A Wartime Childhood in Ashtead

This story was submitted to the BBC People’s War site by Wymondham Learning Centre on behalf of the author, Rosemary Morgan, who fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

My mother and father moved from the East End of London to Ashtead in Surrey in 1935, when I was two years old. Later, when they looked around for a school for me, they were told the one they had chosen, about five minutes walk from the house, was zoned, and I would have to go to one a mile and a half away, crossing main roads to get there. Mother complained to her MP, who brought it up in parliament. Meanwhile mother taught me at home. One day I was playing in the garden, dressed in an old coat, when several black limos drew up outside the house. It was the press. They wanted some pictures. My mother said she’d change me into more suitable clothes but they said they wanted me just as I was. I was taken in one of the cars with my grandmother, who lived with us, and at various points along the route to the school I’d been told to attend the car was stopped and we were photographed trudging along the road. A final picture was taken outside the school with the two of us looking over the fence. A sob story appeared in the paper with the headline “Rosemary Plays Alone”. Then in September 1939 the war began and the nearer school was de-zoned, so at the age of six I did go there. The school had a lot of evacuees and for a while some of them were actually taught in our living room, for some reason. I remember a Crocodile of them trooping in. They were children of about nine or ten, who seemed very big to me.

My father had been very ill and died in April 1939, so mother had to go out to work. At the beginning of the war we were sent a couple of evacuees. I remember them as “big girls”. They were probably teenagers. They stayed for a short while during the “phoney war” and then went back to London, where I believe at least one of them was killed.

Then there came a visitation from five of my grandmother’s friends from the East End, who arrived unannounced, looking pathetic and wanting to be taken in. They were an elderly couple, their grandson Derek, who was about fourteen, and their son and daughter-in-law, Derek’s father and mother. Later another adult turned up, bringing the total number in our household to nine. Two of Derek’s older siblings, a sister in the ATS and a brother in the RAF, turned up on leave from time to time. The new arrivals stayed for what seemed a long time. I never had a bedroom, and slept with my mother. We took over the downstairs rooms for sleeping. The rest of the place was taken over by the interlopers.

I was never evacuated myself. I was an only child and so was my mother, which perhaps made her more reluctant to be separated from me. We had sirens and air raids, though few, and harmless, bombs. I don’t think I was ever scared. During air raids we used to stand under the stairs, joined by our next-door neighbour, whose husband was an air-raid warden. She used to hang a blanket up at the door, rather than closing it, in case of any blast.

When the flying bombs, the V-1s and V-2s, arrived, we used to take our bedding down to some brick kilns about a mile away at night and sleep on two-tier bunks set up there. When I went to bed at home I used to hold the top sheet in one fist and suck my thumb with the corner of the sheet tickling my nose. But at the brick kiln we had only blankets, which were too hairy. I believe I’d be sucking my thumb to this day if it weren’t for the air raids!

Eventually we bought an indoor Morrison shelter (by this time the older couple had left and bought a house nearby) in which I used to sleep, taking my little Scottie dog in with me. The Morrison was the size of a good double bed with a top at about table height. Of course the top came to be used for dumping our possessions on and when the war ended we had a job finding places to store them.

Eventually the Americans arrived and started taking the local girls out. I used to go walking in the woods with only my dog (something it would be unthinkable to allow a small child to do these days) and occasionally glimpsed a canoodling couple in the bushes, and used condoms lying about. We children used to call these “spunk bladders” though we had no idea what the term meant or what the couples in the bushes were actually up to.

I didn’t feel restricted by rationing because I didn’t know any better. I do know we weren’t short of sugar, as mother didn’t use it in tea. We saved all of our kitchen scraps, and it was my job to take them to feed a neighbour’s chickens once a week. I hated doing it, because I felt the neighbours didn’t really want them and I was old enough to sensitive about it, but in return we got a few eggs. We had school milk, and each child had an enamel mug that hung on the outside of the satchel. Most were flat-bottomed cylinders, but mine had a curved bottom and the other children called it “ Rosemary’s Po”, which I hated.

At the end of the war the Americans gave all the children a party at the village hall, which had been built as a Peace Memorial after world war one.

I remember asking my mother once, “What do they put in the newspaper when there isn’t a war on?” She laughed, and said she was sure they'd find something.

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