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This is transcript of an “interview” carried out on Sunday 20th Feb 1994 between Joanne Mason (then aged 10) and her grandparents (Don and Vera Mason), as part of a school project on WWII

Don:
You want to know about war time and things that happened at that stage. I was coming up to the last year at secondary school when war was declared and the whole school was evacuated from Ilford to Ipswich. We had a train down there and then we were distributed round amongst the houses where they were prepared to receive us as evacuees.

We went to school in the local High School. We went in the afternoons, they went in the mornings because there wasn’t enough room to accommodate us all the time.

We hadn’t been there very long before the Germans invaded the Low Countries and got up to the Channel coast and they thought it was dangerous for us to be all evacuated on the East coast so they then put us all on a train and sent us across to Wales. So many people were moving at the time they weren’t able to make proper provision and I remember that we all got on the train and travelled for hours — it seemed — in very hot weather until we got to Wales but before then there was so much distress on the train that they stopped it in a station where a porter’s trolley had been covered with cups and a man stood with a hose just filling the cups with water for something to drink. Then I remember arriving in a small mining village in Wales and we walked up from the station to the school and all the people had come out of chapel in their black suits and black dresses and as we walked up the street they stood at the side of the road watching us. By that evening we were settled in our new billets for the evacuation. It was the first time we had ever been into a mining village it was a new experience to discover that if you just walked down the road, when you got home all your ankles and clothes and your lower legs were black from the coal dust which was blowing up.

They treated us very well there, it was a very isolated village and we caused great turmoil in the village because we (the Boys County High) had gone with the Girls County High and we all knew each and walked up the street arm in arm — rows of us, whereas the local youngsters were not allowed to mix with each other and they had to have secret arrangements to meet inside the cinema.

At that period rationing was not a problem to us. I was very fortunate because I was billeted with the manager of the local Co-operative store and of course when they buy goods in — in bulk — before putting it together there is always an allowance for loss — when they cut up butter for instance and make it into 1lb pieces (it didn’t come ready wrapped) then they had to cut it up and make it into a packet for you they always allowed 10% for losses. The 10% of course was used by the manager and his staff so we were always well fed.

At the end of the first year of the war (that was in 1940) having finished school, I came back and started work in another school which was just opening — it had been completed (the building) in 1939 — and the whole of the playing field was a series on underground bunkers so that if the air raid warning went the whole school (or such as was occupied) would then go down into the air raid shelters. We only had little battery lights down there and they were always getting broken and it was one of my jobs to make sure they were working as well as possible.

The other things that were memorable of those war years were that I went on to study and I had to study in one place, work in another and live in a third and I was always cycling around to get from one place to another — it was the only sensible method of transport and often it meant going to these places at night because we had to stay up taking it in turns watching at night in case incendiary (fire) bombs were dropped on the place. So we all took our turn and the road to the school where I was working also went passed an RAF station and I used to have to cycle down this hill in complete darkness because you weren’t allowed lights on your bicycle and there were no footpaths, so these airmen and women would be walking down the hill in the middle of the night as I was cycling down to get to my duty on Fire Watch and not infrequently only just avoided colliding with these people as they went down the road. Fortunately they were usually rather talkative and you could hear them long before you could see them.

Then the bombing — you would come out in the morning and go work and then come back in the evening and find that sometimes a whole row of houses had been demolished because of a bomb being dropped. The same thing in the morning, you would go to bed at night and the street was alright and get out of your air-raid shelter in the morning and find a whole street of houses was wreckage.

Never-the-less we managed to enjoy ourselves — I remember one day coming back from London, it was the day of the first daylight raid on London and these German bombers were over Hainault and they were being attacked by British aircraft and to protect themselves they had formed a circle and were flying round and round in a circle. When after the war, I read the story of Francis Chichester (the man who sailed round the world single-handed) on that same day he was visiting Hughes, the makers of navigation instruments, in Hainault and they all took shelter or hid from the aircraft by lying in the fields across the road which if I remember were cabbage fields — they were lying in amongst the cabbages.

The other thing I remember particularly was having incendiary bombs dropped on our house and we’re not talking about one or two, there were thirty or forty in the vicinity and we had to rush round and try and put them out.

One night I remember looking out of the window which was open (because bomb blast would throw glass all over the place) and seeing an aeroplane going across the sky with flames shooting out of the back and feeling pity for the pilot, only to discover that it was the early days of the V1 bombs which had no pilot — they were completely automatic and the flame at the back was the engine. It was a bomb that just flew across and when the fuel ran out it just fell and bombed whatever it landed on. Then later came the V2 rockets which were rockets and came so fast you never saw them coming you just saw the explosion.

The school where I worked was in the Roding Valley. This valley was used by airmen for practising low flying and frequently when we looked out from the school on the field opposite you would see score marks on the grass opposite where these aircraft had scraped their wheels on the ground. On one occasion an aeroplane — not a training aeroplane but a fighter aircraft — came across the valley, could not lift up fast enough to get over the school and the caretakers cottage so the pilot tilted the plane and skidded through the gap between the caretakers cottage and school building and then crash into the anti-aircraft establishment exactly where the M11 is now.

Food was uninteresting, there was great excitement when you could bake a potato in its jacket and make some sort of filling for it. We didn’t have enough butter or anything; you would collect all sorts of things to make some flavour for it.

Vera:
I wasn’t evacuated with the school but with my brother to a friend of an aunt who lived in Hungerford. The reason we didn’t go with the school was that my mother was expecting another baby and it was decided that we would all stay together just outside London but when war was imminent, expectant mothers were really asked to seriously consider leaving because they though it would be dangerous. So because my mother was to be evacuated we had to go somewhere and that is how we went to Hungerford to a sweet shop — which was rather a nice place to be evacuated to. We didn’t go to school while we were there because my brother went the County High and I went to Beal School in Ilford and there were no similar schools in the area but after my younger brother was born we all (the family) came back to Ilford for Christmas. We were in Ilford for the rest of the war.

Rationing started very quickly with petrol for cars and this meant that most people who had cars, unless you lived in rather inaccessible places with no buses, you really didn’t get a petrol allowance. Most people had their cars in garages for the rest of the war. The cars that were allowed to drive, because of the black-out (the blackout meant that there were no street lights and all houses had to have black blinds or curtains to keep in the light from the houses and cars and bicycles had lights with a slit to allow light to shine out. So when you went out at night it was like it is in the country now — you just couldn’t see a thing. It was the same everywhere because the government was afraid that the German raids would start and they did start in 1940.

Everyone was issued with gas masks at the beginning of the war and although we had regular practices of trying them on and making sure you knew how to fit them we never had to wear them because gas was not used, but you always needed to carry them.

Rationing started fairly soon and sugar was one of the first things to be rationed and as the war progressed I think all food was rationed. I don’t think bread was, but flour was and everything you can think of — so even when I got married in 1947 and the war had been over for two years there was still rationing existing and for a wedding cake my mother had to give dried fruit to the baker to make the cake which she had had to take out of our food rationing allowances. Also clothing was rationed, furniture was rationed, you couldn’t just buy furniture unless you paid a lot of money and had very expensive furniture. For my wedding dress my grandmother gave me clothing coupons so that I would be able to have a white wedding dress and I also bought a half a silk parachute — I shared with another girl at work, we had half a parachute each — my mother and father sat and undid all the stitching on it. They had a lot of very strong stitching on them because they were used to save an airman’s life and then we had these very large pointed diamond shaped pieces of pure silk in a creamy colour which I made into nightdresses and other under-clothes which saved me a lot of coupons for my wedding day.

Don:
Perhaps you ought to say that these were discarded parachutes, they weren’t taken away from airmen!

Vera:
Yes they weren’t ones that were in use. Perhaps they had improved them and these silk ones were then sold at quite a cheap price for people like me to use.

There were a lot of air-raids in our area during the war and we used to spent the nights in the air-raid shelter and in the morning when the “All Clear” sounded (usually about 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning) we would all come out and go into the house. There were also daylight raids and I can remember being out with my brother (he was a baby) and I was pushing him in the pram and an enemy aircraft swooped down and was machine gunning in the area where I was and that was quite frightening and I just ran with the pram as fast as I could and went into a shelter which had been built for air-raid wardens — these were voluntary workers (usually men) who were in charge of an area to see what damage had been done after an air-raid. At least it was shelter that you could run into quickly.

Don:
You talk about the dangers from air-raids, one of the dangers was shrapnel. When you have guns shooting up into the sky bursting in an attempt to bring down enemy aircraft, those shells (when they burst) broke up into jagged sharp pieces of metal which flew all over the place and they would come down and sound rather like rain. People used to go and shelter under shop blinds, if you think of a chunk of metal descending from the sky…it wasn’t actually very safe! You had to get into something more substantial.

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