Page 7 - My Story

pronounced healthy and were all set to go but at the last minute my mother decided she could not be
parted from her girls. Jackie was relieved, I was angry – and the ship we were to sail on was torpedoed!

My father, Alec with Jackie and Ruth circa 1935

So, the question was where to go to stay safe. My father had been drafted into the air force. At
thirty-six or -seven he was too old to fly so always had a safe job, on land, usually as storekeeper. He was
sent to Catterick in Yorkshire for basic training and we didn’t see him for six weeks. After that he was
somewhere in England until he came home and said he was on demarcation leave. That meant he was
being sent abroad. He was shipped off to Gibraltar and stayed there for two to three years. He always
said that Gibraltar was a pretty boring place, that you could walk around the Rock in a couple of hours
and once you’d done that and seen the apes that was it. So, he threw himself into amateur theatricals. I
imagine he was not a great actor, but he was hard working and willing and conscientious, so a good person
to have around. I meanwhile forgot about him and I’m afraid my father never figured greatly in my life
until he was quite old.

My mother, meanwhile, decided that she and we two girls should go and live in Hitchen, not too
far out of London but away from air raids. We had some family members there, cousins of my father so
she had heard of it through them. They, Sadie and Jo Abrams offered us a home, but it didn’t last long.
Sadie was apparently trading on the black market and my mother was not having any of that!

In those days people living in safe areas were asked, maybe ordered, to give up rooms to refugees
from the cities for a minimal rent. We were awarded two rooms in a farm worker’s Victorian house and
invited to share the kitchen. There was no bathroom. The toilet was in an outhouse and a zinc bath was
pulled out of the shed on Saturday, placed on the kitchen floor and filled with water heated in a giant
boiler. The three of us shared a tubful of water, one after the other – Jackie first, my mother last. The
house had no electricity and we used gas light. Radios worked on accumulators which had to be
periodically recharged.

I loved Hitchen. Mr. and Mrs. Beale, with whom we lived, were gentle and helpful. They had a
son, Jackie’s age, called Malcolm who immediately invited me to join his gang. We children roamed the
countryside, “scrumping” apples and gooseberries and rhubarb and anything edible from peoples’
gardens and orchards. Malcolm, who later became something of a juvenile delinquent, taught me how
to make and use a catapult, how to recognise birds’ eggs and never steal more than one from a nest, and
a lot of country lore. I also remember he taught me to start a fire with the sun on a piece of magnifying
glass.

My mother would roam the countryside with us looking for blackberries from which she made
jam and delicious blackberry and apple pies. We learned to pick up “windfalls”, fruit that had fallen from
the tree and made apple and plum desserts to stretch out our food rations. Rationing in England was
pretty severe, although we children just accepted it. As I recall we had per week two ounces each of
butter, margarine, sugar, cheese and tea, whatever meat you could buy for one shilling and tuppence,
eight ounces of candies and one egg and a half pint of milk a day for children. Bread was not rationed

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