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Part four of an edited oral history interview with Mrs. Anne Misselke (née Alexandre) conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“David had been in Netheravon about four days with my grandma and so after breakfast he knew the ropes. Auntie Pat would say, ‘Children, dogs!’ They had two dogs, one of these great big Dulux type dogs and another 57 varieties and it had been a job of David’s to take these dogs for a good run in the mornings. We weren’t going to school - we didn’t know how long we were going to be there. So he said, ‘Come on, girls.’ So there we were this raggle taggle of three little bedraggled girls and David, who was a very, very thin little boy, and the two dogs, he said, 'come on, come on.’ So off we went and he took all through some little lanes and undergrowth and goodness knows where and we ended up at this long building with this door so we went in the door and there was this big Cook with a big apron on. A big fat chap and white hat and long tables full of food and he said, ‘Hello, David who are these little girls then?’ So he said, ‘Well that one’s my niece and those two are my cousins.’ He said, ‘You are not old enough to have a niece!’ ‘Yes, I am. My sister was 20 when I was born’ so there sort of thing. ‘Oh, right children! Well we’ve got sausage rolls this morning, do you fancy a sausage roll then?’ ‘Oh, yes’ so we had a sausage roll. ‘Dogs’ ‘yes,’ the dogs had a sausage roll and we chatted to the Cook and he said, ‘Cheerio children, see you tomorrow.’ So off we went and we went through the same procedure, lanes and what not, another door in another Cookhouse, not such a fat cook this time, because it was full of Army camps you see Salisbury Plain. ‘Hello, David.’ You know David had obviously been going and he was well known and they thought he was such a thin little boy he needed feeding up. Then we chatted to this one and he said, ‘Come on Dave, you’d better get back to the pub, Pat will be waiting for you with a dinner.’ So of course we had to run back to the pub and of course we couldn’t eat much when we got back because we’d been stuffing ourselves with all these other things. Anyway in the afternoons we spent damming a stream that David had started damming and that was what we did most days.

My dad and mum were going round looking for jobs but by that time they knew where a lot of their friends where. My mum had either telephoned if they had a telephone or written to them and she’d written to her cousin Mollie who was in Stockport and also these friends of hers, Connie and Alec. They had evacuated, he was a teacher and he’d gone to England with his school but they’d had to join up with another school and several of the teachers had been made redundant and he was one of them. But he had found a job as a Head Master of a Church of England school up in Lancashire in a village called Crawshawbooth. They wrote and said that the builder in the village was really very short of men and he would like it if my dad would go up there, he’d have an interview and he was sure he would get a job. So they went up, my dad had the interview and the chap offered him the job if he could find somewhere to live. So Connie said she would find some rooms and sure enough in a couple of days she rang and she said, ‘These two ladies, maiden ladies, had offered us some rooms.’ So we went up and we went straight to Connie’s first of all to have a nice hot dinner and then we walked back through the village to where these ladies where.

It was on the main Burnley road and it was the end of a terrace of four or five and at the side was a very steep hill going down to another little row of three more cottages and this was called Wesley Square at the bottom. We went in the front door and the ladies were there. The stairs went straight up and their living room was a nice big living room there and through at the end here was a door into what was going to be our living room. But we had some stairs in our living room to go down into the cellar area where there was a kitchen and a coal house and a wash house. If you wanted to go to the toilet you had to go across Wesley Square, there were four toilets in Wesley Square. Along the front on the Burnley Road, I think there were five cottages and then there were these three down at the bottom and these four toilets served all these cottages and the mums took it in turns to scrub out the toilets and white stone the floor. My mum, who only died last year aged 97, remembered about four years ago, that if you were fat or pregnant and you went to the toilet in Wesley Square you had to go in backwards and then sit down because they were so narrow! But it was filthy - the kitchen was very, very dirty. My mother nearly had a fit. Anyway these two ladies showed us where my grandpa was going to have a room, a little room and there was going to be a bigger room with a bed for my mum and dad and another bed for me to sleep in and for Gene in the holidays. They said, ‘We’ve got a bathroom, it’s under the stairs - there it is, there. You can use it after we’ve gone to factory in the morning, we go at half past six.’ So my mum was awake the next morning to see the bathroom after these lady had gone to work and she ran down the stairs and we heard her say, ‘Jim, Jim, quick. Come and see, come and see.’ So we jumped out bed, my dad and I, ran down the stairs and she said, ‘We can’t use this bathroom, look!’ And we peered in, it was under the stairs the tap end was here, the end without the taps was right under the stairs. At that end there was a pile of coal on top of the coal was a cat, in the middle was an open umbrella and right under the taps was a plate of fresh meat waiting to be cooked! In the wash basin that was just there, was dirty water. So she said, ‘We can’t use this! Why have they left that dirty water in there?’ She said, ‘I know as we were walking down the village we saw that hardware man, he was putting all his stuff in and I bet you he’s putting it all out. Now we’ll quickly run upstairs and get dressed and get my purse and we’ll walk up the village.’ So we didn’t bother to wash or anything, we quickly dressed and sure enough he was putting everything out. So we bought three big white enamel jugs, three white enamel bowls, two slop pails with lids and a very, very big saucepan. So we came back and my mum boiled the saucepan, one of the jugs was between the two bedrooms with cold water. My grandpa had half a jug of hot water, we had a big jug of hot water and we washed ourselves in our rooms and tipped it into the slop pails. And my mother emptied the slop pails in Wesley Square and that’s how we kept ourselves clean while we lived there. These ladies, every Sunday they would make a big bowl of pastry and leave it down in the cellar, on the table completely uncovered next to the cooker, the cellar was painted with distemper that was very crumbly. When my mum went over to Rochdale to fetch Gene for Christmas, Gene was rather a plump little girl and she walked very heavily and of course every time she walked along our room you can imagine what was happening to the pastry down below, all the bits falling off the ceiling! These ladies, they were lovely really and they would say, ‘Eeh, Mrs. Alexandre if you ever want to make a pie you know you can have some pastry it’s down there in’t bowl.’ So my mum said, ‘Oh, we don’t really like pies, thank you very much, we don’t eat them.’ I mean little did they know that she made pies when they were at work but she didn’t eat any of their pies.

When Gene came then my dad said to us, ‘Now girls we are very, very poor and there won’t be very much money for Christmas presents. And we’ve just got the make the best of the Christmas we’ve got. So here’s two shillings, you can go down to Rawtenstall market (that was our nearest town) and see what you can find.’ So we walked down to Rawtenstall and into the market which was a very nice market, we looked round and then we saw this stall right in the middle and it was full of people all standing round. We thought, what is going on there? So we pushed our way, as children do, to the very front and we saw this man and he had this magic machine! It was just like a little wooden mangle and he had a piece of white paper and he was putting it through and turning the handle and every single time out came a green pound note! He was selling those machines like hot cakes! He had a lady, she couldn’t get them into the brown paper bags fast enough and they were 1/6d each. So we said, ‘Well, if we had one of those machines our troubles will be over and we’ll have sixpence left to have a threepenny ice cream each to have on the way home!’ So we thought well we’d better watch two or three more times and sure enough every single time out came a pound note! So we thought well have one of those. So we paid over our 2/- got our sixpence change and went to the ice cream man, got our ice cream and walked all the way back up to Crawshawbooth licking our ice cream. When we got in my mum and dad were sitting at the table having a cup of tea so my dad said, ‘Well then, what did you get?’ So we said, ‘Well, we’ve got something — all our troubles will be over — but before you see what it is you’ve got to get a piece of white paper the same size as a pound note.’ So he said, ‘Have you got some white paper, Ruth?’ Yes. So he got a pound note out and he cut it to size you see and then he put the pound note back in his pocket, ‘Right, now then let’s have a look at this famous thing then.’ So we took it out of the bag — he said, ‘What do I have to do?’ We said, ‘Well put it through and turn the handle’ and of course we were watching expectantly thinking it was going to be a pound note and of course you can guess what came out can’t you? A white paper came out the other side! ‘Oh’, we said, ‘you haven’t done it right!’ So I had a go — white paper came out, Gene had a go — white paper came out and my mum had a go and white paper came out. Poor Gene and I were so upset - we burst into tears because we thought we’d saved the world with this magic machine. My dad said, ‘Now girls come along now, sit down, sit down, calm down, have a drink, now calm down.’ ‘Now then’ he said, when we’d stopped crying, ‘was that chap selling a lot of those?’ So we said, ‘Oh, yes he was selling them like hot cakes. The lady couldn’t get them into the brown paper bag fast enough.’ ‘Well’ he said, ‘now then’ he said, ‘you’ve been taken in by a confidence trickster. He’s going to be well off for Christmas. And all those other people like you who have bought them without really thinking that you can’t make pound notes out of white paper have been taken in by a confidence trickster. Now I hope you’ve learnt your lesson now, just realise you can’t make pound notes out of paper.’ He said, ‘Never mind, we’ll have as a good a Christmas as we can’ and we did and of course then Gene had to go back to Rochdale.

So then 1941 dawned and we heard that there was a big Channel Island Society in Stockport and they had a meeting the first Sunday of the month. So we decided we would go. We got the bus outside our door into Manchester then we had to change into another bus to Stockport and we got to this place and it was in a big old factory on the road called Wellington Road which was leading down into Mersey Square at Stockport. You went in through the door and there was a big circular staircase and there was this one big room where they had this meeting. As we were walking up the staircase my mum said, ‘Oh, look there’s so and so’ and she could see all her friends and then her cousin Mollie. She saw Mollie and she saw Len and the children and oh, everybody was coming up and giving them big hugs. And then we saw this lady, she was a very old friend of my parents and her sister was there, I’d always called them auntie Gert and auntie Prim and auntie Gert came rushing up, ‘Oh, Ruth and Jim am I glad to see you! Where are you living? What are you doing Jim, where are you working?’ So she said, ‘I’m looking for somebody to live upstairs. I’ve taken on this house. Eddy is in the Air Force and the rent is really much too much for me. I’m looking for somebody to share the house with me. Oh, do say it will be you, I would love it to be you.’ So my dad said, ‘Hold on, Gert I’ve only just recently got this job up in Crawshawbooth what do I do for a job? ‘Oh’ she said, ‘Stockport is a big place. Get a day off next week and come down to the Labour Exchange, I’m sure you’d find a job.’ ‘Oh, Ruth’ she was going on, she really wanted us to be there. So all the way back they were talking and my dad said, ‘Oh, I’m going to ask for the day off next Wednesday and I’ll come to Stockport.’ So he asked for the day off, he explained to man about all the Guernsey people that he’d seen and so the man said, ‘Alright, you can have the day off.’ So he came to the Labour Exchange in Stockport and they said to him, ‘Well, if you are prepared to work anywhere in the country and have leave just like a soldier you can work for the Essential Works Department building airfields. You won’t know where you are going until you are sent there. You may be there six weeks you may be there six months.’ ‘Oh’, my dad said, ‘I’ll take that, I’ll take it.’ So of course we were overjoyed when he came back and said what had happened. He didn’t mind as long as we could get away from Crawshawbooth, because it was so depressing, it was such a depressing place.�

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