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An edited oral history interview with Mrs. Barbara Mary Clark conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“I can only vaguely remember war being declared - because we were at the Scunthorpe Grammar School and still full of being at school in the Sixth Form. I was 16 and really enjoying being at the top of the school and doing things. I mean I listened to the News and I began to think it was inevitable and by 3rd September 1939 it wasn’t really a shock, I think everybody expected it. But they were sorry that it had happened of course. And we realised that the boys we knew at school would be called-up and they were! The boys in my Form were called-up in 1940. You see it was the ‘Battle of Britain’ wasn’t it? Well three of them that I knew very well that were in my Form, all were killed. We had to cope with that almost immediately really when the war began. They were in the Air Force. Yes, four I can remember all died.

We had to be very careful with our rations. We lived with my grandmother and she was a very good cook. She found it very difficult using powdered egg and things like that. She taught me to cook so I sort of learned over a period of time and we got used to it, it’s amazing how you do. You had your rations. You went and fetched them. In a way people couldn’t over eat, it helped some people to curb their appetites. There wasn’t a lot of fruit except English fruit, apples and things but bananas and so forth, peaches and that sort of thing, they all went out for a long time.

My mother was a teacher and I wanted to be a teacher but I was very interested in small children, from three onwards so I wanted to specialise in that age group. I’d be trained for up to 11 but specialising in that age group. I heard of a College in Cambridge, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½rton College that did specialise, they had their own Nursery. A wartime Nursery which dealt with children whose father’s were at the war and my mother also made enquiry’s and it seemed to be the place to go. So I went for an interview. I was very lucky because the Principal was from Hull and she wanted a few Northern girls! So my friend Audrey and I who both wanted to go to ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½rton were accepted. I think that was part of the reason.

I started there when I was 18 in 1941 and it was the beginning of a period in my life that was absolutely marvellous! Despite the war! Freedom from parents, lots of friends, a wonderfully run College, very good lecturers, it was great! And we were encouraged to do any kind of war work in our spare time, not to waste time but to go. So I went to the Refugee Club, which was just down the road near the Station and there, there were every nationality you could think of really having come over to England to escape Nazism, nowhere to go. And a group of women rallied and they were very pleased of help, particularly at the weekends. So a group of us used to go down there as often as we could to help.

I suppose it had been a big old house, it was on the corner of the road up to the Station. It wasn’t residential, they were fed there and they could lounge there and have time off. The people who rallied tried to get them places to live. I mean it was such a fleeting group that you didn’t really know where they went you just hoped that they would find something. Some of them were very sad. Some of them were jolly glad to get away. I never met any of the people there again because it was just serving people food and just talking to them if they wanted to talk.

Cambridge was a place where people did go to, people were very open hearted, the Social Workers were very good. Later on when I was teaching I got more into the Social and the Police side of it. Yes, it was a very multi-cultural society during the war. I think it still is but it certainly was then and it just opened its doors and its arms and welcomed people.

ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½rton College was just outside the town on the road near Addenbrooks Hospital. It was beginning to be part of the University as our science lectures were run by University lecturers and the exams were but now I see that in the last years it has become one of the Cambridge University Colleges. And I think it deserves to because it really did work very hard. And it had this lovely Nursery, a beautiful building which had been built just before the war, attached so that you could do school practice there, so I was very lucky. We looked after children of father’s who were — that was their acceptance that their father had to be in the war and their mother’s wanted to go out to work. So they were all under about — well certainly under five, some babies and a lot under three. So we had very good material to work with!

We were trained all children up to 11 but you could specialise and I did. It was a very lively College and we did lots of drama and PE and games and everything, it was a very well run. Strangely enough I met my nephew’s second wife recently and she’s a teacher and she said, ‘Where did you go, Barb?’ And I said, ‘Well I went to ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½rton’ ‘good grief’ she said, ‘you were lucky!’ Just like that. I didn’t realise at the time but it evidently had got a reputation to her who is, what, 40 years younger.

There were rooms in College, three stories and we lived in the College, everybody did. I only did two years teacher training, I didn’t do the third year. I was to have done the third year but they were terribly, desperately short of teachers because of London evacuees. They had come into the town and they said would we mind foregoing it and doing it at some future date but of course you never do, once you get cracking.

Now my mother came to stay with me and she found a Women’s Hostel in Brooklands Avenue and she got very friendly with the lady who ran it. And when I wanted ‘digs’ this lady was looking for two people who could be sort of always there and an income was coming in whereas the rest of the population was moving all the time. So I went to live in the Hostel when I was a teacher. This Hostel was run by the Social Services - ladies from the Colleges, wives of Dons - and the Police —- so I had a wonderful time really. I went into a Nursery in one of the schools and found that I’d got 57 children! 30 were evacuees from London and so you couldn’t teach in a normal way at all. I taught mostly with children on the floor - we hadn’t enough desks - and a blackboard.

I did have a helper in the second school, not on the first. The first was a Church school and they were big rooms, it was a big old school and that was fine but the second was a new school that was tremendously attached to the Child Guidance Clinic because there were problems all the time. But it was a new school and you had a helper. Children were encouraged to sleep in the afternoons and that sort of thing in the Nursery.

I had had my practice in the College Nursery and that was an eye opener really because I had children who were fatherless because of the war, some of their father’s had been killed and a lot of them suffering from emotional problems. The Headmistress was a wonderful old girl, I think it was her last five years, she was determined to make a go of it and she did. And she let me go with my children one at a time to the Child Guidance Clinic which was in the next street and she let the helper and herself look after my class while I went. So I was able to see these children under treatment and to be able to help them when they came back into the classroom.

It was a very caring area to be in and of course at the Hostel I was expected to pull my weight so I met all sorts! The Women’s Hostel was run by the Social Services and the ladies from the Colleges. People were sent out at all times of day and night to this Hostel so you could be in your bed and Miss Charlton would say, ‘Barb can you come down and just help me with this?’ It had been a Monk’s house and there was a Chapel at the time and I was in a little room off the Chapel. And she used to shout up and we used to go. I met people from European nations fleeing from the war. I was required to pull my weight and some of the women - a lot of them were pregnant - they had their babies and then they were re-housed and helped to have them adopted because they didn’t want to keep their babies. And then from the Hostel on the Sundays, I said to Miss Charlton, ‘I shall have to have a change from this.’ So I went to the Bull hotel that had been taken over by the Americans and offered some help there. You have got to remember that in those days we’d very little experience of the opposite sex except the boys we’d been at school with and as for the Americans, well! They came through to Cambridge to the local Bull hotel. It was made available to their Forces as a Canteen and Club. I served there in the Canteen - it was quite an experience. The Americans were easy going, friendly and a new experience after the Refugee Club and the Hostel! One example on a Sunday I was serving tea to a line of soldiers when a voice said, ‘Are your eyes troubling you?’ I was then a very shy 21 year old and concentrated on my job and I didn’t look up much and then I did look up and said hesitantly, ‘No!’ He said, ‘Uh, but they’re troubling me!’ I fled into the back room to recover from the shock! You wouldn’t believe that today would you, but that’s how we were.

We were not used to dealing with - particularly Americans who were real foreigners to us, much more foreign than the refugees somehow. Well, their ways were very open and friendly and I don’t know, it was a good experience. They kept asking you out and I always said, ‘No!’ But I did go out with a very nice Pole, Janusz Walh, he was just going through a very bad part of the war, it must have been in Europe somewhere. And he took me out to dinner once at the Refugee Club but of course I never saw him again. No, I don’t know what happened to him. It’s terrible really. He was in the Army.

Well, I’d applied and got a card for the WRENS and then I had a letter to say I wasn’t required because teachers were more important so I felt that I wasn’t helping the war effort in a way. I knew that Ken was in it, my future husband, and I wanted to be in it but no, I couldn’t. You don’t realise it at the time but I think looking back the things I did were useful and contributed to the well being of people who were displaced really. That went on until I was about 25, after the war I stayed in Cambridge. With two years of College and teaching I was there for seven years before returning to Scunthorpe.�

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