These were the children who’d left when they were ten and eleven year olds and now were thirteen and fourteen and had come from peaceful England to a Fascist state. We absolutely refused to send them back unless we got a letter from their parents. They arrived back late in the day with the letters. Sometimes I cry when I think of it, the children hanging onto me, not wanting to go. It took all day. They all went back and we never saw any of them again.
When the last members of the battalion arrived at Victoria, there was such joy, the celebration, the tremendous enthusiasm of the crowd. Later on we went to a meeting somewhere in central London. It was after that that the depression set in for me, the realisation that we had lost the war—that Fascism had been victorious—and I thought of all the losses, the thousands of Brigaders and, of course, I thought of Spanish Republicans and what they were going through, the imprisonment, the torture and the killings.
After all these sacrifices, did we achieve anything? I think we did! I am proud of having gone and I would do it all again.
Born 24 April 1909 in Tottenham, north London
My father was known in the neighbourhood as ‘Punch’ Phelps. He was an unskilled labourer, like most of the men in our street—a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. He was in and out of jobs, as a navvy on the roads, on buildings or in the railway yards. He was a chirpy, kindly man, always optimistic and full of backchat, never harbouring a grudge—but he had to work terribly hard, and in some jobs, I remember, he was driven so hard that after leaving the house at four in the morning he would come back in the afternoon drenched in sweat and dead tired, throw himself on his bed and fall asleep.
He was a rough diamond, but he wasn’t spiteful. He had a hard life, and he worked very, very hard, too—but he was always good to us children. He used to get up early in the morning before he went to his job as a navvy, and he’d clean all our shoes before we went to school. He never hit us—he used to say, ‘I’ll aim half a crown at you.’ We’d laugh at that—but his attitude would be threatening. My mother was very short-tempered. I had many a black eye from her—but she had a hard life. She was one girl among thirteen brothers, so she had to learn to look after herself. Her family were shopkeepers—they used to deliver coal on carts and they had a greengrocery shop as well. Right until I grew up, they kept that shop—amazing. My mother had stamina—but, my goodness, she had a temper. In my mind’s eye I carry a picture of her with jet-black hair covered by a man’s cloth cap, a white blouse and a long black ragged skirt, a piece of coarse sacking tied round her waist in place of an apron, and wearing boots done up with side buttons and with a broom in her hand.
There were a lot of us, but my mother adopted a boy; her friend who had a child died in the workhouse, and my mother took the baby and brought him up. He lived with us, but my eldest sister, Violet didn’t get on with him. In Edith Road—and it was usually the same in the other places we lived (because several times we had to leave after falling into arrears with the rent)—we had three rooms: a kitchen/living room with the grate and sink where the lot of us had our meals, washed and sat about, and two bedrooms. A gas meter was laid on, but such a thing as a bathroom was unheard of. Most of our neighbours lived in the same way.
I have a picture of women, wearing their husbands’ caps, talking across the road from their front doors, some of them leaning on their brooms, others scrubbing their front steps with buckets of water. The houses just could not be kept clean, because the children were always rushing in and out, and there were no street cleaners in those days—at least not in our area. The dust and dirt from the streets outside and smoke from the railway and the factories blew in so much that in summer our windows were often kept tightly closed. In winter there was the damp, against which one could do nothing. Whenever possible, us kids were sent into the street so that we swarmed around the pavements.
To us the pawnshop was important—on the Saturday our best clothes were taken out to wear on Sunday, then they were back in again on Monday. My mother even used to pawn her wedding ring and her Sunday clothes; thankfully those days have gone now, but we were always in the pawnshop. I hated it. To make a few pennies we sold bunches of mint in West Green Road by the kerb, at a penny a bunch. We had a garden and my father used to grow mint and carrots. When the carrots got so high, my brother and I would dig them up, take the tops off and wash them in the butt outside, and stick the stalks back again in the soil—and take the carrots to school. One day I got caught going underneath my desk to eat a piece of carrot. The teacher caught me and said, ‘Bring out what you’re eating.’ I emptied all these carrots onto the floor. She said, ‘I never knew we had a donkey in the class.’
Dad went into the army in 1914. I remember my mother hanging out the washing in the garden at the time, when my pa came to go, and I don’t know what he said, but I saw her wiping her eyes with her apron. From then on my mother had to carry the whole burden, so, soon after he was gone, she went to work in a munitions factory. In a brown overall and with a mob cap covering her jet-black hair, she’d go off early in the morning, coming home dead tired in the evening. It was a trying time for her because, before setting off for work, she had to get the five of us ready for school before the first factory whistle. Bill, the eldest, was in the top form, while I, at five or so, was sent along with the others, and a neighbour looked after Rosie, the baby. War at first seemed quite exciting to us children in Tottenham, with talk of heroes and our British navy, and the enemy Hun, but soon there were food cards and, before going to school, we had to queue up outside food shops, which I hated. There were free meals at school—usually pea soup or stew dumpling—but it wasn’t sufficient, and by evening we were hungry. Often my mother hadn’t enough food for us, and I can remember many nights when my brother and I stood outside the factories, especially the Harris Lebus furniture factory in Ferry Lane, waiting for the people to come out from various shifts, holding out our hands for any bits of their lunch they had left over. Often we were in luck, getting half a sandwich or a piece of bread and cheese.
I had to go into hospital, because I had a fall. It was a severe winter—one of the worst winters we’d ever known—and my mother was working in Leavis’s factory. For this she needed hairpins, as she had long hair. It was early in the morning, she was going to work and the factory hooter was going—and she hadn’t any hairpins—so she got my young brother and said, ‘You go and get me some hairpins. And mind how you go—it’s very slippery.’
He got as far as the iron gate and he fell and came back. So she got me and said, ‘You go now and see if you can keep your feet properly.’ So I went. I didn’t slip, but I knocked my elbow very badly. But I carried on, got her hairpins and came back, but the elbow was very bad. My mother went off to work, but when I was at school there was the teacher doing the PE exercises, and she pulled my arm up and I winced. She said, ‘What are you wincing for? What’s the matter with you?’
And I said, ‘I banged it on my way out.’
She looked at it and said, ‘I’d better write a letter to your mother to take you to the doctor.’
My mother took me to the Tottenham hospital, and they kept me in and operated on me. They discovered a diseased bone, which was operated on twice, and I was in hospital for quite a long time with osteomyelitis. I’ve still got the scars.
When I came out, my father, who had been ill with pneumonia, was invalided home from France and sent to a Redhill convalescent home. He was a very good cook in the army and they allowed me to go and help him during the daytime. He had a landlady who looked after him and me of a night and I had a wonderful time there in Redhill. We used to go blackberrying with his chums and the landlady. When I came home, the nurse used to come and dress my wound. My father stayed there, cooking for the Redhill barracks, until he was invalided out of the army, and my time there was
