get washed there. The toilet was the same as Auntie Margaret鈥檚, in the garden. We didn鈥檛 like to go in the dark or in the winter because it was very cold!

All the year Granddad looked after the sheep and he cycled everywhere, his shepherd鈥檚 crook fixed to the side of his bike. When it was shearing time, he had to get the sheep from the fields. He had his dogs to help because they had to be herded along the roads, back to the farm where the wool would be cut off. He usually had two sheep dogs, his main one plus a younger one that he would be training. The dogs were Welsh Sheep Dogs, mostly bluey grey or black and white. As the dogs were working dogs, we were not allowed to stroke them or make a fuss of them. They were not allowed indoors, they had their own brick built shelter with lots of straw. Only Granddad or Tom were allowed to feed them. Sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday, Granddad went to the farm and got a pony and trap and took them with him to the moors where he checked up on the sheep, made sure that they were alright and that there were none injured.

Granddad and Uncle Tom also had pigs in a sty. The baby piglets were lovely. They kept chickens as well, it was our job to go and collect eggs from the chicken house. The house also had a very big garden with lots of vegetables, especially potatoes. There was also a field with a stream flowing through it. We used to play in the field if there were no crops growing in it. Mostly we had to make up our own games. There were a few other children not far away so we did have some playmates. There was no television to watch. Granddad did have a radio. We called it a 鈥渨ireless鈥�. As there wasn鈥檛 any electricity, there was a big battery at the back to make it work. Granddad would only switch it on to hear the news about the War and then he would turn it off, so we didn鈥檛 get to hear any programmes like Children鈥檚 Hour.

During the harvest we used to go and help in the fields. When the wheat was being cut all the animals like rats, mice and rabbits, used to run out and some of the men would try to shoot them with guns and we all tried to catch the rabbits. We used to help with hay making and turning the hay over. I used to like working in the fields.

We used to write to Mum and Dad and looked forward to receiving a letter from them telling us how they were getting on. They sent us parcels for birthdays and Christmas time. Best of all was when they managed to come and see us. It took a long time to travel from London on the train. We were sad when they had to go back to their jobs in the factory.

During the time Clive and I were evacuated, Mum and Dad moved to Charlton in London. They both worked the same factory. It was quite an important factory as they made propellers for big ships and Dad had an important job as a skilled foundryman. The factories all along the river Thames in London were targets for the German bombers. Mum and Dad鈥檚 house was badly shaken by all the bombing. A lot of their windows were broken and they had to spend many nights in an air-raid shelter, wondering whether their house would still be there in the morning.

One day we had a letter from Mum and Dad telling us that they had to move once more as Dad鈥檚 factory wanted him to move to a place called Dukinfield in Cheshire. It was safer than London. I don鈥檛 think any bombs had dropped there but it wasn鈥檛 very far from Manchester which had been bombed. After they had moved and found a house to live in, they came to Cherrington to take us to the new house. We had to say goodbye to Auntie Margaret and Grandma and Granddad.

Mum and Dad went to the new factory and Clive and I went to a new school. It was a Catholic school, called St. Mary鈥檚. On Sundays we went to St. Mary鈥檚 church. The school was very old and a long walk from home. After about a year at Dukinfield I鈥檓 sorry to say we had a telegram from our Aunt telling us that Grandma had been ill and had died. She was buried in the churchyard at All Saints in Tibberton.

We lived in Dukinfield till the end of the War. The factory then closed and so we had to move again. We moved to Lee in south-east London. Dad went back to work at the factory in Charlton, it was quite safe now. I had just left school and Clive went to St. Winifred鈥檚 School, which was near to our home. When Clive was about 15 years old he left home and joined the Merchant Navy. He sailed all over the world.

In January 1956 our Granddad died and is buried with Grandma at Tibberton.

Uncle Tom still lives in the house at Cherrington and is an old man now. I鈥檓 glad to say that the farmer had electricity and water laid-on to the house. He turned the pantry into a bathroom and in the kitchen there is a fridge and a cooker.

Uncle Arthur died in 1976. Auntie Margaret is an old lady. She gave her house up and is living not far away from Tibberton in a residential home. Our Mother died in 1979. She had been very ill and we still miss her. Our Dad is 85 years old next month. He lives in North Devon in a residential home not far from Clive, who retired there after being in the Essex Police. He was a sergeant and in-charge of police dogs at Harlow. Lastly there is me 鈥� I am retired and the Grandma of Emma and Sarah, Matthew, Alexander and Dominic and our baby Amelia who is one year old.

Rachel Barlow
1995

Postscript 2001
Since writing the above memoir 7 year鈥檚 ago, Amelia has had two brothers, Jonathan (3陆 years) and Thomas who is just one. My eldest grandson, Matthew is now a Dad himself and has a lovely daughter Zo毛.

My father died 26 April 1995.
Auntie Margaret died 27 January 1997
Kathleen died 1June 2001
Uncle Tom died 19 September 2001

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