MUM'S WAR MEMORIES 1939-1945

Dear Reader

It's Mother's Day and therefore a very fitting day to start this new 'series' of blogs. I'm going to post my mum's war memories. I want them to be recorded as a lasting record for her and secondly my girls and other family can read them as I type them up. They're very short chapters - episodes really - but I think very entertaining and thought-provoking and I thought others might enjoy them too, especially people from the Grimsby area who will recognises places and have a feel for events. This first chapter is an introductory, quite long with lots of people mentioned - but it does introduce you to the people mum subsequently mentions in her memories.

And Happy Mother's Day to all mothers out there. Thanks to Alice and Chloe for my lovely cards and presents and thanks to my mum for sharing today with me and for always being there for me, for my girls and really for everyone! You're a very special person. xxx


Chapter 1

I was born in 1932 so I was seven when war broke out. I lived at 268 Convamore Road, Grimsby, an Edwardian terrace house which had been rented by my mother's parents. My grandmother had died when I was five years old. My father had been made redundant in the 30's depression and my mum and dad had had to go to live with my grandparents, so at the beginning of the war living in the house were my grandfather, my mother, father and myself.

My friend, a girl called Margaret Graves, a shin sharp nosed girl, (the whole family were very thin - children in the street said their mother only fed them on jellies!), anyway she came running up the passage at the back of the houses and shouted that we were at war. She asked me what did it mean and I confidently told her that the English men would stand in a long line facing the German men and that they would shoot each other!

My mother was one of four girls born between 1910-1914. My mother Edith was the eldest, then Edna, Betty and 'Rene' (Florence Irene). The youngest Rene was not married when her mother died. Before her death aged 29 years, she asked my mother to look after Rene until she had a home of her own. Rene was married on 1st January 1939. The strong bond between them never wavered.

A short while later I went to school and was issued with a gas mask. It was black, in a black case and I was supposed to carry it around with me. All the time. We had gas mask drills at school. I can still remember the rubbery smell. Younger children were issued with 'Micky Mouse' gas masks that were coloured. We were issued with ration books. I can remember we were only allowed 2 oz of sweets per week, this was increased to 4 oz a week in 1948.

Very quickly my Uncle Fred (Rene's husband) who had been a soldier before the war was called up. My Aunt Rene was pregnant when the war started and didn't want to continue living on her own in Combe Street, so she also came to my grandfather's to live and I shared my four poster feather bed with her.

Her baby named Brian was born on May 16th 1940. Whilst she was pregnant a letter arrived to say Fred was missing at Dunkirk in France. My mother withheld this news from her (she had recognised the telegram envelope) until after Brian was born, which must have been a terrible burden. After a week or two Rene heard news that Fred had been injured but he was safe in a hospital in the south of England. He had in fact been brought home by a Cornish man who had taken his fishing boat over to France to try and get some of the wounded home. He had a back operation and was flat on his back for months. Later he returned to the Army and served on three fronts. He received a special medal from his regiment and had a letter from General Montgomery. He was a Regimental Sergeant Major.

After the birth Rene got a thrombosis in her leg so I spent a few weeks running up and down stairs with trays - the only care in those days was to lay flat in bed with your leg held up.

When my Aunt Rene was better she said she would buy me a new dress for looking after her so well whilst she was ill so she took me to Freeman Street to a shop called Gee's. I loved going there because when we paid the money it was put into a little box by the sales assistant, she would then hang it somehow on a wire, then pulled a chain and the little box would whizz along the top of the shop to the cashier's little office in the middle.

Well, Rene said, 'you can choose any dress you like', so I chose a bright yellow silk one with frills all the way down from the waist and each frill was edged with bright purple silk. It had a big sash that tied in a large bow at the back. I thought it was lovely but when I got home my mother's face fell a mile, 'I was hoping you would choose one that you could wear for best', she said. I don't ever remember wearing the dress but I thought it was beautiful.

I got up one morning to find my father and grandfather digging a big hole in the garden. They were erecting an Anderson air raid shelter. It was made out of corrugated sheet iron. They covered it with soil and sandbags and in the front of the doorway they built a small 'wall' out of concrete blocks. There was no door as such. If a candle was lit a blanket was placed over the doorway. Little did I know that within a short space of time I would be awoken every night with the air raid siren and would have to sleep in this dark, cold damp shelter for the next 3/4 years.

My father had put in two benches, one either side of the shelter and hung two hammocks which Rene had braided (she was a braider before the war making fishing nets for trawlers). Grimsby was the largest fishing port in the world before the war and the majority of Grimbarians worked in fishing or its subsidary industries. I was supposed to go to sleep in one of the hammocks but I loved to look out of the doorway to see the searchlights, find the German planes overhead and the guns would try to shoot them down. We had a very big gun in Weelsby Woods called 'Big Bertha'. There was also a very big searchlight which took a long time to warm up but once it had it really lit the sky up and I used to feel very excited when I saw a plane dropping down out of the sky with smoke trailing from its engines. I didn't, as a child, ever think of the men in the planes, they were German planes, they were bombing us, so I would shout 'Mum, we've got one!' and she would invariably shout 'Come away from that door'. Sometimes bright parachute flares were dropped to light up the town before the German planes released their bombs.

About half past 3 to 4 o'clock in the morning the 'all clear' would go and we would crawl back to bed feeling very cold in the winters.

My Aunt Betty, my mother's sister, was a nurse in Hampstead Hospital London when war broke out. She was a sister of a ward and was also a qualified midwife. When the war started she was called up and became a QAN (Queen Alexander Nurse). She was courting a man, we were told he was a doctor and lived in Grantham. She said they were going to be married and I had a bridesmaid dress made which I was very excited about. However, I was going to school one morning (in 1940) and I noticed a suitcase in front of the air raid shelter so I looked inside and saw my Aunt Betty lying inside looking very white so I ran back indoors to tell my mother. They called Dr Riggall our family doctor who sent her into hospital. He said she had tried to commit suicide and that she was pregnant. There was to be no wedding. I heard later that her fiance had been killed, but since I have wondered if he was married or the relationship had gone sour.

She said she had fallen pregnant on purpose to avoid being drafted abroad. This was what they had planned hence the hurried wedding. Well, her stomach was pumped out and now she also lived at home until her baby was born. The house was bulging at the seams and there was little food, although my mother was a good housekeeper and did her best with the meagre rations. We were lucky, as Fred Clark's mother and father (Rene's husband) lived at Ravendale and came into Grimsby every week and brought us two wild rabbits that George (her husband) had caught with his ferrets. Those rabbits kept us alive, one was made into a rabbit pie (to feed five) and one into a stew. As I said we were lucky to have those rabbits but I have never eaten one since.

After the baby was born Betty received her embarkation papers and said she would have to have the baby adopted. My grandfather however said 'No child born into this family is going to be adopted - I will bring him up myself'. This meant that in reality my poor mother would bring him up (which she did) and I found myself with an adopted brother! The baby was only about 4 lb in weight when he was born - he was a month premature and not expected to live. My mother and Rene laid him in a top drawer in my mother's chest of drawers. They lined the drawer with cotton wool and at first they fed him with a pipette until he got strong enough to take a bottle. Betty was made an officer and wrote to say she was on her way to Sicily to be in charge of a hospital for British wounded. She said she had sailed on the HMS Rodney, so my mother not knowing what to call the baby who was obviously going to live now, called him Rodney. I now found myself with two babies to look after when jobs needed to be done.