Disjointed Memories

The day war out my father, mother, 5 year old sister, 2 year old brother and I listened to Mr.Chamberlain at our home in Ramsgate. I got so angry with my sister for her indifference declaring "You don't understand, we are all going to get bombed.

I can remember convoys in the English channel and the RAF planes with the magnetic rings about them exploding Germans mines.

Suddenly, my father remaining behind, we are moved to relatives in Berkshire. Dunkirk. The moved to Luton where I recall wtaching out of my bedroom window as a messerschmidt flew past. I was so ofended as the pilot waved to me. It would be about this time that my father gathered his family together, warned us of the possibility of a German invasion. He intended to kill us then himself rather than we fall into the hands of the Nazis. This was taken calmly as simple matter of life.

At Luton my part in the war effort as an8 year old was collecting rose hips. I collected and enormous quantity but did not do as well as I did later in London. There I was made a field marshall, and given the tags to prove it, for the amount of waste paper I collected.

My greatest disappointment was never having seena buzz bomb. Heard them but didn't see one. I was convinced I was the only person in London who never saw one. The other frustration was not being allowed by my mother to collect shrapnell. How I envied the collection of other boys.

My uncle, an RSM returned having won the MM. He gave me 2/6d. I was so rich and so proud. Much later distant cousins returned from the Andaman Islands where they have been interned by the Japanese. Theeir mother had taught them to read and write in the sand under threat of death. Now teachers complain of lack of resources. We were so short of resources at one time at school we resorted to pencil and slates.

The greater part of the grammar school I went to had been evacuated to Teignmouth. Great was the copntempt of those of us in London for the cowards who had run away from bombs, the doodle bugs and rockets. That is until the main school returned to SE London and we saw how much bigger, healthier and stronger they were. It seemed so unfair.

The other great unfairness was not being allowed by my mother to beg for sweets and and gum from the Yanks "Got any gum, chum?", of being forbidden to speak to the Poles especially. I was also outraged that British women consorted with Americans let alone. Poles, Czechs and the French, the last of whom were regarded as cowards who had given in.

My over-riding memory is of being so cold, with chapped ears and knees and peeling the dried and hardened skin off, of sleeping under blankets, coats, anything to be warm. But it was all so very ordinary. So ordinary that when I was at the Imperial War Museum a few years back and stop to listen to a group of children performing a playlet of life in wartime time London with children actors crying and screaaming fear, of their supposed terror. Of their trepidation about venturing into the streets especially onto bombed sites and into bombed buildings, I had to appproach the teachers and ask if I could tell the children what it was really like. The teachers, younger than my own children, were most graceful telling their pupils they now knew what it was like and they should remember.

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