I was born at the end of August 1936
The most unforgettable memory of the second world war was the telegram Boy coming with the news of my only brother's death in the Invasion of Sicily. I was six years old at the time and as no one else was at home I went next door to get our neighbour as Mum had let out a tremendous wail of grief and I didn't know what to do. This tragic event coming barely three months after the death of my eldest sister from T.B. was overwhelming. Dad was injured badly in the Great War yet despite injuries tried to work and was a sergeant in the Home Guard. I remember peeping under the curtains when his men were doing an exercise in our street, when was supposed to be asleep.
One morning he came off H.G. duty and found Mum and I pinned under an iron bedstead caused by an air raid. During the war our back door was blown off three times by bomb blast and Mum was once caught badly across her back by it, she also cut her arm badly when she slipped getting into our Anderson shelter during a raid. Prior to the war I was told later our Dad when working on Hornchurch airfield had seen Japanese pilots in training.
When my sister was ill in hospital with T.B. she and other patients were moved from Harold Wood hospital to St. Margaret's Hospital at Epping to make room for people injured in the blitz. Many years later I found that my husband Norman and his mother Winnie were among them following the destruction of their home at Waltham stow by a phosphorus bomb. The temporary huts/wards they used were still in use in recent years when I attended for treatment.
My uncle and Aunt came south from Sunderland to escape the raids there but only stayed one night because they thought things were worse in the south. When the air raid warning sounded Mum took down the heavy brass candlesticks from the mantel shelf and picked up a torch and the Fox's glacier mints tin that held all our ration books, and other vital paperwork and shepherded us in to the Anderson shelter. Before we had a shelter we used the public one on the corner of our street -the very corner where pre-war Mum and the older children of my family had watched the Duke and Duchess of York pass by on a visit to our new showpiece housing estate. Being close to a large public house the smell within was unforgettable. Once we had our own shelter in the garden we spent many a sunny day inside it singing songs from 6penny songbook - we had our own British bands and singers and whenever the war is mentioned it always U.S. music that is used and that was only predominant at the end of the war.
I was evacuated three times first aged three with Mum and some neighbours with young children to share a cottage on the East coast-we saw the first lifeboat rescue of the war on the Sept 10th 1939 as us children were having our first taste of seaside behind the barbed wire. Soon home again as it was safer, further from the action and Mum had to care for Dad because his souvenirs of the first war were a missing area of thigh, results of being blinded and gassed and a piece of hard tack biscuit as issued in the trenches, oh mustn't forget his 2 per cent pension and care from University College Hospital, London for the rest of his shortened life.
Like most people he expected heavy bombing as practised in Spain earlier and took the crossbar out of the dining table to make a temporary shelter for me and my dolls at bedtime before shelters arrived.
The second time I was evacuated I went to a Wiltshire village to live on a farm with four adults I was four and started school there and walked the long way there to and fro alone. On Saturdays my nearest sister in age who lived with a young couple came to play and I cried bitterly when she had to go home again. When Mum visited and found me with impetigo I was soon home again. Intermittently I went to the local home school an when the siren went we went into the cloakrooms and sat one behind the other by the wash basins until it was over.
For my third evacuation I was billeted with the sister nearest in age with an elderly couple who had never had children overall they were very good to us but would keep our good clothes for best and of course they were outgrown before outworn which especially in a time of shortages was wasteful. Every lunchtime when we came home for midday meal We had our hair combed looking for nits. We were not allowed to read the newspapers, we took the accumulator to be recharged for the wireless they had. On Fridays we went to the public baths and took our clean clothes in a parcel to be return with our dirty laundry.
The silk works where the man worked was producing red, white and blue bunting for weeks before peace came so we knew it was nearly over. As soon as V.E. day was officially announced a local girl called Una skipped down the street followed by other children singing Unconditional Surrender over and over. The streets were soon decorated and a party held. Later we were taken for a week to Blackpool our first holiday in a favourite Wakes week resort. Then home to a depleted family and soon Dad died also.
Ten years later when I married I left the house over a plank laid across a hole that mysteriously appeared and been checked by a bomb disposal team.
