Memories of growing up in Swindon and Bristol

My name is Patricia Ashwell Griffiths. My father was of Welsh descent. I was born on the 18th September, 1926, 8 years after the first World War ended. So my early childhood was bound up with that war. My grandmother brought me up, (my mother died when I was 3), and we came back from Hampshire, where I’d been born, in Porchester, to the farm in Wiltshire, where her family lived. And my grandmother was soaked with grief. She’d lost my mother, her brother, who’d been killed just after I was born, and they’d lost a brother and a brother in law in the war. Lots of my memories before THIS war broke out are of Armistice Day, and talking about how Bruce was missing at Gallipoli and how they’d never found him, and what had happened to him. Bruce was my grandmother’s.. there were 11 of them and most of them still at the farm.. this was the brother.. the youngest, her next brother down, Bruce. Before he went, he said ‘I won’t be coming back Nell’, which was my grandmother’s name, and I said ‘Why did he say that?’ and she said ‘Well, he showed me a mark on his chest’ and I said ‘What was that mark?!’. I mean the whole thing really upset me. I suppose I’d lost my mother and this missing person.. and so, the war was really present with them, because my grandmother had also lost a brother in the war at Paschendale, and also my mother had been a red cross nurse. I’ve still got her album full of autographs and pictures and drawings of soldiers in the First World War.
So when I realised that we were going to war again, I was absolutely terrified. And I remember that my father came home, which in itself was rather unusual, because when my mother died, he went to work in Brighton, and then in Birkenhead, and was up North -coming home very often, but we never knew when, though I always heard from him on my birthday. And he came home that weekend, and made the blackouts for the house, and sorted out the curtains. And then I remember sitting in the drawing room, listening to the broadcast that Mr Chamberlain made about the war. And when he said that we’re now at war with Germany, I was just absolutely terrified. And I didn’t like to say anything about it. I thought we were going to be gassed, because so many of my friends—Desmond Morris who wrote the Naked Ape, he was a relative of ours- his father had been badly wounded and was an invalid, and when we played we had to be quiet because he was in a wheelchair and wrapped in rugs and that.. The vicar had been gassed.. so I thought of gas. And we’d heard about Warsaw and the bombing, and I thought, you know, war’s declared, instantly, everything will happen at once.
On my birthday, I went to a farm, a close friend of ours, because all the farmers stuck together, and most were our relatives anyway. By then we were living in Swindon. We moved into Swindon when it was time for us to go to school, because Nan didn’t drive, and living out on the farm would’ve been hard on her brothers and sisters, so we had a house in Swindon, and I used to go out and visit friends.
I went to stay on a farm in Wiltshire for a week, and when I went home, I’d lost all my fear of the war and throughout everything that happened afterwards, I never once was afraid. It was as if this wonderful- The Land matters, and Food matters.. took over this terrible fear of the war, and put it all into perspective..
Initially, I don’t think things changed much for us, after the outbreak of war, apart from being terrified, as I’ve just said. Life just sort of went on. It was what they called The Phoney War. And they hadn’t really got into rationing, although things were rationed. The thing I hated was carrying my gas mask everywhere. And at some point, I don’t know when, the first air raid warning happened. It was in the middle of the night. My grandmother got us up, my brother and me, and we had to put our gas masks on, which, being asthmatic was terribly difficult. They were hideous things. And go under the stairs. And we stayed there for ages. And I said ‘well, whether it’s the all clear or not, we’ll have to come out, and I took my mask off and said ‘Nan, we’ll HAVE to come out’. And out we came, and found we’d gone under the stairs with the all clear. We’d slept through the warning, and we didn’t know! So I said, ‘Right, we don’t go under the stairs again!’
But I suppose really that I felt like I had to look after Nan, because she was quite elderly, she was my grandmother, and she’d got the two of us.
So, life went on, school went on, and then we started hearing that things were going wrong, you know, and that the war wasn’t going our way, and everything.
The next real memory I have was actually after the Battle of Britain, because, again, we weren’t really affected by that, although a friend of mine was to marry a Battle of Britain pilot before the war was over. But I came home from school one day, and I was at a private girls school in Swindon then, I suppose I was about 14 because it would have been 1940. And our neighbour, who was very nice, my grandmother depended on neighbours quite a lot, was in there talking to my grandmother and I remember I came in with my brown and yellow blazer on, I threw my satchel on the table, and they were talking about packing up and leaving, and how they’d have to go on the road. And I said ‘Are we going away?’ and Mrs Taylor said ‘Yes! Yes! Of course we’re going away. We shall be invaded, you know. They’re expecting an invasion..’, which they were, actually. ‘..at any time’. And I said ‘Well, where are we going, and how will we get there?’ ‘Oh, we’ll have to leave everything behind, except what we really need and pile it on and set off’ Because none of us had cars, there was no petrol then. And I said ‘Where are we going?’ She said ‘To the mountains of Wales, of course! Everybody goes there when we’re invaded. The Romans never got there, and we’ll have to go there.’ And I said ‘But it’s different now with planes and all that sort of thing’, you know parachuters, and that sort of stuff, that we’d heard about. But luckily we never had to go. And I never thought about it til about a month ago. I was talking with some friends and they were talking about things that had happened (during the war). And I suddenly realised that here I am thirty or forty years later in the mountains of Wales. And of course that got me interested in Welsh history, and the whole history of people coming to Wales. But I remember thinking at the time, that it wasn’t a very bright idea. So, luckily, we didn’t have to do that.
Every year my father wrote to me. And he wrote to me in September 1940 for my birthday, and I still have that letter. He says if the Germans invade us, we’ll drive them into the sea. He was obviously writing to make us feel better. He had a bad experience towards the end of the war. He couldn’t- he was very upset because he was too young for the first World War, and he’d been dragged back by his father when he joined at 15. And then he was too old for the second one. Because by then he was unfit with his eyes. He tried even to join the American Navy. I said ‘You must be mad!’ you know, ‘They’re the pits, the American Navy!’. But they didn’t want him either.
When he was in London, he started to work in aircraft factories in Bristol. And I said ‘You don’t know anything about aircraft’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘But by the time they do find out, I’ll know enough to get the next job.’ But he came home one day, and he was shaking. And I said to Nan ‘He’s been drinking’ and Nan said ‘Oh, I don’t think so’ And I said ‘Well, he has.’ And I said to him ‘Have you been drinking all the time you’ve been away?’ and he said ‘No’ and wouldn’t say any more. But after he’d gone, my grandmother said my father didn’t want to tell me and Peter, my brother, because he didn’t want to upset us, but he’d been on a bus that had been hit by a flying bomb in London that day and a lot of people had been killed. And he’d said to the rescue people ‘Can I help at all?’ and they’d said ‘No, no,’ they said, ‘Go. If you’re alright- just go.’ And he said ‘I just walked through London to Paddington Station..’ to get the train and came to us- came home. So I felt awful of course, when she said that.
Then I went away to school in Bath, because I passed all the exams necessary by the time I was 14 and they couldn’t keep me on at the little school, where I’d been. By that time, of course, living in Swindon, we’d lost a lot of our connections with farms, we were sort of in Swindon. Swindon was always due to be bombed. Everyone would say Swindon would get bombed. But it didn’t. But when I went to school in Bath, I was a weekly boarder, sometimes staying at weekends, and Bath DID receive heavy bombing. It was very different from Bristol. Bristol was a nightmare when we got there. But Bath HADN’t been bombed. But — although we didn’t know it- but the admiralty was situated in Bath. So they bombed all the outskirts of Bath, luckily, in the school holiday, my school, Bath High School, was hit by a land mine. Nobody was in it, fortunately. Not even the caretaker. It made life very very difficult. And that was a difficult part of the war. And we all had to go back to school. That night, the usual warning in Swindon, and one of my brothers came in the morning, and he said ‘It was Bath last night Pat’ and I said ‘Oh dear!’, and he said ‘I’m going to go down on my motor bike and look for your school’ and when he came back, he said ‘Your school’s gone’. So we (boarders) went and had to live with teachers. And the teacher we lived with, their house had been very badly bombed, and their daughter was covered in nettle rash from being machine-gunned running down the garden. So they’d moved into another house, that’d been bomb damaged, so most of it was shut off. It was quite spooky, you know.. you couldn’t go through some doors into some rooms, because the roof was missing.
And while we were there, the grand daughter of the emperor Hailie Selassie- who’d been driven out of Ethiopia by the Italians- was in school with me. Her name was Ida - and ever so nice, she was. And she was the first dark person — I’ll put it that way- that I had ever seen.
And the emperor was very nice too. And they must have had some connections.. well I knew they knew some friends in Swindon that I knew, because his daughter, the princess, came to open the fete for us. And the mayor introduced her, and he said ‘I have the honour to hintroduce ‘er royal ‘ighness, the Princess of.. ‘ and we all held our breath.. ‘Habysinnia’!
But trying to think back, I don’t think we were soaked in the war, like people who actually WENT to war were. And we didn’t know what they’d been through until much later, when they came home.
On the farms they did have Prisoners of War- Italians and Germans. And at my friend Ruth's place, they were very friendly with their Italians. They had two Italians. And they lived in the barn opposite the back door, and they got all their food from the farm. And when my brother went out there, because he was a year younger than me, and when he was about 16 or 17, he was a good shot. So he went out, and the farmer, Mr Archer, asked if he wanted to go and get rabbits with one of the POWs. And they were gone for quite a long time. I remember Pete came back with the rabbits. And my brother said to me that night ‘Do you know Moll? I had a few bad moments this afternoon.’ And I said ‘Over what?’ and he said ‘Well three fields down, away from the farm, with an Italian prisoner of war, and me with a gun…’ He said ‘I began to think, well what if he isn’t as nice as he seems?!’ and I thought, well I could understand that, he was taking a risk really. But when they went back, when the war was over, they wrote to ask if they could come back and work as farm labourers again. Which gave you some indication as to what Italy must have been like.
And then I went to Bristol University, and on D day I was in Swindon, because it was in June and I was back home, shopping for my grandmother, and I went to the old town station, on my way to the shops, and all the road was lined with ambulances, and very few trains came into the station at all. And I thought ‘What’s going on?’. I went and did the shopping, and I came back, and again there were ambulances, and stretchers, and trains coming in all the time. And there was an American hospital that they’d built on Rawton Hill, just outside Swindon, and they were all going to Rawton. And I asked somebody ‘What is it?’ and they said ‘They’re bringing them all back from France- the casualties.’ And I went back to my grandmother, and I said ‘I’ve got to do something. There are ambulances pouring out of Swindon.’ So I joined the Red Cross, the 46 Wiltshire Battalion, and I was trained to do that. But I had to finish my university degree. I’d gone there (to University) at 16, in 1943.
We had the worst bit to do- bed pans, clean the wards, bandages that were SAFE- you know. And I was told that the wards HAD to be cleaned every day. And I wasn’t paid- I was a volunteer. And I’d joined up, and said “I’ll come in every day, from 9 til 6, apart from Sunday”. So I started by scrubbing floors, and I moved to peeling potatoes. And then they moved me to preparing diets and food, and that was very good. The matrons were very strict. They knew the hospital backwards. And then I moved to developing x-rays, and that was my job then. Now of course, you’re behind a screen. It can affect you badly! But I did that til the end of the war. I worked at the BRI, in Bristol.
I think we must have been well governed, really, because food never really ran out. The worst place was at the University, living in hall, and we had four fire watchers- medical students. It was a woman’s hall, no men allowed in, no relatives allowed upstairs in the bedrooms. And it was a great moment of the day when you had dinner at night, at the High Table. They swept in to High Table in their gowns- stood there (the wardens)- and then we had grace in Latin, and then we sat down and the food was brought in. And this one night, we had one boiled onion each. And that was a real low point.

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