My mother was a great coper. She lived through a very disturbed historical period – born in 1901, she experienced two world wars and a depression. She had trained as a midwife and worked in the 1920s in the East End of London at the Jewish Hospital. She remembered the visits paid to the hospital by Mrs Rebecca Sieff, who was a patron, and particularly that she was always sacking her chauffeurs. Every time she came to the hospital she had a new one. She used to tell the nurses that you had to keep a very sharp eye on chauffeurs or they would use up too much petrol. Mother’s experience at the hospital, particularly in going to East End homes to deliver babies, convinced her that you should make the most of what you had, and she was not given to complaining nor was she sympathetic to anyone who did.
This stoical attitude was certainly well tested in those early months at Margaretting.
The winter of 1939-40 turned out to be excessively cold. All the pipes froze. There was no water and little heat. All able-bodied men had gone off to the Armed Forces and there was extreme difficulty in getting a builder or anyone in to help. To increase the gloom, both my brother and I got bronchitis and to his he added German measles, so he had to be isolated.
Our bedrooms were kept warm with Valor paraffin stoves and I had to breathe in the fumes of Friar’s Balsam brought up steaming in a big brown bowl every few hours. The smell of paraffin and Friars Balsam still bring back to me those early days of the war.
Father was working in London at this period and though she coped, Mother became increasingly exhausted and uncharacteristically bad-tempered, particularly when we were beginning to recover from our ailments. Spring and the warmer weather must have come as a great relief to her. We had quite a carefree early summer, spent feeding the pigs which lived in the field at the back of the house with bucket-loads of rotting apples which we found in a shed in the garden. But with May and my fifth birthday came Dunkirk. All day long and as we lay in bed at night, lorries and buses rumbled past the house, including presumably the bus which should have picked us up from school, going down to the coast, as we later found out, to help in the evacuation.
Towards the end of 1940 Father got a job as Chief Draughtsman at the Barrow Hematite Steelworks in Barrow-in-Furness. We gave up the house in Margaretting and my mother, brother and I moved north to stay with my mother’s mother and sister in Wallasey, while Father looked for a suitable house for us in Barrow.
My maternal grandmother was a rather beautiful, ladylike and gentle person. She had been born into a fairly prosperous Liverpool family and had married the son of another solid, middle-class Liverpool family, the Parrotts. He is described on their wedding certificate as an ‘African trader’. For some unknown reason, my grandfather had gone off to Canada when my mother was quite small, leaving Grandmother in Liverpool with their three children, promising to send for them when he was established. He corresponded for a while and then she heard no more from him. The years passed and she brought up the children as best she could, on her own, with help from her family. Then one day, in 1917, she was contacted by the War Office, to be told that her husband was on a hospital ship in Liverpool docks on his way back to Canada, seriously wounded. He had become a Canadian citizen, had been conscripted into the Canadian army and had fought in France in a Canadian infantry battalion. If she wanted to see him before the ship sailed, she must go straight down to the docks. She did, and my mother then aged sixteen went with her. Neither of them ever talked about what was said at that meeting but it must have been a traumatic occasion. It was their last meeting for he died not long after his return to Canada.
Wallasey in 1940-41 was not a good place to live. Night after night the German bombers came over to try to flatten the Liverpool docks. My grandmother had a flat in a large Edwardian house in Church Street, just up from the Wallasey sea front and opposite the docks. My brother Brian and I slept on bunks behind a thick curtain at the end of a long corridor. It was thought to be safer than sleeping in a room, where the windows might break and the glass cut us. We didn’t like the dark, so we drew the curtain back after we had gone to bed. Looking up the corridor one night as the bombs descended, I saw a picture falling off the wall and a nightlight on a table flickering and going out with the blast of a bomb which had fallen very near by. Until recently my mother still kept that particular picture with a crack in the frame where it had hit the floor.
After a few weeks of this, the bombing became so intense that, when the sirens sounded, we left our house and went next door to a ballroom dancing school, where there was a windowless basement. We and several neighbours sat there night after night till dawn came and the all-clear sounded. The first time we decided that it was too dangerous to stay in our own house, we delayed until the middle of an intense air raid. As we went outside I looked up and saw the sky lit up by the flames of the burning docks, with a pattern of spotlights, antiaircraft fire, barrage balloons and an aircraft falling on fire out of the sky.
For months during this period, Brian and I did not go to school. There probably seemed little point as we were awake most of the night and in any case we did not know how long we would stay in Wallasey before moving on again. I think Mother did not really want us to go to school in case there was an air raid and we got separated, because by then the sirens were sounding during the daylight hours too. Being separated from us was her biggest anxiety at the time. We used to sleep during the day and sometimes play in the park, but eventually the school inspectors got on to us. Rather surprisingly they were still working and they told my mother we had to go to school. I can’t remember many lessons, though, when we did, just more time spent sitting in the white-tiled school cellar during daytime raids.
Later in 1941, we moved to Barrow-in-Furness, to join my father. By then, night after night, the Luftwaffe was bombing the Vickers dockyards at Barrow. At first we lived in rooms in a tall house on Abbey Road, where the safest place during a raid was under the stairs. We went there every night, the landlady’s family, my mother, brother and I, while my father was out on the streets as an air-raid warden.
After a short time in Abbey Road, we moved to yet another rented house, No. 5 Ilkley Road, a pebble-dashed semi, where, like our neighbours, we turned our back garden into a vegetable patch, stuck tape over the windows to stop the glass shattering in the blast and battened down to see out the war. But before that time came we had yet more nights of bombing to endure. In this house the safest place in a raid was judged to be under the dining-room table and we were all sitting there one night during a particularly ferocious attack, when the blast from a nearby bomb drove the soot down the chimney and covered us all from head to toe. On that night my parents decided again, in the middle of the raid, that the bombing was too close for safety and we set off in our nightclothes, covered with soot as we were, to walk the hundred yards or so to the municipal air-raid shelter. I was terrified, as yet again I saw the sky full of the lights of anti-aircraft fire and burning planes and buildings. I remember urging my parents to run, but my father insisted we walk. No Nazi was going to make him run, and in any case he took the view, difficult for a six-year-old to appreciate, that if we were to be hit we would be hit whether we walked or ran. That night I had a very narrow escape, when a piece of shrapnel missed me by inches. I felt the draught as it passed my shoulder.
After that experience, we acquired an air-raid shelter, a mighty structure of steel plates, which was actually a blast shelter from a quarry. It entirely filled our sitting room but was rapidly absorbed into the family and became accepted as part of the furniture. We could sit up in it, and we had beds in there too. We spent every night in that shelter while the bombing went on. My brother colonised it and used it as a base for his model railway. It made a really satisfactory reverberating sound when hit, and on it I learned the Morse code. Air-raid shelters were a part of life in those days – everyone had one. I used to envy some of my friends who had neat table shelters, which could be much more easily disguised than ours.