Polly the Foul Parrot

I, Irene, was born in Southampton and lived opposite the old docks.

During the war there were many soldiers down at the docks and one night they saw a plane and decided to fire at it. The German pilot thought that the soldiers were defending an important building and fired back. It was a butter factory! The flames that came from the factory were so near and bright that they lit up my bedroom.

There were a lot of French soldiers in a camp who were all very dirty. One day my father, Jack Marks, rang the Mayor and asked him to open the baths so that the soldiers could clean up. The Mayor refused so we had the soldiers come to Queen’s Park Terrace and out into the gardens. There we hosed them all down. We had a laugh at this.

I was an ARP Auxillary nurse at the age of 15 ½ and I loved wearing the uniform. I felt I looked cute in it. I used to walk through a converted school, called the Deanery. At the back of the school , which was used for boys, was an area used for people with minor ailments. Most of the people here were French soldiers. Because of the blackout I would have to walk through with a lamp. Sometimes they would pretend to be asleep and scare me by touching my legs as I walked past.

During this time I also used to sing with a band to entertain the troops outside Southampton and Netley Hospital.

Later in the war I saw a doodle-bug come down. It fell on a whole family and killed them all! I forget their name but they were a very well known family.

One day, when I was at work, a bomb dropped on our house. I was worried for my parrot, Polly, and the money I was looking after for the girls at work. The money was hidden under my bed. On hearing about my home I jumped on my bike and rode as fast as I could to my home. When I reached there I ran through the crowds that had gathered, up what was left of the stairs and into my dust filled bedroom. Polly was running up and down on his perch frantically. I grabbed the money and threw some clothes out of the window, then made my way into the daylight with the parrot. By this time the crowd had got quite large and as I left the building the Polly came out with the most terrible language. Words that I didn’t know existed! The crowd roared with laughter. By the evening Polly had made the newspaper headlines, “Polly Hates The Germans”. When he heard about it my father said the parrot must have been listening to the sailors on the way to England. Up until then I had never heard the parrot say a word, nothing was going to stop him now! I even managed to teach him to sing, “Danny Boy” my father’s favourite song.

I moved to Brighton with my mother Lulu Marks and we lived in a flat in Grand Parade. My father had to stay in Southampton as our house had had every window blown out. My father stayed to get the house secured.

In Brighton, just before six at night everyone in the area would gather together their knitting or books, games and anything else to while away the time between then and the ‘all-clear’. We would all make our way to the crypt under St Peter’s church, where we could play, talk and listen to the radio. We heard what was happening in London and the planes would pass over us. If they had any bombs left on the way home they dropped them on Brighton.

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