Stuck Under the Bed

“This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from BBC London Online on behalf of Margaret Wright , and has been submitted to the site with her permission. Margaret Wright fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.”

I was eight when the war ended, I can sort of remember being on my father’s shoulders when the troops all came home. I cant remember exactly when it would have been, but it was obviously when they came home from Europe, and I can remember another thing that just stuck in my mind, my mother was having my brother at the time (during the war) and we had a bomb dropped. We would have been living in Worcester, but we had a bomb dropped fairly near to the house and my father heard it and he shouted to my mother “get under the bed!”, so she got under the bed, but she couldn’t get out of it because she was so large. So he helped to drag her out because the beds in those days were not very high off the ground. That’s one thing I can remember.

I remember as a schoolgirl, I don’t know how old I would have been, getting drinking chocolate from the town hall. We used to go with a tin. Whether it was anything to do with the Americans, because we had an American Hospital near us, I don’t know. But we used to go once a week, with a tin, to the town hall and take a spoon with us and eat it on the way home!

I also remember, just after the war, they invited us up to the hospital and they gave us the most wonderful goody-bags because I’d never seen a banana or anything like that in my life. Everything was on ration and there were things, coconuts, I didn’t see till after the war.

The dates, I was only eight at the time, I cant remember all the times that things happened, but I lived through rationing. And I can remember a lovely front garden growing lovely vegetables, the whole of the garden, and I can remember getting told off for pulling up the carrots. We used to grow carrots and potatoes, everything that we could so we could have fresh vegetables.

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