大象传媒

I was born MARY KING, in 1931, and so was eight years old at the outbreak of World War II. I lived in Walthamstow, East London, with my parents, a brother aged 6 and a sister aged 2. I was not officially evacuated, and remained in London for some months, experiencing the disruption caused by heavy bombing, by the closing of schools, and by the shortages and rationing.

At the height of the Blitz on London, friends of our family, who were farmers in Norfolk, offered to look after my brother and me in more peaceful surroundings. We stayed with them for about eight months, from the autumn of 1940 to the summer of 1941. It was hard to be separated from our parents and little sister. They came to visit us very occasionally - petrol was rationed, so travelling was not easy, and wartime duties like fire-watching for home, shop and church made life complicated, especially for my father.

There were many contrasts between life in London and at Wilby Hall that we had to get used to. For instance, in Walthamstow we lived in a semi-detached house, with electricity, gas and piped hot and cold water. Now we lived in a large farmhouse dating back to Elizabethan times, the rooms lit by oil lamps, taking lighted candles with us when we went to bed. We washed using jugs of cold water in our bedrooms - in winter we sometimes had to break the ice first! Once a week we bathed in a metal hip bath in a small room heated by an oil stove - no central heating in those days!

In the kitchen the sink was large, shallow and made of stone. Water was pumped into it, and I remember that once a frog landed in the washing up! There was no flushing toilet - we used a privy out in the farmyard - a very cold outing in the winter to a little building which housed lots of spiders, to my horror! Otherwise chamber pots were in every bedroom.

It was a lot of work every day for the farmer's wife and her two grown-up daughters to trim and prepare the lamps and candles, light the fires, do the washing in a large copper, and bake on a range or in a brick oven in the corner of the kitchen.

We had been used to going shopping with our mother in Walthamstow, buying food at the grocers, greengrocers, bakers and butchers, etc, for supermarkets didn't exist then. But now, most of the vegetables were grown in the large garden at the farm, and other goods were brought once a week in a van driven by Mr Bloom. This was a highlight for us, because we could then spend our 6d a week pocketmoney on such things as a gobstopper, liquorice bootlaces or jelly babies. At this stage in the war sweets were scarce, but not yet rationed.

On Saturdays, or after school, and in the holidays there was so much to see and do in the fields and woods . . . wild flowers to identify; berries to pick, birds' nests to discover, tiny fish in the stream, rabbits to chase, and the farm animals to learn about. Our favourites were the cows - we used to round up the herd and bring them in for milking, and spent hours in the cowshed. Charlie, the cowman, was very patient with us, explaining what he was doing and letting us "help" in various ways. I particularly enjoyed giving buckets of milk to the calves.

On wet days clambering over the sacks in the ancient granary, playing hide and seek, was great fun. This building is now a listed structure, and has recently been restored. Harvest-time was very special - the farmer had an early type of tractor and binder. Sunny autumn days were spent watching, helping to make the corn stooks, riding high on the wagons pulled by shire horses, going from the fields to the stackyard. The arrival of the threshing machine was very exciting, as the steam traction engine pulled it along the narrow lanes from farm to farm. We got covered in dust as we stood around as close as we dared, to watch the threshing process.

All this was very different to the busyness of London streets, or the small garden or nearby recreation ground where we used to play, and we were delighted! I particularly remember the winter of 1940/41 which was exceptionally bitter. The snow drifted and lay on the ground for weeks, making our two-mile walk to Eccles School a great adventure. We slid along the icy patches in the lanes, had snowball fights galore, and, one evening, built a snowman in the middle of the lane so that the milk lorry could knock it down in the early hours of the next morning! We arrived at school with almost-frozen hands, and were amazed when our friends told us to plunge our hands into the icy waters of the tank in the playground, as the quickest and surest way of warming up our fingers! It worked!

There were only two classes in the school, the children's ages ranging from five to fourteen, with just two teachers and no administrative help, as far as I can recall. There had been another teacher, Mr Brown, but he was called up to serve in the R.A.F. He promised to fly a Lysander over the school and wave to us one day, when we sadly had to say goodbye to him.

As we walked to school each day, carrying our gasmasks, of course, we would meet up with friends en route - mostly children from other farms, but also Barbara, who was evacuated from London, like us. Her father was serving in the Royal Navy, and so she seldom saw him or had news from him. For a time there was an anti-aircraft gun emplacement at the end of the village, just by the church, for sometimes enemy planes would fly low over the East Anglian countryside, on their way back from bombing big cities. One day we had to dash for the ditch under the hedgerow, for a German gunner was machine-gunning us as we came home from school. On another occasion a few bombs
were dropped in the fields of the farm next to ours. Many of the farm workers were also members of the Home Guard, and were always alert for anything or anyone suspicious in the countryside, sometimes aiming at these low-flying aircraft with their rifles, in hopes of scoring a hit!

All this sounds very exciting - but those long months were difficult for everybody, whether in city or countryside. News on the radio (no TV, of course) was grim. One day we heard Walthamstow mentioned as having suffered a particularly bad bombing raid. My brother and I wondered if our family was still alive, or whether our house was still standing.

I have two bundles of letters which are very precious to me. One is of letters written by my parents to us - with news about our sister, our grandparents, our cat, how many ceilings had come down, or windows shattered. Lots of reminders to us to be good and helpful (!), and always expressing the hope that soon we would be reunited as a family.

The other bundle I discovered in my father's desk just after he had died, twenty years ago. He had put them together in an envelope labelled "Love letters from Mary". They were the weekly letters I had written in pencil (no ballpoint pens in those days!) and so are rather faded by now. I wrote about many of the things 1 have already described, but often asked anxiously how they were, sent messages and drawings and stories for my sister, reported on my piano practice, and sometimes complained about my brother, who never wrote letters home! One special event I described was listening on the wireless to Children's Hour, when Princess Elizabeth, who became our Queen, spoke to the children of the nation. This was a great encouragement to us - for all the people in Britain, including our beloved Royal Family, were going through very traumatic times.

We often heard bad news about people we knew - killed in battle somewhere, or being taken prisoners of war, or losing their homes and all their possessions in bombing raids, or just "missing" in action and never found.

My brother and I were only young children, but we grew up quickly, as we learned to cope with all these happenings. We learned to care about other people, and in turn received much care and support from others, especially the farmer and his wife who had so kindly welcomed us into their home.-

Everyone contributed to the war effort in some way, whether children or adults. Even at nine years old I used to go to a meeting of women and girls from the village, held at the Vicarage. There we knitted warm garments for servicemen. With much struggle, using four knitting needles, I made a pair of thick navy-blue woollen mittens, which was sent to a sailor serving in the North Atlantic when the V-boats were inflicting heavy casualties. I've often wondered what happened to him. Did he survive the war and return to his family?

I thank God for those months living in the country. It was a very formative time in my life, which influenced me greatly. I learned so much about natural history and the rural way of life. I discovered the joy of writing and receiving letters. I learned to take responsibility; to enjoy all kinds of crafts and hobbies; to be thankful for the simple pleasures of life; and to value life itself as a very precious gift to be used wisely.

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