keep us going with her cheerful manner. When she made a bowl of Jell-O for us, a rare treat, she said “just put it at the foot of our bed, it will soon set”. We never had a refrigerator, our food was bought fresh daily; my mum would walk to the shops every day, and one bottle of milk was delivered every morning. I would sneak out early and eat the cream off the top of the bottle where it settled and then put the top back on.
We all walked everywhere; the only person I knew with a car was our family doctor. I did ride in it once, he came to the house when I had diphtheria, and he rolled me inside a big red blanket and put me in the back seat, and took me to the hospital when I was seven years old. My mum said I almost died that time, their were no antibiotics in those days. Margie, Bobby and I had just about every disease a kid could get. Mumps, Measles, Chicken Pox, Scarlet fever, the only inoculations available were for Small Pox.
The 1930s were very hard years for a family to survive; their was a depression and men couldn't find work. After the boom of the roaring twenties, following World War I, the whole country was in a slump. When our shoes wore out we would put cardboard inside to cover the hole in the sole, until my dad could get a piece of leather to repair them. He also cut our hair, mine was chopped real short just like the boy’s; I hated it but I had no choice. And we mended our clothes. Luckily we wore a uniform to school, a white blouse and navy blue jumper, and we wore it every day with long black knit stockings.
My Grandma had a neighbour with a daughter, an only child, who gave her hand-me-downs to me, so I had some nice things. I remember one pretty dress, it was Salmon Pink, I felt like a movie star when I wore it, she also gave me a Grey flannel suit with a pleated skirt. When my mum was in the hospital having my brother Billy, I was looking for it, to wear it to Sunday school. I almost cried when I found it, my Dad had put the pleated skirt under the sofa cushion to press it, it was a wrinkled mess, I suppose he meant well.
CHAPTER TWO
My whole life changed when World War II started in 1939. Food and clothes where rationed and my mother worked miracles with what she could get. My dad planted a vegetable garden; the potatoes were a lifesaver some days. Once in a while a rumor would start that something off ration, such as fruit was available and my mum would dash out and stand in the never-ending lines.
It wasn’t too much longer before the air raids started. The planes were aiming for the ships in the port of Liverpool, and the docks were hit hard. Of course England is an Island, so we depended on ships for everything. Much of our food ended up in the river Mersey; a whole ship loaded with sugar was hit and all of the sugar ended up in the river, my mum said they had been waiting weeks for that sugar. Most of the boats never even made it to Liverpool; German U. boats sank them in the Atlantic.
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As the air raids became more frequent, we were given an Anderson air raid shelter. It came in sections and had to be bolted together, the sides were six feet tall and the top rounded, it was made of corrugated steel. My dad and brother dug a hole three feet down and six feet square and stood the shelter in it. The three feet that stuck up over the hole was covered with dirt and sod that also helped to disguise it and cover the shiny surface, as we were in a strict blackout. All of the house windows were covered with heavy blackout curtains to block the light, as the planes would circle overhead looking for targets. It was so dark that when I walked home at night, I’d run my hand along the fence, until I hit the gatepost I knew I was home. My aunt said she bumped into something in the blackout and asked, “are you alive or are you a lamp post?” A voice replied, "I am a lamp post," -- she ran all the way home.
When the raids started to come every night, my dad decided to build bunk beds in the shelter so we could sleep in it when the sirens rang out. We had been roused out of bed and led down the stairs by my mother, into the cold night air and into the damp shelter, with only a dirt floor. Now we were tucked in blankets and given a flashlight and comic books to keep us quiet. My dad never got out of his warm bed. He said, “Hitler isn’t going to give me pneumonia, and besides if the house gets hit, you will have two stories worth of bricks on top of you!” This of course was a great source of comfort to my mother. Most of the damage in our neighborhood was caused by incendiary bombs; they would stick in the roofs of houses and burn. Easy for the home guard to put out if they landed on the ground, but difficult if it was on the roof. The land mines were the worst; they would float down on a parachute and drift along the ground destroying everything in their path.
We tried to keep to a normal schedule with our schooling until the day raids started; a school in Liverpool was hit, and all the children were killed. Our teachers split the classes up into small groups and we were sent to the homes of volunteers who had a room to spare. They came to each house and gave us our lessons and homework, so we wouldn't all be in one place during the raids.
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Our next big worry was that the enemy would use gas. All of us children where issued gas masks and told to carry them everywhere. We thought we where pretty cool and put them in a shoulder bag. Mine was black patent leather. One day a mobile unit came to our school and we were all ordered to go inside while they turned the gas on to check for leaks, not deadly gas of course.
My friends and I were not old enough to worry about survival the way the grown-ups did; we made a game out of searching for pieces of shrapnel the day after an air raid. We would be quite pleased to find some with German markings. Mostly imprints of swastikas, I saved mine in a shoebox.
The only time I was really scared and worried was one day after a big raid. I was sent to grandma’s house to help her clean, as I had always done on a Saturday morning. When I got off the streetcar at my usual stop, I didn’t recognize anything. The area had been bombed, there was glass and food all over the road from the shops nearby. The police were patrolling the area to prevent looting. There was a huge crater where the Windsor Castle Pub had stood. We heard later that the owner of the pub had gone back in, after the air raid warning had sounded, to get the money out of the safe. He never made it back out, as the building got a direct hit. That pub had been my landmark. I walked up the hill toward my grandma’s house, afraid to turn the corner in case her house was gone. My grandma was fine, but the street next to hers was flattened, she was home alone because my grandpa was out with the bomb disposal group. They were sent out after a raid to put out fires caused by incendiary bombs, and to detonate any unexploded bombs. His age group was too old for the army, but they were needed in the home guard.
Some nights before a raid, the planes would circle overhead and drop flares to light up the area. The British anti-aircraft guns would try to shoot them down with tracer bullets; we called them flaming onions. It was like fireworks and we wanted to watch; we were constantly being told to get back inside the shelter. We had an old anti-aircraft gun that was wheeled around the neighborhood, we found out after the war that it was useless. What it did do was rattle our windows; luckily we had criss-cross tape on the glass so it wouldn’t shatter. One night they did catch a man signaling the planes, at the aircraft plant near our house. It was a factory that built the Spitfire airplanes, that was why we had so many raids around us, even though we lived in the suburbs. The bombers also aimed for the shipping at the Liverpool docks.
I was so glad I lived in the suburbs, because it was decided that children would have to be evacuated out of the cities. The first plan was to send them all on ships to Australia, America and Canada, but that was stopped when the U-boats sank them in the Atlantic Ocean. All those children where lost at sea. After that, they were all put on trains and sent to the countryside, to stay with strange families. It was sad to see them on the newsreels, with their nametags and their little suitcases saying tearful goodbyes to their mothers. Some of them never saw their families again for five years, or never, if their families where killed in the raids.
England was not prepared for war - every scrap of metal that could be salvaged
