大象传媒

My parents had only twenty-four hours in which to decide whether they should evacuate my sister and I away from Great Yarmouth to safety. On June 2nd 1940 we were put on a train to Nottingham and then on to Stanton on the Wold, which was to be the first of several different boardings during the war. We were very young, myself only four and a half years old and my sister two years older. We were both stunned by the enormity of leaving our parents to face an uncertain future. During that period of emotional and physical extremes my overwhelming memories are of constant hunger and the various eccentricities of our host families.

We were billeted with two elderly ladies who lived in a beautiful house with a large garden in Stanton on the Wold. On our arrival they sorted through our clothes bag with an air of disdain which was puzzling since my mother was a dressmaker and took a pride in our clothes. We were then marched to the kitchen and a meal of pease pudding was laid before us which we could not eat even though we were very hungry. We were both quiet and well behaved children but we were not allowed into their sitting room although their large dog enjoyed its comforts. Mother sent us a parcel of toys as we had been unable to carry them on the train, but mysteriously, they laid it on the top of their piano and forbade us to open it. We were too young to question their behaviour but were pleased when a kindly neighbour lent us a dolls cot with two dolls to play with. These two elderly ladies were ill at ease with us so we were moved on to our two different homes at Wroxham.

We went to stay with a rather fierce and strict North Country lady, who demanded regular habits, and on a daily basis we were ordered to sit on the outside privy until she was satisfied with our performance. I can still remember sitting there for long periods, searching the walls and floor for spiders and other insects. If, however we failed her expectations we were given a dose of sennapods .She must have ruined our digestive systems because we were constantly bilious. She punished us for any inconvenience this caused by beating our bottoms with a slipper. In those years there were several health problems such as scabies and head lice, and we developed the former. She tried to burn the spots off by placing a magnifying glass over them and directing the sun鈥檚 rays onto them. Naturally this did not work, so she resorted to tying our hands to the bed rails to stop us from scratching. Mother used to visit us occasionally and of course realised that we were desperately unhappy and undernourished and moved us on to our next home.

Our parents had to find us more suitable lodgings in Wroxham which took us to our last and happiest war-time home with a kindly country woman and her two daughters. Life was hard for her, there was little food and I was constantly hungry. We never ate real meat in the three years we spent with her, and had to make do with spam and corned beef like many others I suppose. She kept chickens in the garden but was forced to sell the eggs to increase her income, so we had to eat dried egg. My sister admits that she sometimes ate the chicken food as she prepared it because she was so hungry. Our hostess loved to sit roasting her legs by the fire in the evenings and entertained us by singing the popular love songs and music hall ditties, whist we danced around the furniture. During the summer holidays we all went fruit picking, and I ate as much of the free fruit as I could. Any money we made was put into our book-shaped post office money boxes. I can still remember the details of the planting in the garden in Wroxham, with its rickety hen house and pear tree at the bottom of the garden. The outside privy in the garden would overflow occasionally and we used to make a dash for the house when the sanitation man came to empty it. I was not unhappy at this time, and learnt much about nature by close observation.

Mother came to visit us as much as she could and occasionally we took a bus back to Yarmouth for a weekend in spite of the dangers. One day I heard the rumble of a plane overhead and looked up to see a large low-flying German bomber overhead. As I watched I saw it splay bombs out over the nearby town centre. My own Father was an eccentric who admired German music and constantly tuned in to Radio Germany to listen to their commentary. He was fascinated by all things German and liked to go down to the sea wall and watch their planes approaching, and on one occasion when the rest of the family were in our Anderson Air raid shelter he had to jump down into the sand dunes to save himself from a bomb explosion.

We were happy to return home to Great Yarmouth in the Spring of 1945 and in spite of our experiences and probably some suffering we gained a useful knowledge of the eccentricities of our fellow human beings at a very early age.

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