大象传媒

I got married in the middle of the Blitz in 1940 and my husband was in the army. We didn't have a wedding cake and instead of a honeymoon, we went to the pictures to see Charlie Chaplin in The Dictator which was all about Hitler!

My daughter was born in 1942 and when she was about 2 years old, the doodlebugs started. I didn't want her to be frightened so I used to pretend it was a game and we'd dive under the table when we heard them overhead and I used to her, 'Listen and when the noise stops, you'll hear a bang.' And we used to wait for the bang and as soon as we heard she usd to laugh and say, 'More doodliebugs! More doodliebugs!' At that time I was on my own with her as my second child wasn't born until 1945, just 3 months before the end of the war. It was very frightening for me but you just learnt to cope - you had to.

A pregnant friend of mine was buried in the rubble when the house she was in was demolished by a bomb. The rescue workers managed to get her out but her baby, born the same time as my daughter, Jean, was severely deformed and never progressed well. She was still lying flat when my daughter was sitting up and she was blind. She died when she was 13 months old and I am sure her condition was something to do with the bombing.

I had an aunt who wouldn't go into the shelter until she had finished her dinner. Her attitude was that her dinner came first and that Hitler could wait!

When I got married, my mother said to me, 'It's nice to be married but don't have any children. They're a worry and an expense so don't have any.' I really wanted a baby and 18 months later I was pregnant. When I told her, she said, 'You bloody fool! I thought you had more sense!' She was so annoyed with me she didn't speak to me for a couple of months! So later in the war when I became pregnant again, I thought, 'I can't posibly tell her. She'll go mad!' So I went to the Town Hall and asked to be evacuated! I didn't tell the Town Hall people that the reason was because I was scared to tell my mother I was pregnant again! I just said I had a 2 year old daughter and I wanted to be out of London with her, and they sent us to Cumberland (now Cumbria). Mum guessed before I went - one day she looked at me and said, 'Have you gone wrong again?'!! I had to admit to it but she wasn't too annoyed as I think by then she had decided that I was a lost cause! On the day I took Jean home from hospital, my husband, Les, received his call-up papers and when Mum, who came to collect us, told me, I burst into tears. She told me to stop crying as I had a beautiful little baby, and Jean became the apple of her eye. So despite what she said, she was a doting grandmother to the children and as we lived near, we saw a lot of Mum, and she gave me a lot of support when Les was away so much in the army. It was quite hard being on my own with a new baby as I had had no experience of babies, but you coped - you just had to.

It took a while for us to adjust to all living together again when the war ended, especially as we also had a new baby, because we had become so used to being independent. We had been lucky though, that Les had not been sent overseas and we saw him quite often during the war, so he wasn't like a stranger to Jean. I think that made it easier for us than it was for some others.

I remember much later, after the war, the ceiling paper coming down when I was cooking. Our house had a kitchen/dining-room combined and when we had decorated, we had papered the ceiling. The room used to get all steamed up with the cooking, and one day I had just taken the Yorkshire pudding out of the oven when the paper fell down, right on to me and the pudding! I just turned the Yorkshire upsidedown so that it wouldn't get the ceiling in it and of course, it fell on to the floor instead! But we ate it anyway!

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