大象传媒

A few memories of my wartime childhood.
I was born in 1938 and lived in the countryside at Fairfield, near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. I remember the air raid drill at school, hiding under the desks and wearing my hideous Mickey Mouse gas mask ! My Mother worried about putting my baby sister into a clothes basket with a hood over it, which would require pumping by hand to give the baby oxygen. We had a galvanised air raid shelter in the garden, which, after the war, was turned upside down and I remember using it like a see-saw !
I remember the powdered eggs, the "Pom" potatoes, Spam and the ration books. We kept hens for eggs and Dad killed them for food - I could never eat them as they had been my pets !
I remember my Father taking me up to the top of a nearby hill in the blackout, and showing me the whole distant sky ablaze with fire : he said it must have been Birmingham which had been hit, but it wasn't - it was Coventry, much further away.
I remember my first banana : I made a terrible mess out of it, trying to poke out the seeds... I remember the knitted pixie hat I wore and the scratchy liberty bodice, the searchlights criss-crossing the night sky, the twin girls who were evacuated to us but who were so homesick that they returned home to their parents. I remember the smell of Monday wash day, with me turning the mangle, and the smell of baking bread - a treat for toasting great doorsteps of it on a long-handled brass fork in front of the coal fire.
Although we were at war, it largely passed us by out in the countryside : but we children did "our bit", learning how to knit socks for our soldiers and collecting old saucepans and metal objects for the War Effort.

Joy Jeffrey

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