蜜芽传媒

My maiden name was Dorothy Elizabeth Borrell and I lived with a sister and two brothers and a cousin in the depressing mining village of Hetton-le-Hole. When the war started I was 11, and had won a scholarship to Houghton-le-Spring Grammar School but for months we had to teach ourselves all the new subjects as the authorities battled to build shelters at the school. We went for an hour on Mondays and were given work in 9 subjects, then returned it on Fridays. I still remember that work I did on my own.

At school we were fitted with gas-masks. They had visors, not goggles as 鈥淒r.Who鈥� recently erroneously depicted. We had to run through a tunnel of tear-gas to test them but I was so scared, I ran through holding my breath, unaware how useless that was. I was lucky : mine fitted comfortably and I could even sleep in it, as requested . Each time the Nazis evolved another gas, we were mustered to have filters put on, so that by the end of the war, our masks were considerably elongated! Thank goodness Hitler had been gassed in the first World War and did not authorise the use of gas against us.

The North-East had its heaviest raids early in the war after the Germans occupied Norway and tried to bomb Newcastle and Sunderland and get the bridges and the ship-building. I remember seeing a coal truck which had been blown from Sunderland station right across the road into Joseph 鈥榮 sportshop window. From its bumper he hung a sign: 鈥淏usiness as Usual鈥�. A fortnight later, he exhibited the architectural plans for Joseph鈥檚 after the war, glittering and resplendent. He was a real tonic. Our Hurricane squadrons gave those bombers such a mauling, they never did try much more out of Scandinavia. The Peenemunde rockets, though, were another story.

Our family started by going in raids into a shelter Dad had made with our next-door neighbour. Dad must have been influenced by the huge German block-houses he had seen at Hill 60 in Ypres during the first World War .It had a massive slab roof and was just as cold and damp; the result was, as we got used to raids, we stayed in bed, or lay on our faces in the cupboard under the stairs. At school, we first were trained to throw ourselves prone on the floor near the inner classroom wall if there was a sudden raid. Everyone feared a blitzkrieg situation. This training had, for me a curious result. Years later, I was walking with my new husband past a building site in Cape Town when the siren went off. In its deafening wail, I found myself flinging myself on my face amid the dirt and debris, to the embarrassment of all.

Later, we went in raids during school hours into long shelters of concrete with huge steel doors that clanged shut. We had to play 鈥淧assing the Message鈥� games down the long rows of benches in the smelly semi-dark, desperately hoping we鈥檇 get out before we needed the toilet 鈥� a communal pail behind a curtain where all one鈥檚 noises were overheard. It gave you both claustrophobia AND constipation! However, that didn鈥檛 stop us praying for a raid during a Maths or Physics exam.

Our school started a girls鈥� training corps long before the government. We had our own uniform and syllabus, though we did the usual square-bashing .We leant Morse, semaphore and Asdic, First Aid, map-reading and meteorology, aeroplane identification and how to deal with incendiary bombs. The boys automatically went into the RAF so they had an Air Training Corps, but we supplied recruits for all the women鈥檚 services.

Late in the war, we visited the local Ack-ack batteries, which now were manned by Americans. We invited them to our school dance. Hordes of squat, pimply, bespectacled whites turned up and a few well-muscled blacks. We realised the whites were Class 4Bs who did the administration of the gun batteries but the blacks did the firing. We had no problem with race, as blacks have settled for centuries in our northern ports. I remember they introduced us at that dance to 鈥淏ebop鈥�.

To improve our French, our teacher asked us to correspond with French troops who had escaped to Britain. Mine was a Free French commando. He had little English, so he wrote to me in French and I wrote to him in both French and English. His letters were heavily censored but I gather now he was at Narvik, the attack on the German radar stations before D-day and in the D-day landings, of course. My parents were impressed by his fervent patriotism and how he exhorted me to read good French literature like Victor Hugo .He wrote wearily after terrible 鈥渙p鈥漵, painstakingly correcting my mistakes鈥斺�淚 have been all night up to my neck in water鈥� .We sent him gifts 鈥� knitted stockings and a small hip-flask of my father鈥檚 precious whisky- but never got to meet him, his schedule being so heavy. After D-day, there was silence. Two years later, he wrote he had returned home to find his wife had been a Nazi collaborator .The victory mob had had their revenge, shaved her head and violated her .He was now Inspector in the Surete in Nantes, 鈥渁nd all my hopes are dust.鈥�

I visited France the year of VE in Europe. I was horrified meeting resistance fighters who had had their eyelids torn off, hearing of all the atrocities and seeing children with their ribs sticking out from hunger. We might grumble about food, especially the North East who never got off-ration extras (as a Depression area before the war), but we were really very fit on our Spartan rations and the balanced diet the Ministry of Food gave us. A third of a pint of milk a day, school dinners that were often dull but wholesome, supplemented later by South African fish (snoek), USA spam and Canadian intensely delicious vitaminised jelly, meant Durham children were healthier than they鈥檇 ever been in the industrial slums. As we fought on against the Japs, I realised how lucky we were never to have been occupied by the Nazis.

Meanwhile, my elder sister, a trained nurse now, had joined the Queen Alexandra鈥檚 Imperial Military Nursing Reserve and was posted in the Desert Campaign to Egypt and TransJordan. They had extraordinary adventures the B.B.C. is yet to cover - the Jews were fighting them as were the Germans and Italians. Her ambulance train was blown up by Jewish terrorists. I make a plea for her story to be told: she died at 56. Nothing has been done on the valiant Q.A.鈥檚 by the media.

My elder brother is still alive (83) and can tell his own story. He was a bomb-aimer-navigator in Lancasters. My mother ran the Red Cross post and my father seemed to be a Civil Defence co-ordinator. This meant when we got a Morrison Indoor steel shelter, the only occupants were my little brother and an eighty-year old aunt, because I was a bicycle messenger. After the war, I was astonished to see the regular army come to our house and remove from beneath it cases of ammunition, grenades, rifles and machine-guns. As a captain in the D.L.I. in First World War, my father had been secretly recruited to liase between the army and the clandestine forces of resistance in the event of a Nazi occupation. When I remember a parachute mine dropped just over the hill and could have landed on our house and sent us all to blazes, I am so grateful to the Poles who filled it full of sand.

The war ended before I could join the W.R.N.S. My sister returned and emigrated from drab, post-war Britain to Rhodesia and I followed her in time. I went from a country where disillusioned people shuffled out of cinemas when the National Anthem played, to one where the audience stood and clapped as the image of King George and Queen Elizabeth appeared on the screen. Alas, these loyal people were to be betrayed and forced to accept, after 17 years of war, a Communist dictatorship.

But that is another story.

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