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| My gorgeous 80th birthday cake! |
Recently,
I turned 80 years old. Now how did that happen? In my head, I don’t feel any
different than I did when I was much younger though of course the body has
deteriorated. Like many of my contemporaries, I’m subjected to various ailments
that come with increasing age although I’m luckier than most in that I don’t
have a debilitating illness or infirmity.
I’ve
had a full and varied life and have been sharing some of my most memorable
moments with anyone who reads this blog. In the spirit of looking back over my
life, I want to go a little further to my very early days.
Early
memories are like those old photographs we all have in a battered photo album
or 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
life are like that too, faded, none too clear and all of them connected with
the Second World War. Born six months before that fateful September 1939 when
War against Germany was declared, I was only a baby when my father went away to
war. He’d been working as a lorry driver and had become a reservist under a
scheme where experienced drivers were encouraged to register for service with
the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) and would be rewarded for doing so by an
extra £15 a year, a lot of money then.
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 castling its full light into the shadows of the bedroom. Mum must have
opened the curtains to see to me by the light of the moon rather than put the
light on because of the blackout.
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| Me about a year old! |
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 of the air-raid siren 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 and seeing in the black night outside,
fires leaping and flaring from buildings that had been bombed.
My
little sister, Christina, was born in November 1942 and tragically, the only
memory I have of her is seeing her in her cot, chubby arms and legs flailing as
she fought for breath. From then on, the memories mercifully fade. I remember a
sense of confusion, of shouting, someone wearing a uniform plunging my
strangely still sister alternately into a hot tin bath then an icy cold one in
what we would now see as barbaric attempt to revive her. Then stillness,
quietness, broken only by muffled crying, a darkened front room through which
we had to tiptoe, eyes averted from the still form in the cot. At the age of 13
months, Christina had died from broncho-pneumonia. She had battled valiantly
against it but penicillin, which might have meant her living, still wasn’t
widely available.
The
next snapshot image that comes to mind is of my mother and me walking hand in
hand down a 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 years in
Blackpool.
Blackpool
is a confusion of jumbled memories. Mum was working as a live-in housekeeper
for an ear, nose and throat specialist who had two noisy and lively children
who made my life a misery. As an only child, to have to share my life with
other children, older, more precocious than myself was a humbling experience.
They taunted me daily, ensuring I got the blame for things they had done, like
the time they emptied a chamber pot out of a bedroom window and saying it was
me. Small wonder that I became a shy timid child. I am still, as they say in
Lancashire, ‘a bit back’ards at comin’ for’ards!’
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, he came home, carrying a cardboard
suitcase containing his demob suit. What that meant for me was 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.
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| Early pic of Mum and me |
We
were moving a long way away, it seemed, to Ivybridge, Devon where my parents
had obtained a job, Mum as a cook-housekeeper, Dad as chauffeur-gardener, even
though he knew almost nothing about gardening. You could say he picked it up as
he went along!
And
that was the pattern for most of my childhood, living with my parents’ in other
people’s houses while they were in domestic service. You can read more about it
in this previous post Behind The Green Baize Door.
