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A YOUNGSTER’S WAR by Doris Grimsley (nee Briggs)
War was declared in September 1939 but at 4½ it didn’t mean much to me. I lived in a small terraced house in Plumstead, South East London with my grandmother and my parents. We had an Anderson shelter fitted in the garden and went down there to sleep occasionally — it was very damp and there were spiders. We also went once to the brick shelter in the school playground opposite our house. The Matchless Motor Cycle factory was in our road and the Woolwich Arsenal was very near.
I started school briefly in May 1940 and my sister was born in July 1940. By the time I should have gone back to school after the summer holidays London was badly bombed and my mother was advised to take my baby sister and me away as we lived so close to the Arsenal and the motorbike factory. The three of us went to Peterborough in Northants and were billeted with a family named Twelvetrees. The boy Alan was just a year older than me and I remember his mother encouraging him to eat his cauliflower florets or he’d only be Eleventrees! I went to the local school and had my first sight of a country school mistress — the vision has stayed with me since. She was a large matronly figure dressed in a gymslip with a sash at the waist. This was a shortish garment so her navy bloomers hung below it to the knees where they joined her thick black stockings. At break or maybe it was lunchtime we had to sit around a roaring fire and drink warm milk. I’d never liked milk and was promptly sick and had to stand outside in the corridor. We soon came home as we’d heard that my father, who worked in the Arsenal, had a transfer to an armaments factory in Lancashire and we could all go up there to live.
We stayed in a large house for the Christmas period and moved to Haydock. A small estate had been built especially for the factory workers and we were lucky to get a house. This remained our home until well after the end of the war. We were a mixed bunch on the estate. A nice mixed race girl named Helen lived opposite. Her father was black and her mother was white. Another girl I made friends with was Jewish and her name was Eunice. Her mother had a big “daisy” bike and her father fixed blocks on the pedals so all of us children could learn to ride it. The few toys we had were shared by us all. I had a big stuffed doll dressed as a jockey. The kids next door had some balls — one lucky girl had a doll’s pram with a teddy bear in it and some of the boys had marbles. The only time we knew there was a war on was at night when the drone of planes going over to bomb Liverpool kept us awake. Of course we all listened to the radio and the voice of Churchill seemed a comfort to the grown-ups. I went to a church school about a mile from where we lived, it was near a colliery so on our daily walks to and from school we would pass the miners’ cottages and see the men coming off shift covered in coal. Later when we were older we played on the slag heaps, getting filthy and eating lumps of coal because we were so hungry. The smell of coal now brings back that memory. I only had one sweet during the whole of the war and that was a piece of nougat when a local shop had some in. Other than that we had licorice root or some cocoa powder mixed with a small amount of sugar. Our mums would put this into a newspaper cone and we’d lick a finger and dip it into the mixture. School was pleasurable whilst I was in the infants. My teacher was Miss Noon and she was friendly with another teacher Miss Knight, the significance of which wasn’t apparent to me at the time. We had a little nap in the afternoons when we turned all the tables upside down and put cushions in them to lie on. It was lovely. When I went up to the juniors it wasn’t so lovely as the teachers were strict and I frequently got rapped over the knuckles for talking. I made friends with two local girls, Audrey Dale and Cora Kay. I had to speak “Lancashire” when I was with my school friends and “South London” when I was at home. When I met my friends whilst out with my parents I was struck dumb!
Although we weren’t affected by the bombing we felt the effects of food and clothes rationing. We had our own chickens and it was my job to gather the eggs every day — any more than six and they had to be passed on somewhere else. We also grew our own vegetables and to this day I have a scar from when I fell over a potato sack and cut my leg. No money for a doctor or any National Health Service then. All our potato peelings were boiled up on the stove for the chickens to eat and we also had a pig bin on our doorstep which we put our waste food in — but there was so little to eat in the first place that very little was wasted. Dad seemed to be in with the right people as he often came home with a piece of meat from the factory and said it was Black Market.
Christmas was a lean time for presents as there was nothing to buy. I remember being kept up one night to help stuff some of my old black school stockings with scraps and mother made them into soft toys for my sister. It was then I found out there was no Father Christmas. That year I had two books in my stocking, they were both boy’s annuals but I loved them and read them from cover to cover many times over. I was also given one of those small cocktail umbrellas, like we have in drinks now, and I treasured it for years.
The local Picturedrome drew us like magnets when cowboy films were on. Roy Rogers and Trigger or the Three Stooges comedies. The cinema was run very efficiently by a family called Bracegirdle, Mr kept order in the cinema, Mrs was the projectionist and Miss sold tickets. We children sat on forms at the front for 3d each; the miners’ wives usually sat in the 6d seats behind us and brought a bag of peas to shell with them for their husbands’ suppers. If we were lucky they gave us some peas to eat to keep us quiet.
Other than the films we listened to the radio and all the favourite programmes of the time. ITMA (It’s That Man Again) with Tommy Handley and such characters as Mona Lot who said “Can I do you now sir?” which made us laugh even though we didn’t know that it was a bit rude. There was a comedian called Rob Wilton who always started by saying “The day war broke out...” and of course Vera Lynn singing to the troops and Glen Miller’s orchestra from America.
We had a young lady who drove a van around the village selling hardware, Sunlight soap, Rinso washing powder and dolly blue bags for the wash tub. She used to go out with some Yankee soldiers and as she knew I was fond of reading she regularly bought me an American comic which was about the size of our broadsheet newspapers today. I thought she was wonderful.
Monday was always wash day throughout the land I think. When I went home to lunch it was always something cold as Mum was busy with washing The kitchen would be full of steam from the copper boiling up the sheets and towels and the washing would be folded and put through a great big mangle which stood in the yard. On other days of the week we kids used the mangles when we played newspaper reporters, putting a sheet of newspaper, or a sheet from my beloved comic, through the rollers turning the handle and shouting “hot off the press”. Simple pleasures.
As too was playing hop scotch when I chalked a hop scotch pitch on the pavement outside our house. Mum used to fill a couple of jam jars with milk, put lids on them and put them in the patch pockets of my coat. The idea was that as I jumped, the milk would slosh about and turn to cream. Unfortunately I fell over a lot so don’t think it was successful. We had our milk delivered but not in bottles. We left a small churn on the doorstep and a man would tip the milk in it from a bigger churn. Both he and the greengrocer had horses pulling their carts and it was a race to see who could collect the manure if the horse “obliged” outside our house. A precious commodity when growing your own vegetables but not a favourite chore for a young girl.
The coat I had for most of the war was a grey astrakhan made by mother out of one of hers. It had a hood and mittens sewn on the sleeves with elastic. It was big for me when I was 6 but more like a blazer by the time I got to 10. I can only remember having two nice garments — one was a lacy knitted cardigan in maroon fine wool made for me by a Welsh lady in the village. I can see her now sitting by the range in our kitchen finishing it off for me — I loved that cardigan. The other garment was a black watch tartan dress with a white collar and we went to a proper shop in St Helens for that. Most other things were home-made except the vests, liberty bodices, flannelette petticoats and black wool stockings which came from the local haberdasher’s. Even hair ribbon was on coupons so woe betide us if we lost it.
Another regular chore for me was to take the accumulator to the hardware shop and have the fluid topped up. This was a battery which ran the valuable radio. I know I used to skip to the shop and back with this battery acid sloshing around. Wouldn’t be allowed by the Health and Safety Inspectors today.
We were still in Haydock on VE day on May 8th 1945 and Dad had the choice of either moving to another factory farther north or taking his chances of getting a job back in London. As both my parents came from the East End of London, they decided we would return but it was February 1946 before we came back. Grandma had kept the rent up on our small house so we moved back in with her. I cried for ages thinking that I’d be allowed to go back if they knew how unhappy I was but no such luck; I was in London for good. Nothing had prepared me for the shabby buildings, the lack of trees and grass and when I went back to school to find the other children were years behind me in education. It wasn’t until years later that I realised how fortunate I’d been as “My War” was vastly different to that experienced in the South and many major cities of the British Isles.

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