Too Young to be Afraid

I was not yet two when the second world war started and I have few memories before I was three.
During that year, however, which was probably the happiest of my life, memories were imprinted which were so strong that 40 years later I was able to find my way back to the cottage near Oswestry where my parents and I had lived and discover it was just as I had remembered it.
Up to that time we had lived in an extended family set-up in Lower Bebington. We shared a small, condemned terraced house with an aunt and uncle and next door was my maternal gran, her unmarried son who worked at Cammell Lairds, her oldest daughter and her husband who was mostly away in the army.
When my father was sent to Park Hall Camp in Shropshire on his first commission as a junior officer, however, my mother and I went with him and stayed in a charming but primitive cottage with a delightful old lady - or so she seemed to me - called Miss Sands. Opposite was the farm belonging to the Sands family where we would go for Sunday dinners which bore little relation to the spartan rations of town dwellers.
The cottage had a double seater lavatory at the bottom of the garden; water came from a pump outside the kitchen and the rooms were lit with paraffin lamps.
It was an idyllic place for a small child and I was indulged by everyone. At the army camp I was known as Shirley because my mother dressed me like Shirley Temple and I no doubt enjoyed the attention of being an only child in a world of grownups.
The war seemed far away so it came as a great shock when my father was posted overseas to India and my mother and I returned to the family in Bebington.
I was then aware of air raids but can't recall finding them frightening. The siren meant going under the stairs instead of having to go to bed and, sometimes, going down the the local air raid shelter with our belongings in my old pram.
One night when there was a raid, we went under the stairs as usual, except for my Uncle Wess, who had just come in from the pub and insisted he was staying in his armchair in front of the fire. Suddenly there was an explosion close by, the house shook and soot came down the chimney, turning my uncle black.
I only vaguely remember another occasion when there was an air raid over Port Sunlight where my other gran lived. Several houses were destroyed a few hundred yards from hers and the blast, according to an aunt who was standing in the doorway at the time greeting her husband, threw them both across the garden still in each other's arms. It also blew in the windows and killed the budgie.
I started at St. Anddrew's School in Bebington when I was five and about the only memory I have of being afraid was when we were taken to an air raid shelter to be shown where we would go in case of an air raid. When we got to the entrance I burst into tears and refused to go in, saying I didn't want to die without my mummy.
Before I could read properly I would look at the Liverpool Echo and make pronoucements such as: "Forty five thousand Germans killed today" I also called my puppy "Timoshenko" after a Russian general.
I don't recall ever going short of food during the war and in fact was always a chubby child. I do remember cream from the top of the milk being shaken up to make pats of butter and thickened cornflour being added to margarine to make it go further. My mother also used to make sponge cakes with liquid paraffin until there was a warning about the danger of using a laxative in the place of butter.
While he was in India my mother sent parcels back to us in England, surprising as it may seem. My mother drew around her feet and sent the sketch to India where my father had snake skin shoes handmade for her. He also sent me material for a dress.
I met my first Americans during the war and tasted chewing gum, which I thought disgusting. It wasn't peppermint but tasted of antiseptic.
My mother loved dancing and would often take me with her, young as I was. Dancing was all the rage during the War and there always seemed to be plenty of soldiers around as partners for my mother and her friends. She was still very young, in her early 20's, and my father's absence for so many years must have been hard to bear.
The war was still on when I had to have my tonsils out. I had had several serious childhood illnesses, like measles and whooping cough, and apparently had also had congestion of the lungs during which I was poulticed with thermogene. M and B was a precurser to modern antibiotics and it was due to being treated with that that I survived. Eventually, however, removal of my tonsils and adenoids was decided on and I was admitted to hospital for the operation. Parents were not permitted in hospitals at that time so at the age of four I was deposited in a ward with three other little girls and left. I had a new book with me - Alice in Wonderland, I think, and I remember tears dripping onto it before I told myself I had to be brave and not cry like a baby.
Just like the year in Shropshire, I can remember so clearly those few days in hospital - especially the anaesthetic which caused you to feel as though you were suffocating as you breathed in the sweet fumes. I can even remember the dream, in technicolour, that I had during the operation and which featured a young boy from the adjoining ward who had sat on my bed and read to me while sharing my marie biscuits.
After the operation I expected to have ice cream as a special treat but in wartime that was just a dream. All we got was water except for the girl opposite who was bleeding heavily and got orange squash. Very unfair the rest of us thought it.
Life was very free then for small children in working class areas. We played in the street and wandered off without parents seeming to be at all worried as long as we came home for meals. Ours was a car free environment and nobody worried about children being harmed by strangers.
At school we were taught by women who all seemed to be old and terrifying. Tables were taught by reciting them over and over - an excellent way to learn them as they have stuck with me every since - and the most exciting part of the week was when the "clay" was brought out with its little wooden boards on which to roll it our and make models. No bright colours, just grey. Not being much good at modelling I made simple things like babies in prams and Moses in the bullrushes. Cradles were easy!
I don't remember VE Day but do recall VJ Day and the bonfires which were lit everywhere. There was a firework display to celebrate the end of the war at the local recreation ground and it was then that I think I was aware of the dangers that had been around us for so long. When the sparks from the rockets dropped down towards the ground I burst into tears and had to be taken home. I thought that they were going to make me blind.

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