大象传媒

I started school during the Second World War when I was five years old in 1943. We lived at the time in the county of Surrey which is just south of London.

In the early part of the war many thousands of children from around London were separated from their families and sent to live in the country where it was considered to be safer from the bombing. They lived with people they did not know, in places they did not know and had to start a new life with different 鈥減arents鈥� and go to different schools. Some had happy lives and some not so much so. It was expected of the people who lived out in the country, usually in villages and farms, that they would take these children into their homes whether they had children of their own or not. Most of them were happy to do so, but unfortunately not all of them were and these people often gave their evacuees, as they were called, a hard and unhappy time. I am sure that this was only so in very few cases.

I did not become an evacuee because we had relatives who lived in the country in Somerset and some more in Dorset in the western part of England, and for some months at the height of the bombing, I went to stay with my grandparents down there. I was luckier than many children in this respect and my parents often came down to visit. I was only away from home for a few months on a couple of occasions unlike real evacuees who were often away for several years. I went to two different schools during that time and can remember occasions when we went out into the fields to pick rose-hips from the hedges as part of the war-effort. I am not quite sure what they were used for, possibly to make Rose-Hip Syrup which I believe was given to sickly children to help make them well. Everybody was expected to support 鈥渢he war-effort鈥� by doing whatever they could to help the country survive, even if by just growing their own vegetables, of which more later.

Where I lived then, in a cottage in Somerset, there was no electricity, heating, gas or running water. Water was collected from a pump across the road; lighting was from paraffin lamps or candles. Cooking was done on a paraffin-fuelled cooker or the 鈥渞ange鈥�; there was no heating as a rule apart from a paraffin stove in the main living room when it was very cold. Beds were heated with hot water bottles and blankets. The toilet was in a shed out in the garden. You sat on a wooden board with a hole in it over a deep pit, or later on this was changed for chemical toilets, like sitting on a big smelly bucket which had to be emptied when it was full! Still no water for flushing or anything like that. Baths were only taken once a week when a big metal bath was placed in front of the range (which was a built-in cooking fire, coal fuelled, rather like an early day version of an AGA cooker, but much more primitive. It was filled with hot water heated in saucepans and kettles on the cookers. This was usually on a Saturday night so that you were all nice and clean for church on Sunday. Sunday was a day of neither working nor playing. It was not unusual to go to church three times on a Sunday, so what with meals there was little time for much else apart from reading. You wore your best clothes all day on a Sunday too!

The only thing that ran off electricity in the house was granddad鈥檚 wireless set which worked with big special batteries called accumulators which had to be taken down to a shop in the next village every couple of weeks to be re-charged. Listening to the radio was also rationed because of the need not to run down the accumulators before you had heard all about the progress of the war which was given out on the news broadcasts. It certainly wasn鈥檛 just put on to provide back-ground music like it often is today. Milk was collected in a can each day from a dairy down the road in the village, a baker frequently called at the house as did a butcher (although wild rabbits were often caught to provide a nourishing and free meal), we had chicken in the garden for eggs and an iron-monger called each week with everything from saucepans to wicks for the paraffin lamps and of course the paraffin itself which we used a lot of in the course of a week.

Back at home in Surrey we, that is my parents and my home, (where we did have electricity and running water) had survived the 鈥渂litz鈥� which was a part of the war when the Germans tried to destroy London and the surrounding areas by heavy bombing, and a lot of the bombs fell around us as well. We had to spend a lot of time at night and often in the day as well, living in the Anderson Shelter which had been built at the end of our back garden, usually half underground. I remember spending many nights in the shelter listening to the anti-aircraft guns trying to shoot down the enemy planes before they dropped their deadly bomb load, as well as the boom of the exploding bombs which could easily be heard even from as far away as London itself. It was a very noisy experience and of course you never knew whether a bomb would fall on your house and destroy it or even do a lot of damage if it fell close by. Worst of all was the thought that maybe one would fall right on top of your shelter, but of course you wouldn鈥檛 know anything about it if it did because you would have been killed. Although I think that maybe we as children did not worry about that as much as did our parents. Quite often my father would be outside on duty during a raid because he was an Air Raid Warden and also in the Home Guard. Then we often shared the shelter with our neighbours.

Usually nobody stayed indoors during an air-raid and one night an incendiary bomb fell down the chimney of our house. Luckily for us it was a semi-detached house and the bomb went down the next-door half of the chimney and landed in their front room where it bounced onto the sofa and burnt a hole in it. Luckily my father was patrolling in the road outside and was able to get into the house quickly and put out the fire before it took hold. An incendiary bomb was intended to set houses and buildings on fire and they were dropped in great numbers from the enemy aeroplanes. They did a lot of damage when they landed on houses. They were not very big, about 35cm long and if they fell onto the garden or anything that did not burn they soon burnt themselves out. In the mornings we young lads would run around the streets collecting the burnt-out bombs. This was very dangerous because we might have picked up one that had not gone off and we could have been very badly burned.

We also liked to collect shrapnel and 鈥渨indow鈥� after an air-raid. When the anti-aircraft guns fired at the enemy airplanes more often than not they would miss but the shell would explode high up in the sky where it did little else but maybe frighten the pilots of the aeroplanes. However, the exploding shell would send little pieces of metal flying everywhere and these of course came down to earth again which is one good reason why you never went outside during an air-raid. These pieces of metal were known as shrapnel and they rained down out of the sky and were often about the size of your fist. The Air Raid Wardens wore metal hats so that they did not get hurt if some landed on their head. We would collect these pieces and it was 鈥済ood鈥� if you had more or bigger pieces than your friend!

鈥淲indow鈥� was simply strips of aluminium foil, about the size you would use to make Christmas decoration paper-chains from. The German aeroplanes would drop great bundles of it into the sky in an attempt to make it difficult for our Radar to be able to see them. We, the British, invented it and used it to great effect against the German Radar, but of course it was equally effective when the Germans used it against us! This was something else that we youngsters used to collect up in the morning after a raid.

One day I was in bed with Chicken Pox and my mother thought it was safe to go up to the local shops which were not very far away, so she would not have been gone very long. Unfortunately, whilst she was out there was an air fight in the area and I remember seeing from my bedroom an English fighter plane chasing a German one and firing its guns at it. My mother panicked and ran all the way back home from the shops. Nevertheless, I was alright!

When we were at school we used to have air-raid practices, rather like the fire-drill that takes place today in school when you all have to go outside and be counted. We didn鈥檛 go outside though because this could have been dangerous if it was a real raid. We went to the school鈥檚 in-door air-raid shelter which I remember was in one of the cloak-rooms which had a specially thick concrete ceiling in it which would have acted as a shield had the building fallen down as a result of a bomb exploding.

When an air-raid was about to happen (you could hear the German aeroplanes coming whilst they were still a long way off) a siren would sound so that everyone could run to a shelter or put on a steel helmet if you had one. On several occasions whilst at school we heard the sirens and we all had to go into the shelter, but I do not remember being in a serious raid during school time when bombs were dropped anywhere near us. Usually the worst air-raids took place at night.

In the early part of the war there was a great worry that the Germans were going to drop poisonous gas bombs on us and everybody, children and babies too, was issued with gas masks which had to be carried with you everywhere you went. You put them on over your head and they were intended to enable you to breathe whilst stopping the gas getting in. Luckily we never found out whether they worked or not! By the time I went to school, the threat of a gas-raid was lessened, but we still had to have a gas mask with us at all times.

I remember that the windows at school, like those at home too, had sticky paper diagonally across each pane of glass. This was to help stop the glass flying about so much if the windows were blown in by a near-by bomb. Lessons at school carried on much the same as ever although the teachers always had an ear open for the sirens.

We all had to observe a 鈥渂lackout鈥� at night time. This meant that no lights of any kind were to be shone in case a German aeroplane pilot could see it from the sky and drop a bomb on you or try to shoot at you. Cars had covers on their headlights with a very small slit of light visible, and even these were turned out if there was a raid on and enemy planes were about in the skies. All your windows at home had to be covered with thick black paper or a heavy blanket so that no light showed through and the Air Raid Wardens kept an eye open for anyone who showed any light at all. No street lights were allowed to be switched on even if there were any, which there were not in most villages and few towns even. No neon signs or lighted shop windows anywhere; life was a very dark affair at night time. At best you carried a small hand torch to see where you were going if you were outdoors, or you hoped for a clear moon-lit night.

It may be of interest to know that at that time when small children were taught to write in school, very small children only ever used a pencil (although one school I went to for a short while still used a slate instead of paper to write on!) but when you had learned well enough to start on 鈥渏oined up writing鈥� you eventually got to use a pen and ink instead. At quite what age I achieved that I do not know, but I do recollect that we had to master, first of all, a school pen which consisted of a wooden handle with a metal nib which you dipped into an ink-well on your desk. It was the job of an 鈥渋nk monitor鈥� to fill up the ink-wells each morning. You had to be good at hand-writing with these pens before you were allowed to use a fountain pen. A fountain pen was a grown-up writing instrument really in which you sucked ink up into a plastic tube inside so that you didn鈥檛 have to keep dipping it into the ink-well. I think I must have been nine or ten before reaching this stage although not many children owned a fountain pen in those days and it must have been around that time that ball-point pens were invented. We were never allowed to use ball pens in primary school (where you stayed up to age 11 in those days), it was considered to be very bad for hand-writing skills! (I think they were probably right!!). I seem to think that much the same applied in the first years at grammar school too.

After the war was over there were many parties and celebrations which, although perhaps not as technically advanced as the laser displays we may have seen for the millennium, would have at least matched them. Street parties were something else and were enjoyed by young and old alike. The war ended in the summer time so they were often held out of doors in the streets as well as in halls, playgrounds as so on. Everybody took part and enjoyed it all.

Food, or lack of it, was another thing that stays in the memory too. Most foods were rationed, that means that you could only buy a certain amount of anything, and that quantity was not very much. Anything that had to be brought into this country from overseas was generally unavailable. Whatever we had to eat was grown or made in this country which meant that what there was available was only in limited quantities. A lot of extra people, mainly women, were sent to work on the farms as part of the war-effort, to help grow and produce more food. We were encouraged to grow as much food as possible in gardens at home 鈥� everybody was growing vegetables in their gardens, and lawns were often dug up for this purpose. I do not remember ever going short of food or being particularly hungry, the ration of food was sufficient but there was no surplus, you rarely got 鈥渟econds鈥� and little was wasted. What there was was made to go as far as possible. At the age I was, I didn鈥檛 know anything else, so I didn鈥檛 miss what I had never had and as I was never hungry, as such, I did not feel at all deprived. One thing I do know is that like most parents would, mine never let me go hungry. If there was no food available, it was they who didn鈥檛 have anything to eat or went hungry themselves, or had just a very small amount, rather than let the children go without. The very small amount of butter per ration, for example was made to spread on many pieces of bread by putting it on and then scraping it off to go onto the next piece. This was known as 鈥渂read and scrape鈥�. Jam was something of a luxury because it was not considered 鈥渆ssential鈥�, so usually there was none, sugar to make it was rationed. Sweets similarly were in very short supply and I well remember my Grandmother making sweets from condensed milk, rather like a soft fudge, but very sweet! We didn鈥檛 have chocolate because the cocoa from which it is made had to come in from abroad. Unless you lived in the country, or kept chickens, eggs were in short supply and frequently scrambled egg was made up from a dried egg powder. Like most people who lived through the war, I well remember afterwards having my first banana, as soon as ships could bring such fruits in from overseas again. Food rationing was so severe that it lasted for many years after the war ended and I think that it was finally lifted altogether from the last items as late as 1952 or so.

To help people with their rations, or if it was difficult to make meals, there were community canteens providing basic meals, and I remember going to one of these near where we lived.

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