Page 7 - My Story (final)

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
until the end of the war and people were encouraged to grow their own fruits and vegetables. We did
not see tropical fruits such as oranges, lemons and bananas and many people kept chickens and pigs, too.
Even clothes were rationed – we had clothing coupons to spend and clothes were passed down from one
family member to another.

Even school was OK in Hitchen. We went to an elementary school called Wilshire Dacre where
nothing seemed too difficult and the headmaster’s nephew took it into his head, when sitting behind me,
to cut off one of my plaits. My mother complained, the red headed nephew was reprimanded, and I didn’t
care and ran out and climbed another tree.

During this time, we three drew very close. My mother taught us to knit and we made quite
complicated things like balaclava helmets and socks for soldiers, although I think my mother was always
there to “turn” the heel or the top of the hat. I wonder now what the finished garments were like or did
my mother spirit them away and make sure there was a true pair of socks or that the knitting was not full
of dropped stitches? The three of us would sit knitting in gaslight in the evenings while my mother read
aloud, still knitting. We always said my mother was the only person who could knit, read and listen to the
radio all at once! We went through all four of the Little Women books, Anne of Green Gables, A.A. Milne,
Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, all three Katy books and many more. I find now that not many
American women knew of Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did but those books were great favourites of ours.
I had another favourite book, passed down to me by my cousins, and that was Number Eleven Joy Street.

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