food. They were meant for the poor. And we had been dragged down to that. I felt it as a humiliation.’ Her reaction to new hardships emphasises how little she enjoyed or even comprehended the war period. Its privations came at a difficult time in her life. She was too old to be oblivious to the greater threat. Children under ten write of seeing the whole thing as one long adventure. Yet neither was she old enough to get caught up in the war spirit, the comradeship, the sense of doing your bit in a vast community effort. She had all the worry, without enough real insight to put it into any context, and none of the excitement of broadening horizons experienced, for example, by her sister Ann, who was conscripted.
Hitler’s strategy towards Britain was two-fold – to bomb it into submission from the air and to starve it into surrender at sea. Over half of all foodstuffs in the pre-war period had come into the country by ship. If the aerial policy made relatively little impact on Bronwen’s life, the maritime blockade drove her to despair as her empty stomach ached. Rationing was the order of the day: marrow or carrot jam spread on stale bread was sometimes all that was on offer for tea at Dr Williams’.
Sleepy and safe Dolgellau managed to work itself into a fever about the war. In June 1940 the girls from Dr Williams’ took part in an air-raid practice. ‘We had to go down into the basement in single file and in silence from our forms,’ the weekly letter home detailed, ‘and the Head said that we had got to get down in four minutes – the whole school of 300 girls. It was an awfully queer siren.’ Later there were air-raid practices for boarders in the middle of the night. The drills were a sensible precaution though predictably, given the town’s location, it entirely escaped the attention of German bombers. The nearest to a raid was when an American plane crashed several miles to the north.
Sometimes the elaborate preparations for eventualities that were extremely unlikely to befall Dolgellau left Bronwen and her contemporaries fearful but bemused. In October 1942 they all went to Sunday morning service wearing their gas masks. ‘What a sight we looked,’ twelve-year-old Bronwen reported home. ‘I wish I’d got a proper gas-mask case because I’ve still got that cardboard thing and it’s all come to pieces. You see it’s all very muddling, but I’m sure G[wyneth] will explain better than me about this gas attack. There are some people who are attacking some other people somewhere and some girl guides are running messages to somewhere from somewhere.’
As the war passed Dolgellau by, the pupils of Dr Williams’ were determined to do their bit, even if they had no clear idea of what war entailed, but their active service stretched no further than evenings of knitting scarves for ‘our lads’ in the army or watching Ministry of Information films about how to disarm a German. There were collections of spare toys for ‘bombed-out children’. When Bronwen played Nerissa in a school production of The Merchant of Venice, the townsfolk were given a rare invitation over to Dr Williams’, with their ticket money raising £5 for the RAF Benevolent Fund. Town and gown for once had common purpose.
The war did change Dolgellau’s landscape. Various schools were evacuated out there and a group of children from Birkenhead, a target for the bombers because its port worked hand in hand with neighbouring Liverpool, took up residence nearby. And there were American soldiers stationed in the area who paid particular attention to the teenage girls on their doorstep. In March 1943 Bronwen, showing the first signs of impending womanhood, wrote excitedly of one of the older girls at the school being greeted by a chorus of wolf-whisdes when a military truck overtook her on her bicycle.
North-west Wales was also considered a safe place to detain prisoners of war – far away from the continental coastline and any hopes of escape or liberation. In September of the same year Bronwen recorded an encounter with the enemy while on a school walking trip at nearby Bala Lake. Her oddly neutral tones reveal a lingering bemusement about the issues at stake in the war:
We saw a very nice-looking Italian prisoner, who was working in one of the fields. By the way we see tons of them round here. Anyway down we got and went to talk to this prisoner. We talked in very bad French, and he seemed to understand. Anyhow he answered. He had been captured in Tunisia and he liked Mussolini and Hitler, but hated Churchill. He was a fascist. He didn’t like Wales. He said in a very strong Italian accent ‘Wales, rain, rain, rain, but Italy sun, sun, sun!’
The mixture of childish mantras and glimpses of the conflict in the adult world is revealing. More wholeheartedly positive was her response to a British war hero and family friend who dropped in to take her to tea on his way to Barmouth. Major-General Sir Francis Tuker, a senior figure in the Gurkhas, had been at school with Alun Pugh and had visited the family home on several occasions. Thirteen-year-old Bronwen had developed something of a schoolgirl crush on him, which he played along with by calling on her at Dr Williams’ in 1943. ‘He came in a small army van, raised awfully high from the ground by big wheels,’ she told her parents. ‘There were three soldiers in the car with him, one driving.’ The link endured. In February 1946, towards the end of her time at Dr Williams’, he answered one of her letters. ‘He didn’t actually say much,’ she reported, ‘except that he would be stuck in Calcutta through the summer and that it was already “beastly hot”.’
Dr Williams’ itself certainly got caught up in the national mood of patriotism and swept Bronwen along. She described an armistice service in a letter home in November 1943. She was one of a number of guides there, but the head had refused to allow them to carry the Union Jack. ‘Everybody,’ Bronwen raged, ‘thinks it is disgusting. Not having a Union Jack on Armistice Sunday because “it isn’t done”, goodness. We all feel jolly hot about it.’
However, for Bronwen, the privations of a wartime childhood greatly outweighed any excitement. Her biggest problem was the absence of food. ‘For me the war was one long hell,’ she says. ‘It got worse and worse and worse because the food ran out, the clothes ran out, there were shortages of everything, then rationing. I was always hungry. I felt I never had enough to eat.’ And even when plates were full, it was ‘lucky dip’ or its equivalent that was on offer. ‘Dinner,’ she wrote to her parents in November 1940, ‘consisted of soup with bits of raw celery floating around and huge chunks of carrots also floating around like corks, then a pudding something like a terrible bright yellow blanc-mange with a few prunes also floating round, then two mingy little biscuits.’ The hunger pangs were so extreme at times that she felt moved to steal food from the school dining room. The headteacher caught her with her hand in the biscuit tin and stopped her sweet ration for a fortnight.
Hitler’s maritime cordon quickly affected the nation’s eating habits. Churchill’s Food Minister, Fred Marquis, later Lord Woolton, was by Christmas 1940 advocating a wholesale change in diet to meet the new circumstances. ‘It is the duty of all grown-up people to do with less milk this winter,’ he advised through the columns of the Daily Express, ‘so that children and nursing mothers can be sure of getting as much as they need. Oatmeal, one of the finest foods for giving warmth and energy, is a “must” for growing children.’ With a blithe ignorance of the eating likes and dislikes of youngsters, he continued, ‘they will probably like it as oatcakes. Encourage your children to eat baked potatoes, jacket and all. Carrots are an important protective food. Most children love carrot,’ he suggested hopefully, ‘when it has been washed, lightly scraped and grated raw into a salad or a sandwich.’
Children were encouraged to abandon their sweet tooth in favour of carrots by the example of night fighter ace, ‘Cat’s Eye’ Cunningham. His ability to dodge German anti-aircraft guns and repel the Luftwaffe’s 1940 blitz on London was put down in official propaganda to a rabbit-like love of carrots, which enabled him to see in the dark.
A taste for salad, Woolton ordered, must be inculcated at once. ‘Salads and vegetables are what [your child] needs almost more than anything else, so teach him to like them as early as you can. You will find that many children, when they can’t cope with a plateful of green salad, will enjoy it when it’s well chopped up between slices of wholemeal bread.’
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