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In September 1938 the British Prime Minister promised “Peace in our Time”. That ‘peace’ ended a year later on 3rd September 1939 when Britain declared war against Germany. This was just before my fifth birthday.
The church bells on Sundays were silenced and I was sad about that, but my gentle parents sheltered me from the dreadful truth. I just watched with interest as the preparations for war went ahead. Windows were criss-crossed with lengths of sticky brown tape. I asked, “Why...?” Mum said, “To stop bits of glass flying about and cutting people if a bomb explodes nearby…” We children watched the searchlights scanning the night-time sky, looking for enemy ‘planes. We also were fascinated by the huge, bulbous, barrage balloons which floated high.
ARP wardens patrolled doing their nightly check, knocking on doors or shouting, “Put that light out!” at the slightest chink of light which had eluded the heavy, black dyed sheets which had to be used to black out all the windows at night.
We asked the men removing the road signs “Why are you taking them down?” One gruffly replied: “No good showing the German invaders how to get to places, they’ll ’ave to find that out for theirselves…” … so we didn’t help any ‘poor lost souls’!
Unperturbed by our presence, the grown-ups started to speak in hushed, conspiratorial tones to each other and they talked ‘above our heads’. They endlessly discussed rationing, queuing, war efforts and would use phrases such as: ‘for the duration’ and ‘called up’, We didn’t know then what all this meant but we very soon were to learn what ‘conscription’ and ‘called up’ meant to my Dad and Mum, my sister, Jill, and me. My friends and I were not troubled by the gossip. We couldn’t understand it so our attention would drift away to much more important topics: “What do we give to the newts to eat? They don’t seem to like breadcrumbs…...”
My first awareness that war was really ‘serious’ came when sweets were put on ration; points as well as pennies were needed. My kind grandmother always gave me her sweet coupons. But most serious of all, my beloved daddy was conscripted, taken away from us by the army. Whistling happily, but rather tunelessly, my Dad would no longer drive his small black Ford car to work with Quaker Oats. There would be no more tunnels with cut-out windows that he made from Quaker Oats’ cardboard boxes, no more visits to his firm’s office where the friendly manual switchboard operators would let me put the plugs into the extension sockets, no more hearing the explosion in the factory as wheat became Puffed Wheat and no more nights when my Dad came home from work, would he wait for me outside the garage , let me jump onto his lap and allow me to ‘steer’ the car into the garage . No more would he tell me that I was the world’s best driver.
When I noticed that Mum was sad at his leaving, I ‘cheered her up’: “Daddy going into the army is much worse for me than it is for you, Mummy, I’ve known him all my life and you haven’t” I reasoned. At least this ‘reasoning’ made her laugh…
Dad had been especially unlucky, as when, on 11 September 1941 in Church Stretton, he was conscripted, he was just 5 months below the 40 year age limit for compulsory conscription.
Dad in his hated army uniform
During the whole time that Dad was away from us, I hated our next-door neighbour, Mr Barton who had been ‘C’ graded so he was not sent on active service. I used to glare menacingly at him through the holes in the fence separating our gardens. Years later Mum told me how they had all laughed at me, although, Mum said, Mr Barton felt very sorry for me… “Look at that poor little Ann, glaring at me” he would say, “I do wish I could help her to understand…”
Dad did his 'square bashing' in Church Stretton and during his home leaves, I watched intently as he cleaned his brass buttons. “You just slide them into this slit in this special piece of metal and then polish them. That way you don’t get the Brasso onto your tunic.” He told me what he had to do to make his boots shine: “I had to learn from the ‘old lags’ how to do ‘bulling’. First I have to heat up a spoon, like this” and he paused “until it is very hot,” and he demonstrated the technique. “Then I use it to singe the leather of the toes of my boots - this burns off any uneven pimples in the leather - then I add polish and buff them up to shine ‘like the morning sun.’ Just you look at them now!” he added with pride as he gave them a last loving rub with a soft cloth.
He spent his ‘square-bashing’ days doing mindless chores. When an important army officer was coming, the drill sergeant would say: “Look at you bloody lazy layabouts. Get to work making these f…. g barracks spick and span, start by white-washing the blasted coal.” But Dad told us how, by many devious means, he ‘wangled’ more than his allowed number of home ‘leaves’….
He was sent abroad with the 8th Army and in October 1942 was in the battle of El Alamein in Egypt. After that he spent most of his war service in hospital with severe amoebic dysentery which plagued him for the rest of his life. Dad was later posted to Israel and finally to Italy where he supervised Italian POW camps. The only Italian words that he learned were “subito” (‘get a move on’) and “domani” (tomorrow)!
Whenever he could, Dad wrote airletters to us and he sent us lovely presents from abroad. By my bed I still (2005) have a mother-of-pearl covered New Testament from Jerusalem . It is inscribed “To Ann with everlasting love from Daddy.”
Photo sent to Dad in Egypt
Dad’s Present sent to me from Israel
After the war, Dad, when in expansive mood, would tell us his ‘war stories’ and, like all teenagers, we used to say “Oh, No! not again, Dad”. He told us how he had kept a chameleon for a long time as a pet, hoping to bring it home with him. However, the creature fortuitously escaped before it could be brought to our chilly climate!
Before he left, in anticipation of air raids, Dad had dug into our garden a corrugated iron Anderson shelter. “Invaders” was a new word to add to our rapidly expanding vocabulary. I had nightmares that Germans invaders would parachute in and kill me in my bed…..
In wartime England we led a very different life to today’s children. Nowadays, we might be described as ‘deprived’ but then we certainly were not. We had a great deal of freedom and we lived in Hunton Bridge, a very pleasant, sleepy village which nestled in the River Gade Valley. We wandered freely over fields and we spoke to everyone, in spite of our mothers’ warning us, ‘You must not to speak to strangers’. Maybe there were undesirable, malevolent people wandering around then but since there was no television, there was little or no media ‘hype’ over incidents - There was almost no traffic on the roads — just the occasional doctor’s car, ambulance or fire engine and the horse-drawn carts of farmers, milkmen, coal merchants and brewers.
Living in the country was a tremendous bonus and the long walk to school opened up new vistas for my friend Elisabeth and me. Our freedom and the perceived safety of our environment meant that we enjoyed the changing of the seasons to the full. We had a tramp’s intimate knowledge of the local countryside. We knew which trees gave the best shelter from the rain, which apple trees hung over the road, where to find walnuts and which gardeners had planted their raspberry canes or gooseberry bushes too close to their chain link fences.
For a dare, we would sometimes ‘scrump’ apples. These ‘scrumped’ apples were delicious, cool and crisp and juicy after the night-time frosts. But one day, a policeman caught us in an orchard ‘in the act’. He told us that he would put our names in his little black book if he caught us again stealing apples.
In spring we watched the farm labourers ploughing and sowing, often with horse-drawn ploughs and harrows, leaving behind them a smell of damp, earth. With long handled scythes the farm labourers, reaped the corn and cut the grass and then, with their very long pronged pitchforks, they tossed the hay or stooked the sheaves of corn to dry. During the threshing of the corn with a steam driven threshing machine, we saw frantic mice trying to escape from the thresher’s blades… My little sister, Jill, was convinced that the farmers ‘threshed’ the mice, not the corn.…
In late summer in the very early, dewy, mornings, in fields shrouded in mist, we gathered mushrooms with tiny white maggots in them and took them home for our mothers to fry — the mushrooms, not the maggots - for breakfast.
With nets, made from old stockings, bits of wire and sticks, we fished in the River Gage. In jam jars, with string handles, we brought home frogspawn and Golden Crested Newts. We were unwittingly, contributing to the Golden Crested Newts near extinction.
Often, with a crowd of village children, we watched the village blacksmith as he shod the local farm working and hunt horses or made gates or repaired farm machinery. He used bellows to make his fire roar and then held a bar of iron in the fierce heat until it glowed red-hot. Then he beat it over his anvil, making a ringing noise and showering the forge floor with dazzling sparks in the process. When the shoe was fashioned he lifted the hoof of the patiently waiting horse and, with a sizzling noise and an acrid smell of burning hoof, he hammered nails into the hoof to keep the shoe firmly in place.
Mum was doing part-time work, for the War Office so during my school holidays, she used to get the potatoes all peeled and ready and ask me: “Ann, at a quarter to twelve please put the potatoes on the gas stove so that they will be cooked and ready for lunch”. But I always forgot to add the salt or forgot to light the gas or forgot altogether to put them on. Mum would complain; “Ann, your dreaminess and forgetfulness drive me to distraction…”.
Elisabeth and I used to watch lovers on the corner of her street kissing ‘goodnight’ and couldn’t understand why they took so long about it. I ‘gate-crashed’ the double wedding of two of Elisabeth’s cousins at the US Army base in Bovingdon. These brides were two of the many ‘war brides’. We ‘stuffed’ so much ice cream that we were sick! The Americans were so nice to us; I expect that they understood that we couldn’t get wonderful ice creams in wartime England so they forgave our bad manners.
During all our primary school years we had frequent air raids. And we quickly learned the different sounds of the alarm siren with its variable whoooer, whoooer, whooer sound and the continuous scream of the all clear siren. Our school day always started with prayers followed by gas mask drill and the practice of sheltering under our desks in case there were a sudden air raid. Apart from the fact that we had to spend some cold, damp nights in the shelter, and our lessons were sometimes interrupted by an orderly dash to the school’s shelter with its dripping ceiling and mildewy smell, air raids did not worry me. I had no sense of their impending danger. I was confident that nothing would disturb my tranquil life. If a siren sounded when we were walking to or from school, we were told to throw ourselves to the ground. This, of course, meant that our mothers didn’t scold us even for the muddiest possible clothing. We played this to advantage!
At the nearby Leavesden aerodrome, which was about a mile away from us, the de Havilland Aircraft Company produced Halifax and Mosquitos aircraft for the RAF. So when air raids started, de Havillands, was an obvious target for the enemy’s bombs. Luckily no bombs or rockets fell very near to our house but Elisabeth, who lived only about a mile away from us, remembers well that some fell in the field behind her house. Elisabeth told me: “One unexploded bomb was found in a neighbour’s garden just three doors away. We went to see it. The disposal team arrived and we were evacuated locally for several days. After the controlled explosion of the 1,000 lb bomb we were allowed home to a window- and door-less house.” Often, after a raid, we would collect the thin strips of aluminium foil which had been used to confuse the enemy’s radar. We also sometimes found bits of shrapnel.
On 20th August 1940, The Battle of Britain began and a large fleet of the Battle of Britain planes took off from De Havillands where they had been produced. They roared noisily and to us, excitingly, over our heads. ..

My Mother wanted us to have a happy, untroubled childhood, and not be worried about the dangers of war so she concealed all the details of the major events of the war from us, She was so successful that I had no idea of the importance of the news of the war, nor of its implications for Britain, for her and for my father
In spite of food rationing, we always had plenty to eat. School dinners cost three pence for the small children and, as you were promoted up the school, the cost rose to four pence and you got a different coloured ticket. The meals we were given were nourishing, I am sure, but seldom did we enjoy them. We often had rather tough and sometimes fishy tasting stew and it was followed often with spotted dick pudding. The currant spots were very sparse and surrounded by lots of soggy dough that, when you were hungry enough, you ate.
If we didn’t eat everything up, we were told to put it into the Pig Swill Bin. I wondered if pigs were cannibals as we had to put left over pork in there too… Everything possible was recycled: tins, waste paper, cardboard. Especially important was the saving of rubber boots, and hot water bottles since the Japanese forces threatened to cut off all rubber supplies.
Pig Swill Bin
Dig for Victory Poster
At one point in the war onions were so scarce that one was offered as a a raffle prize…. As part of the “Dig for Victory” campaign, potatoes were planted in the lawn behind the air raid shelter and my Mother kept chickens. She was trying to augment the egg ration, but the ‘blessed’ hens kept laying soft-shelled eggs which messily flopped out onto the filthy floor of their run. Mum then learned that to get hard shells one has to give hens broken shellfish shells in their feed. Hens were not my Mother's forte.
When late in the war the German’s V1 flying bombs, nicknamed ‘Doodlebugs’, were launched at Britain, we quickly learned to listen for their motor to cut out and to count the seconds which gave us a clue as to how far away they would fall. We knew that with only ten seconds of silence after their engine cut out, there would be an explosion as the bomb hit the ground.
We heard on the radio on 6 August 1945 that the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima but we had no idea of the horror of this act. We were just told that, at long, long last the War had ended. I thought that the ‘blue birds’ would once again fly over the White Cliffs of Dover...
When in June 1945, Victory in Europe was celebrated, our daily newspaper, ‘The Daily Mirror’, celebrated by, for the very first time, showing the cartoon character, Jane, in the nude! A huge bonfire was lit outside the blacksmith's forge in the village square, but I stood aloof from the celebrating, rowdy crowd and sulked as my Dad was still away. He had been abroad for 4 years.
At long last, Mum got a small yellow envelope. She opened it with trembling fingers. The telegram was from the War Office and in cold, formal language, informed her that her husband was on his way home. I waited all day for my Dad’s return under the horse chestnut tree at the end of our driveway. This was an excellent vantage point, one could see all the way down the hill to the railway bridge at the bottom. Never before had I had to be so patient.
Eventually, very late at night, Dad returned. He was thin and debilitated from a long battle with amoebic dysentery. He had gone away young and fit, with lovely curly golden hair, beautiful blue eyes and a fresh complexion. He had returned old, thin and almost bald. Mum was shocked and my sister, Jill, didn't even know him and said "Hello, Uncle Stan". How that must have hurt him! She had been only about two and a half years old when he was conscripted and she had then refused to say ‘goodbye’ to him because he was going in the ‘warmy’. Appendix in separate folder,

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