ĂŰŃż´«Ă˝

Outbreak of War

I was nineteen when the war began. I worked at County Hall, Maidstone doing clerical work for the Public Assistance Department. (This was the forerunner of the National Health). Although it was a Sunday we had been asked to go into work that day because they knew war was imminent. Being Sunday, there weren’t many buses running so it was rather difficult, and when we got there we were told we could go home again.

I was living in Alexander Road, Luton at the time and always went to work by bus. I used to run down my road, straight on to the bus to the Town Hall, Chatham, and then straight onto the Hastings bus. There was little traffic on the roads then and it used to be a straight run. I used to leave the house at twenty past eight to get there for nine. I think I got to work quicker then than those people who go by car now!

That first day, while I was at County Hall, there was an air raid warning and we all piled down into the basement. I’d forgotten my gas mask, I’d left it up in the office. We didn’t know what to expect when that first warning went off, we thought, this is it, the enemy would come over with all his aircraft and he’d be dropping bombs and dropping gas, and I said “Oh! I haven’t got my gas mask!” And one of the men said, “I’ll go up and get it for you” and I said “No, no, you’ll be killed!” Then the all clear went. It didn’t last long, that first one, but it was enough to frighten people to death”.

ĂŰŃż´«Ă˝ life

At the beginning of the war I was single and living with my parents. I was an only child. My father was an insurance agent but my mother, who was Welsh, didn’t go to work.

We had an air raid shelter in the garden. My father wasn’t able to build it because he had been wounded in the First World War. My husband, or boyfriend then, he put it in and the people next door helped. Everybody helped. We didn’t use it a lot except at the start. As soon as war was declared the sirens went off and my mum and dad went down and sat in the shelter all the morning but of course nothing was going on.

I got married in 1943 and I asked for a transfer from my job in Maidstone to Chatham. Mr. Rix was the Assistant Public Assistance Officer of Rochester and Chatham and I knew him vaguely because he used to come into the main office, and I used to say to him, “Have you got a job there for me?” He’d say, “I will one day”. So when I got married I said to him, “I’m ready for that job!” and he said “Well, you can come over now!”. The other relieving officer, Mr. Swan, had been called up, so they asked me to go over and help out. I couldn’t take his place because I wasn’t qualified. The office was in a house in the grounds of All Saints Hospital, Magpie Hall Road, Chatham. It was right down the bottom of the grounds opposite the Magpie Hall Tavern. I used to walk to work every day. I tried a bicycle but I was frightened of riding it.

The work was much the same as before the war, I was typing letters just the same but when I moved to the Relieving Officer’s office in Chatham, then I had to interview people who wanted their relief, as they called it then, parish relief and they wanted their relief increased. That embarrassed me.

Rationing and making do

I didn’t notice any difference in our food or anything. We grew beans and peas and that sort of thing. I remember one of the dishes my mum used to do. She used to get a big marrow, and peel it, cut it lengthways down the middle, scoop out the seeds and fill the cavity with bits of meat, bits of mince and bacon, whatever she could find. She’d put it together, tie it up and roast it and when it came out she’d pretend it was a joint!

My mother’s family lived on the Gower Peninsular. They had a smallholding there and they were allowed to keep a pig. When they killed the pig, they always sent my mum a bit, so that was something to look forward to. The spare ribs of the pig. We had a butcher, down on Luton Road, and he would be fair with what he had. My mum also used to do some bottling and making jam and things like that. And we always had plenty of vegetables. I didn’t really feel deprived.

It was a happy time, really, I can’t tell you why, probably because I was young and it was a good time of my life, but it was a happy time.

My mother-in-law had a little general store in her front room and of course she had sugar and butter and that sort of thing and it all had to be sanctioned by the Food Office. She used to get in a terrible pickle, because she was so kind-hearted. The neighbours would come in and say, “Oh, my so-and-so’s home on leave and I haven’t got a bit of sugar!” And she would give them a bit of extra sugar and then say to me, “Margaret, I can’t let you have any sugar this week! I’ve given it to Mrs. So-and-so”. Every so often she would have to go to the Food Office and account for what she had got and what she hadn’t got, usually she hadn’t got it. She used to get me to go for her. She had two daughters, but they were both away, my husband was away, so she used to ask me to go to the Food Office for her, and I would say, “Oh well, she’s only got so much sugar and she should have this much!”.

Queues

I’m not very tall and the queues for me were a blessing, because whenever I went in for anything and there was a crowd of people, I would be pushed to the back. It was the same with the buses. I had dreadful trouble trying to get on a bus if there was a crowd of people there. So when the queues came, I thought, what a good idea. It made a big difference to me.

Entertaining the locals

At the beginning of the war everything got cut off. There was radio, no television then, of course, but the cinemas were all closed. I was just beginning to go with my husband then and we belonged to Luton Methodist in Connaught Road and there was an institute there for the young people, but of course, they closed that up as well, so we had nowhere to go.

That’s when we opened our “Smilers’ Club”. One evening, my husband was at home with me, with my parents, and we found some rolls of old wallpaper and we printed out words of the popular songs, like “run, rabbit, run rabbit” and that sort of thing. We said, if we could get Miss Evenden, the organist at the Methodist Chapel to play for us, we could have a sing song sometime. So we asked her. She was an elderly lady, but she was quite willing and she suggested we ask permission to use one room of the chapel.

So we asked permission and were told that as long as it was blacked out properly and we didn’t need a fire, then yes, it was alright. My husband lived in Connaught Road, where his mother had the little shop and she put the word around that there was going to be a sing song in the Chapel.

We were inundated! We couldn’t get all the people in the room! There was nothing else going on. And that went on until my husband was called up. About eighteen months, I should think. They used to come every Thursday and queue up outside the Chapel and we used to charge them a penny each. We didn’t make them tea, but we used to have this sing song and a lot of people heard about it and offered to come and do an act for us in between the singing.

One man was Ken Stirling. His real name was Cyril Boorman but he used the name Ken Stirling because, like my husband, he was building Stirling Bombers at Short Brothers. So he would come and do a bit of an act. And then we had a hypnotist, we had some weird people there. But the people of Connaught Road and from all around looked forward to this evening.

A wartime baby

My husband was called up at the beginning of 1944 and I was expecting our first child, Richard when I remember the first of the Doodlebugs. It was very frightening. It made such an awful noise and we were told that it was a pilot-less aircraft and you couldn’t imagine it.

Wilf had been in the Army a few months before our son Richard was born. Anyway, I was expecting Richard within the next fortnight, December 44 and he came home on embarkation leave. He said, “I’m pretty sure we’re going to the Far East”, and that was a terrible place to go to. I was really worried, and he wasn’t too happy either. But I had to go up to All Saints’ for a check up, because Richard was due soon, and I happened to say to Mr. Wright, the Gynaecologist, when he asked, “How are you?”, that I was a bit unhappy because my husband’s embarkation leave was up soon. He said that he shouldn’t go abroad. He said, “I don’t want to frighten you, but he shouldn’t go abroad until your baby’s born”. I said “there’s not much we can do about that”, and he said, “Yes there is, I’ll write a letter to his commanding officer”.
So he wrote this letter and what he put in it I do not know, but I gave it to Wilf and he said, “this won’t do any good”. He was really upset about it all, and I said, “Never mind, take it back”. He did, we said goodbye at the station and he said, “I don’t know when I’ll see you again, and I don’t know how I’m going to know that the baby’s born”, because it was all so hush-hush. He’d been training, Far East training, that’s the only way they knew.

The next Sunday, he was in Liverpool, he hadn’t gone. He managed to phone his mum’s neighbour, not many people had a phone in those days, but there was a banging on the door, and they said to come quick, Wilf’s on the phone. That happened for two Sundays and then Richard was born.

I had one of the easiest confinements you could wish for. I was only twenty minutes in the labour room. It was amazing really. One of the nurses said to me, “You’re Mrs. Scott, aren’t you? I think we had a phone call about you this morning”. I said, “Did you? Who was it?” and she said, “Never mind, forget I said that”. Thinking about it afterwards, I think it was the Army phoning up to confirm, and if they had phoned a day later, Richard would have been born, and they would have said that everything was alright and that my husband could go.

A ĂŰŃż´«Ă˝ Posting

On the third Sunday when my mother in law was expecting to hear that Wilf was on the phone again, there was a banging on the door and Wilf was there and he said, “I’ve been told to come home”. He came up to the hospital and the baby had been born and he was all right! It was amazing, that was, and it was because of Richard that he probably owes his life. He said, “Don’t get too euphoric, they’ll probably fly me out to my regiment” but we had a fortnight together and then he went back to Liverpool.

Nothing was done and he was kicking his heels there for a couple of weeks and then he was called into the office and they said that his posting had come, and he said, “Yes, I’ve been expecting it” and they said, “Do you know of a place called Gravesend?” and he was there for quite a time. That was so lucky. He stayed in the barracks there but he could get home. From there he went to Shorncliff in Folkestone, he was training the soldiers there. We had been so lucky.

Looking after baby in wartime

I remember I couldn’t get the liners for the baby’s nappies. We could buy towelling and we used to cut them up ourselves to make the nappies but they used to have a sort of gauze liner and I couldn’t get it. So I bought lint, the medical lint, cut that up and bound it round the edge and washed it well, and used that inside the nappies and that worked.

I fed both my boys. I never did have a bottle. I had worked for the Relief Officer right up until a fortnight before Richard was born, and I used to have to walk up to the hospital and interview patients to see if they could afford to pay anything or not, and there was an epidemic of Gastroenteritis amongst the babies. They were dying like flies and of course in those days they didn’t sterilise the bottles like they do now. So I was determined not to have a bottle in the house and I never did. Any water I gave them was from a spoon. It was really distressing, the mothers losing their babies, even in the hospital they were dying.It was a real epidemic.

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