My war as a teenager - Chapter 2

There were lots of troops stationed in and around Brighton. I lived in Preston and the Canadian Tank Corps had all their vehicles parked all up the Gallop in Preston Park and in the central reservation of Surrenden Road. They were billeted all around but the main place was a Jewish school (I forget the name of this) which was also in Surrenden Road, (the children of course had been evacuated). We made friends with quite a number of these lads and invited them to our home. In fact my mother (who had done a bit of bed and breakfast before the war) had one or two of their wives to sleep at our house and their husbands came as well during their off duty hours. I suppose being a teenager and ready to enjoy myself, the great pleasure for me was that Australian and New Zealand trainee airmen were billeted in the Grand and Metropole Hotels on the seafront. I loved dancing and when I wasn’t on duty for the Fire Service and the canteen I mostly went dancing at the Regent ballroom with my friends from work. There was a really good band there led by Sid Dean, who played in the style of Glenn Miller . It had a sprung floor and was a real joy to dance on. I spent many happy hours there and met lots of Aussies and Kiwi’s. Some, I let walk me home, if I thought they were trustworthy and a few I met up with again, perhaps to go for a drink or to the cinema, but their training time was comparatively short and there were no long lasting relationships. I think that these were the only nationalities based in the town, and only a few Americans, which were just visiting. There were one or two Polish - very polite and charming but we kept clear of going home with them as they had a reputation, albeit wrongly, of being rather passionate and perhaps being difficult to handle! The majority of girls, me included, never let any of the men go any further than a goodnight kiss and a cuddle — there was no contraceptive pill and we were too scared of the consequences to permit anything else and the majority of boys respected us for that and I must admit I think that the only man I ever had to get tough with was an English naval officer. We also had the ice rink and I used to venture there occasionally, although I was never a great skater — too scared of falling over and really hurting myself, but it was here that I met an Australian that was to become a more serious alliance. I took him home and he spent his leave with us when he was posted and eventually he asked me to marry him. At the time I was only 19 years old and I felt that I was too young to commit myself to a permanent romance and I was enjoying myself being fancy free, so I didn’t give him a definite answer and told him I would tell him my decision on his next leave.

This brings me to talk about casualties of the war. I suppose compared to a lot of people, as a family we were very lucky. I used to wonder how many of the air men I had met and danced with had survived. I remember one particular one who phoned me and asked me for a date when he came back on leave after a tour of operations and I could tell that he was in a real state of nerves and certainly wasn’t looking forward to going back for further raids. Then one night I was on duty at the canteen and a Canadian came in and I recognised his cap badge as being in the corps that was billeted near my house. I asked him if he knew Dave Smith, a dispatch rider, who I had gone out with quite a lot and had spent many hours in our house and he told me that he had been killed. Except for my school friend this was the first casualty that had hit home to me and obviously I was extremely sad. Then in February 1945 my father who was a foreman bricklayer on the railway was working on the Viaduct in Preston Rd, repairing bomb damage. He was wheeling a wheelbarrow of rubble across a wooden plank, when it snapped and he fell and the contents of the barrow landed on top of him. The fall was only four feet, but he was taken to hospital and although at first they thought that his spleen was damaged, in the end it was found that except for extensive bruising he had only broken some ribs. So it was an awful shock when one night (St Valentine’s Day to be exact), I was serving in the canteen when my mother walked in and said that the police had come and said that we must go to the hospital at once. They had offered to take her but she said she wanted someone with her. My sister was out so she had caught a bus and come down to me by herself! When we reached the hospital we weren’t taken to the ward the usual way but right underneath all through tunnels where the pipes were and finally led up to the sister’s office, where we were told that my father had died. The post mortem results showed that a small splinter of bone from his spine had entered the blood stream and pierced his lung. There had to be a coroner’s inquest before he could be cremated and we had to go to a special court where my mother was awarded the princely sum of £400 in compensation because my father was 62 and near retirement. It wasn’t considered that the Railway could give more than that. Furthermore, she couldn’t have it all in one go but had to have a small sum paid each month! Getting back to my exemption from call-up, I had been told that I reached the last one through doing a man’s job but now I got a further three months, because of all the trouble my father’s death had caused. Also it appeared to have affected my mother’s mind and she seemed incapable of doing anything herself. This exemption brought me up to the end of the war.

Then I was to receive another shock. About a month before the cessation of hostilities I realised that I hadn’t received a letter from Rex (the Australian that had proposed) for a week or more. I really didn’t think he was the type to dump me without letting me know so I plucked up courage to write to his commanding officer. I received a reply that they had been on a bombing raid (he was a rear gunner in Lancaster’s) and on returning to England they had flown into a hill in the fog in Lincolnshire near their base. Putting two and two together and knowing how few hills there are in Lincolnshire I think they must have been hit whilst on the raid and limped home only to crash before they reached base.

I think that these are all my memories of the war that would be interesting to other people, except of course the end of hostilities. We had been anticipating this for several weeks but even so it still came as a terrific surprise when it was announced. I remember going up to the Clock Tower with my sister and her friend Rita and seeing all the dancing and drinking there. We stayed for a little while but I must admit I couldn’t really let myself go, because I was thinking of everyone that I had lost and all those lads that perhaps hadn’t survived and I know my sister was thinking of her husband who had been abroad for many years so we went back home and had a quiet drink with my mother and aunt. Also I thought of all the terrible things we had found out about the camps in Poland and Germany. This was especially foremost in my mind as I had had a Czechoslovakian pen pal, who was Jewish, before the war and when the Germans invaded she had written and begged me to try and get her and her sister over to live in England. We spent a lot of time finding out how we could manage this but in the end had to admit failure and now I was sure she had perished in the Holocaust. Also one of my friends was an Austrian Jewess that had been brought over when that country was invaded and we knew that both her parents had died in the slave labour camps. This was on VE day but I am ashamed to admit that I really can’t remember anything about VJ day except that we had a day’s holiday. Of course we had learnt of all the atrocities that the Japanese had subjected our boys to in their prison camps and we were so glad that at least all this was now over. We could only think of all the poor souls that had perished in them and how hard it was going to be for the survivors.

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