大象传媒

鈥淭his story was submitted to the Peoples War site by a volunteer from Adult and Community Education, Oxfordshire on behalf of Eileen Groom and has been add to the site with her permission. Eileen fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.鈥�

I was 5 years old when war broke out. I was living with my 2 brothers and my parents. We had just moved into a new house, a typical 1930s house, with bay windows and coloured lead lights, in a road of similar houses.

We children attended a village school four miles away. It was an RC school and it had about 250 pupils on roll aged 5 to 14. 14 was the school leaving age at that time.

We were not well off. My father was a bus driver, and my mother managed to get a job in the local grammar school, serving hot milk to evacuee children at lunch times to have with sandwiches brought from the homes where they were billeted. This job soon developed into the provision of cooked meals for pupils and staff. This I believe was how school dinners were first introduced.

All buses were camouflaged at that time and headlights were shielded at night. There were no signposts on the roads, nor destination boards on the buses so my Father had to know the routes. Some nights he never came home because he was driving troops around and on some occasions carried amunition. He was not called up as his was a reserved occupation just like the miners, who formed much of the working population in the area.

We travelled to school by bus. There was no heating on buses in those days. Travelling to school could feel very cold in winter. As I suffered with asthma my mother always made sure I wore my liberty bodice under my jumper. This was a white fleece garment with suspenders attached to hold up my woolly stockings. At 5 years of age I also wore a pixie hat. This was a hand knitted scarf sewn in such a way as to create a hood with long ends to tie under the chin. My brothers and I each carried our sandwiches and our gas masks to school. The latter were issued in a bag with a strap to go over the shoulder. At school we had regular practices putting on the gasmasks and learning to breathe through them. We also had air raid practice, when, at a given signal, we would hide under our desks until all was clear. We were not frightened as we were too young to understand. However, we were disturbed by an influx of evacuee pupils from Birmingham who came with their teachers. What a strange accent they seemed to have and they were much more boisterous than we country children.

We had very few resources in school. Exercise books and writing paper which was a drab flecked white colour. We used pens with nibs which we dipped into inkwells that fitted into little round holes in our desks. There were no coloured pencils and very few paints for art work. We mainly used wax crayons. Most reading books had black and white illustrations although I remember the black and orange pictures in the
Beacon Readers of that time.

We enjoyed our childhood in the country. We collected conkers and ignored ammunition dumps 鈥� (open corrugated iron sheds placed under trees along the verges of the country roads where crates of ammunition were stored).

In spring we collected bluebells and sticky buds and there were always jars of tadpoles brought to school, lining the high window sills of our classrooms. Sometimes we were hungry but we had milk at school every morning for which we paid two and a half pence a week. We could not remember the pre-war days of plenty and so we did not feel deprived.

We played traditional games such as: hopscotch, marbles, skip and top, farmers in his den, in and out those magic bluebells, oranges and lemons, hoops, cowboys and Indians, bows and arrows. We often went fishing with homemade nets, and brought our fish home in jam jars. Little girls played with tea sets, and boys would use a clothes horse covered with an old sheet to make a tent.

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