Nana's Memories of WW2 for Eloise

 

 The following memories of a small child during WW2, have been gathered because my young grand-niece, Eloise, asked to interview me about my recall, for a school project. The language below is aimed at a child's understanding of a strange situation, hence the occasional explanations of wartime life.

My sister, Esme, and I in our front garden
Possibly taken in 1938/9

My family lived in a little semi-detached house on Lindhurst Lane in Mansfield in Nottinghamshire in the 1930s and 1940s. There were quite a few houses, mostly quite big, on either side of the lane, which was rutted and rough, then became rural, with just countryside around. In WW2, a barricade was built across Lindhurst Lane “to stop the Germans.” It had a small gap between a huge block of stone/brick, about 8/9 feet tall, to permit cyclists, pedestrians and tractors through to continue their journeys but there was no way for any car or lorry or tractor to go through. Quite often, my sister, Esme, and I would climb up on to the top of the barricade and pretend it was a stage where we would give a concert consisting mainly of us singing and dancing! We were also the audience.

 On the ‘top field’ near our house was an American army camp. One of the cooks used to steal tins

Four American soldiers, WW2.

of food, put them in a sack, and bring them to give to us at night, from time to time. I have no idea why; perhaps he had met my father in a pub somewhere, though wartime food was short for ordinary people and there was lots of food in the American camp!  Quite often, individual American soldiers would walk past our gate, and I used to run to the gate and shout, “Got any gum, chum?” which an American soldier had taught me to say! Quite often, they would stop and give me a stick of chewing gum wrapped in silver paper! And sometimes, a little piece of chocolate which I loved as we never had any! One Christmas we received a food parcel from America, from a soldier’s family who had heard of the food shortages in Britain. We were thrilled to see tinned fruit cake, tinned butter and tinned cheese for the first time.

Evacuees begin their journey to safety

Next-door to us for a year an evacuee was living with the family there though she wasn’t related to them. I think her family lived in London where there was a lot of bombing and she was one of thousands of children taken from their families and ‘evacuated’. [That is, she went to live without her parents, with people she didn’t know, who lived in a safer part of England] She was called Lally, and she and I became great friends. She left after about a year and I missed her a lot!!

 Buildings were not allowed to show any light through the windows at night. There were inspectors called Wardens who would knock on your front door if even a little chink of light was showing to demand you put out your light immediately. People did as they were told about the chinks of lights showing as they didn’t want to help the German aeroplanes know where they were!

This looks exactly like the ration books we had.

We had ration books, one each, and we couldn’t buy any food without coupons being clipped from our books. Several items such as tinned goods, dried fruit, cereals, sweets and biscuits were rationed using a ponts system. Each person was only allowed a very small amount of meat and sausages each week. Priority allowances of milk and eggs were given to those most in need, including small children and expectant mothers.  Not all food was rationed. Bread was never rationed during the war but strangely, became rationed in 1946, a year after the war had ended! All food rationing stopped in 1954, nine years after the end of WW2 when I was 20!!  Fruit and vegetables were never rationed but were often in short supply especially tomatoes, onions and fruit from overseas like bananas. My little sister Heather was born in 1940, and she saw her first banana when she was five; she tried to eat it without peeling it as she didn’t know what to do!

As shortages increased, long queues became commonplace. Often, a person could reach the front of a long queue only to find out that the item they had been waiting for had just run out! There were no supermarkets then, just specialist shops like bakers, grocers and butchers. The Government encouraged people to grow vegetables in their own gardens or allotments, and often areas in parks were made into communal vegetable plots! The Government publicised this as Dig for Victory!!

Small evacuee, already missing Mummy.

 

Queues, often for food,, were an everyday feature of life during the war.

Other items which were rationed during the war were petrol in 1939, clothes in 1941and soap in 1942. So, by the time I was eight, people could only buy very few clothes, so my mother used to knit a lot; she seemed to specialise in multi-patterned cardigans and jumpers and the knitting patterns were called ‘Fair-isle’; these were very complicated with differently coloured wools sort of woven together on the reverse side of the garment. My mother was skilled at this and sometimes knitted an occasional garment for a neighbour who would pay her. My mother taught me to knit when I was about six and I do remember knitting for my new baby sister, Heather, a little clover pink cardigan with blue aeroplanes flying around the bottom edge! I remember Mum showing it to people and saying I had made it which I had though I didn’t knit the little blue aeroplanes which decorated it; Mum did! All my clothes were passed down to my sisters as I grew out of them! This included underwear. Besides the usual vest and knickers, in winter we also wore what was called a ‘liberty bodice’, a thick, quite stiff, white, extra sleeveless layer over the vest.

The much-hated gas mask

In the early days of the war, which began in September 1939 when I was five, like all schoolchildren, I had a little gas mask which I hated because when I put it on over my head to cover my face, it smelled strange, and I felt I couldn’t breathe properly. I had to take it to school every day, and we used to
practice putting it on and off quite often in class. Also at school, once a week I think {but not sure!] we used to line up and walk from school, over the nearby allotments to the nearest air raid shelter. We all hated the shelter because it was dark, dank and smelly but we had to sit there until the ‘All clear’ sounded. This was a sort of siren playing a special tune to show us that there was no longer any danger from German bombs, then we lined up again and couldn’t wait to get back to school!

WW2 ended

V.E. Day street party in Nottingham

in Europe on May 8^th, 1945, three months before I was 11. There was a super street party for children on Woodland Drive, off Lindhurst Lane where we lived, to celebrate that the war was over, and absolutely everyone went. I do remember being amazed at just how much food was there. Sometimes one of the Mums would shout at one of the dads to stop eating the children’s food! There was a second, similar, street party for children soon after August 15th, 1945, when the war with Japan finally ended, with all the kids in the area sitting at this long, long table in the street eating sandwiches and jelly!  My mother said I must wear my new school blazer as I had passed the 11+ and was due to go to the Brunt’s Grammar School in Mansfield in September and she wanted everyone to know! I had a long photo of all the kids at each party but both seem to have disappeared!

The Holocaust. Nazis set out to kill all European Jews

It was around this time that I saw, in the Daily Herald newspaper that came every day, pictures of Jews in Europe, millions of whom had been killed by the Nazis. There were also stories and pictures of the war in my Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper which my mother bought for me every week during the war. The newspaper pictures showed concentration camps where millions of Jews had been imprisoned and tortured then killed. The surviving Jews were often so very thin that they were like living skeletons and these photos were very frightening for me at the time. We all thought how wicked the Germans were.

European Jews en route to extermination camps.