Memories of Wartime

I have a kaleidoscope of memories: starting school, fitting gas masks and trying out earplugs on each other as well as ourselves, being given two biscuits at the school Christmas party and running home and back to school so that the teachers could time us. Then there was the wonderful Snow White dolls’ house my father had made for me from a packing case. There were tinned plums and Carnation milk for Sunday tea. (I was later to have a craving for tinned plums in my first pregnancy.), My mother listening to War and Peace on the Home Service. Hitler had made the same mistake as Napoleon before him and was bound to lose and the flames of our fire became the flames of Moscow burning.
I remember the train visits to Grandma every Saturday and returning in the blackout and not knowing the stations the train stopped at because all names had been taken out. It was no good counting the stops because sometimes the train stopped at halts and sometimes it didn’t. We did, however, know when we were at Nelson because when we peeped behind the blind on the window we could see under a diffused blue light an advert for Mazawattee tea. “Mam, we’re at Mazawattee Tea”. We knew ours was the next stop.

At the Big School, I wrote an imaginary story of a boy’s escape from France to this country and worked out sums about a certain number of children collecting money for Warships Week and the total amount brought. We had to learn what acronyms such as A.R.P.; M.O.I.; W.V.S.; G.C. stood for I remember a girl coming into our classroom from Miss Davies’s class with the news that the allies had landed in France. D Day .

And there was the marching through the village. Everyone marched: the Home Guard, the W.V.S.; the Girl Guides; The Scouts; The St John’s Ambulance; the Red Cross; even when no one of higher rank than corporal could be found to take the salute. It was all like a kind of communal nervous tic. When news of victories came, the marching became more purposeful and the church bells rang. On one occasion the whole school was taken in crocodile to the open space where two roads met in the bottom of the village to see the Welsh Guards march past. They were due at 2.0 p.m. Two thirty came and went. The teachers conducted us in singing. Then a ripple of cheering and clapping. All alert waiting for The Guards to round the bend but then we saw cheering wasn’t for The Guards but for my father. It was half day closing and there he was in his old gardening clothes, pushing a home made wooden wheelbarrow coming down the centre of the road on his way to our allotment at the other end of the village. He was playing up to the watching crowd by sloping arms with the rake. I died a thousand deaths. My friend kept on nudging me, “It’s your father. It’s your father.” Yes, I knew it was my father and I, a self-conscious eight year old wanted the ground to open and swallow me to hide my embarrassment.

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