E
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arly memories
are like those old photographs we all have in a battered album or a box at the
back of a cupboard. There are gaps in our lives, too, similar to those left by
missing photographs. The hazy recollections I have of my early like are like
that, faded, none too clear and all of them connected with the Second World
War.
We lived in
Horwich, a small mill town six miles from Bolton in Lancashire and I was only a
baby when my father went away to the War. My very earliest memory, and I must have been
very young at the time, is of lying on my mother’s chest, my cheeks burning
hot, and seeing the moon through the window casting its full light into the
shadows of the bedroom. Mum must have pulled the curtains open to see to me by
the light of the moon rather than put the light on because of the blackout.
Another memory
which comes vividly to mind is of Mum and me running through a blacked-out
Manchester at the beginning of an air raid. Who could forget the bloodcurdling
wail that struck fear into the hearts of everyone or the same sound of the ‘all
clear’ which always sounded much lighter, less fearsome? A further click of my
mind’s eye shutter and we were on the train to Bolton on our way back home,
seeing in the black night outside, fires leaping and flaring from buildings
that were being bombed. I must have only been about two then for, besides the
main blitz of Manchester in 1940, there were a few other isolated raids, one of
which was on Salford, which the train would have passed through, in April 1941.
Christina, my
sister, was born in November 1942. Tragically, the only memory I have is seeing
her fighting for breath, chubby little arms and legs flailing, as she lay in
the cot, brought down to the front room of the terraced house
where we were then living. From then on, the images mercifully fade. I remember
a sense of confusion, of shouting, someone wearing a uniform plunging my
strangely still sister alternately into a steaming tin bath then into an icy
cold one in a barbaric attempt to revive her. Then, stillness, quietness,
broken only by muffled crying, a darkened front room through which we had to
tiptoe with eyes averted from the still form in the cot. At the age of 13 months,
Christina had died from broncho-pneumonia. Antibiotics weren’t available then.
The next
snapshot image that comes to mind is of my mother and me walking hand in hand
down the street. Mum was crying, tears rolling down her cheeks, and she was
wearing a black coat. I had the strong impression that we were leaving and this
may well have been true because we spent the rest of the war in Blackpool,
which is a confusion of jumbled memories. Mum was working as a live-in
housekeeper for an ear, nose and throat specialist. He had two noisy and lively
children who made my life a misery. To have to suddenly share my life with
other children, older, more precocious, more outgoing than myself was a numbing
experience. They taunted me daily, ensuring I got the blame for things they had
done, like the time they emptied a chamber pot from a bedroom window and saying
it was me.
There was the
experience of a new school too. I’d first started school in Horwich where I’d
decided fairly quickly that I’d had enough and came home early. It’s a good job
it hadn’t been far away because Mum had paddled my legs all the way back to
school and I never played truant again. The only thing I really remember about the new school was a
big turreted clock tower over the doorway and the hard benches we were made to
sit on, hands on head to keep us all in order.
Dad hadn’t, up
till that time, played much of a part in my life as he’d been away for much of
the War. Then, suddenly, Dad came home, carrying a cardboard suitcase
containing his demob suit and stayed. For me, it was a vague sense that life as I had known it
was going to change. Mum told me, many years later, that they, in common with
many couples, struggled with their marriage after so long apart.
We were moving a
long way away, it seemed, to Devon where my parents had obtained a job, Mum as
a cook-housekeeper, Dad as chauffeur-gardener. I wish I had clearer memories of
Ivybridge but as I started being ill almost immediately with yellow jaundice,
all the memories I have are hazed with illness. Quite early on, I remember
standing by my father as he tended a flower bed, smelling the rich earthy smell
of leaves that had been mulched in some time previously.
The house, I
recall, was large and rambling and because of the danger of flooding from the
river which ran through the town, only the upper floors could be used. The
river itself was nearly my downfall as it was also a mill race. Playing hide
and seek one day with the children from the house, I fell down the embankment.
Fortunately, I landed on a ledge but my playmates, not knowing this, raced up
to the house to tell my parents. They, thinking the worst, ran back to the
river bank expecting me to have been swept along by the mill race into the
cavernous gloom below the mill. Arriving there, they found me climbing back up
to the higher bank.
Many of life’s
necessities, let alone luxuries, were scarce after war and Dad, thinking to
please me, went into nearby Plymouth to buy a second-hand doll’s house for me
for Christmas. It was so big he couldn’t take it on the bus and had to walk all
the way home with it. It hurt him deeply that Christmas because I played more
with a torch given to me by the people of the house than I did with the doll-s
house. Poor Dad, I don’t think he ever quite forgave me for that.
More another time ...
