大象传媒

The night before I was born my mother was left alone on the top floor of a maternity home in Newcastle upon Tyne while bombers flew overhead to attack the shipyards. For those of us born between the end of 1939 and 1945 war was a normal state of affairs and it was difficult to envisage what peace might be like, or even what 'peace' was. One of my earliest memories is of blackout shutters made of wood, wire and black paper being put up on the windows - it was just something that happened every night and you thought it had always been so. We lived in the country, remote from the war and only one bomb fell in the vicinity, leaving a crater which gradually filled with water and was the source of excellent frog spawn. I remember ration books and 'coupons' and screw-top bottles of orange juice which were provided for babies. We had few toys - these were made for us, like a little wooden milk cart I owned, or second hand, like a large teddy bear which had belonged to a child who had died. Many of the men were away and I vaguely remember a hazy figure in blue uniform, the father of a friend of mine, on leave, taking us for a walk along the road to the next village. He never came back. For war babies there were intense pleasures to be experienced when the war came to an end. The entire village gathered for a tea party in a barn, decorated with streamers, followed by children's races, to celebrate VE or VJ day but I don't think we entirely understood what was happening. The first banana I ever encountered was a small green thing with a musty taste which spent days ripening in a dark cupboard. A great event, years later, was the day that sweets came off rationing and the entire village queued up on Sunday morning to experience the freedom of buying more than two ounces each and exhausted the entire stock of the village shop.

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