top of page
Ann Arran

September 3rd 1939

I did not know what was going on. Aged not quite five, I stood between my mother and father looking across the room at the large Kolster Brandes wireless, staring at the fretwork design which made a sunray pattern. I could tell it was something serious because we were not sitting down, and my parents’ eyes looked glazed. This was not the news they were hoping for.  They tried to explain what Mr. Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, had just said. It seemed to involve a man called Hitler, something called “shelters” and “gasmasks”. These had been a sore point with me when they were issued, as it turned out that I was too old to have a Mickey Mouse mask like the boy next door. The air of solemnity was broken by my friend Mary, eighteen months older than I was and the leader in all our schemes. Far from being frightened she was full of excitement announcing, “We are at war with Germany, we must wear our gasmasks, and Daddy says I may ride round the Block on my tricycle and can Betty (as I was then known) come too?” The tricycles were the large-wheeled sort which lasted us until we were big enough to manage an almost adult sized two-wheeler. The Block was a square of houses arranged on four sides so we could travel safely without crossing a road. Ten minutes’ vigorous pedalling brought us back to our garden gates but it amazes me now, that two little girls were allowed to do this and reminds me of the glorious freedoms we enjoyed, even as the war progressed.

​

Evacuees

Soon after War had been declared, our village agreed to host a number of evacuees from  Hove. They came with their school, some only four years old, just into a nursery class. They were accompanied by their own teachers and would be accommodated in a wooden structure which had been vacated by the local children who were to move into their new Infant School built on the same site.

My parents agreed to take in one evacuee. I was an onlychild and was delighted at the prospect. The great day came. My mother and I answered a rap at the door and there stood a pleasant though official looking lady with five or six children. My mother was invited to make a choice.  How could she pick one and leave the others “unwanted”?  The problem was solved for us when the Evacuee Officer pushed forward a little girl of about my age saying, “Would you like Patricia? Her brothers are going to stay with the lady who lives opposite.”

Pat was a delight - shabbily clothed but beautifully mannered. Her brothers Peter and David were eight and four respectively. Peter, I remember was a serious lad, curly haired and wearing girls’ shoes.  He was conscious of his role as big brother and took good care of David who on first sight just looked lost. Pat soon lost her shyness and by the end of our first meal, we had learned that she had not wanted to leave her mother but a promise that she might get to see a cow or a horse if she came to Leicestershire with her brothers persuaded her onto the train. We set off on our first walk and behold, a field of cows! The horses came later. We got on so well, sharing a bed, toys and clothes. Pat a bit younger and smaller than I was fitted nicely into the clothes I had recently outgrown. My father said long afterwards that when we went out as a family, Pat had looked like the favoured child whilst I in my Utility outfits was obviously the child who had been taken in. I should add that Pat was the prettier of the two and I did not mind at all.

Except for one occasion in the early days. We were playing in the garden and Pat only was called inside. In our kitchen, I could see Mrs Howlett the neighbour who was caring for her brothers. In her hand she had bottle of I knew not what and my mother held a comb I had not seen before. I heard them tell Pat that this special shampoo would make her hair curl (telling lies to children “for their own good” was a common practice). I retired to the garden shed in tears wondering why I was not being treated, I was more in need of curls than Pat was. Later my mother told me the truth, to be kept a secret; Peter, Pat and David had hair lice. I was re-assured, and the shampoo must have worked because the dreaded nits were never mentioned again.

On Saturday afternoons, my mother helped Pat “write” home and added a few words of her own.  Her mother replied, not quite so regularly, sometimes enclosing snapshots. One interested me, her mother sitting on a public bench surrounded by young men in uniform all laughing. I liked the look of them and asked which one was her Daddy. Pat said none of them, they were all uncles. It was assumed though never actually stated that her father was serving abroad.

The Saturday letters developed into a kind of friendship and after a while Pat’s mother asked if she could come and stay with us and visit her children. Of course, she could and Pat was taken out of school for the day to meet her at the station. I was told that Pat spotted her mother immediately, rushed up to her and promptly burst into tears. “What odd behaviour,” I thought, “to cry when you were happy.” At six years old, I knew so little.

All went very well at first, then Mrs W revealed her real reason for coming. She told my parents she was pregnant and asked if she could move in with us and have the baby at our house. More than sixty years later, my mother was still wondering if their refusal had been the right thing to do. They had thought carefully, taken into consideration the size of our house, how the rooms might be re-arranged to accommodate a mother and young baby and the possible effect on my father’s sleep patterns. He was travelling daily from Leicester to Nottingham to work in the munitions factory, a fortnight on days, a fortnight on nights. It was already difficult keeping two children and their friends quiet when he was sleeping in the daytime. Had I understood the situation, I would have begged for the baby.

I was miserably disappointed when Pat’s mother said she would return to Hove immediately taking all three children with her. In the kerfuffle of getting them all ready for departure, my goldfish was left in the sun and died. Like every tragedy in my young life, I blamed these two unhappy events on Hitler.

Wartime School Days

Our brand-new Infant School should have opened early in September 1939. Everything had been provided, new solid oak, child sized tables and chairs, wood block flooring, wall tiles bearing large silhouettes of wild animals, indoor toilets of appropriate size for infants. But there were no air raid shelters. They had to be dug out, piled high with earth and were very damp and dark.  Their construction delayed the start of term by some weeks.  They were hardly ever used and I have no recollection of practising more than twice as an Infant and not at all when I became a Junior.

Our other form of air raid practice took place in our classroom. The teacher held a duster above her head, our eyes were trained on her and as she dropped the duster which signified a bomb dropping, we dived under our tables which was quite good fun.

The sirens never sounded during school time and once the route had been memorised, 5-year-olds were deemed perfectly capable of getting themselves to and from school, with gas masks slung over our shoulders.

The war did however, impinge on our education in other ways. Our ferocious Head Mistress and her equally frightening Deputy believed that saving paper would win the war, so out came the old slates and bits of chalk. It was not too bad if you got a proper slate but more often I was given a pretend variety made from very  thick card painted over with shiny black paint, The chalk slid everywhere, and I regularly got into trouble when the head teacher took the class for forming my figures and letters badly. Sometimes we did Drawing, never Painting, far too messy for infants - and for this treat we were given pieces of paper roughly torn from wallpaper sample books. If we needed the toilet and said we might need paper, we were issued with a single sheet. Inadequate and undignified. Looking back, I wonder if these two ladies really thought they were supporting the war effort or if they just did not understand children or even like them very much.

The war did affect my education in one good way. Young men were called up for war service and the consequent scarcity of teachers persuaded the Government to bring back married women teachers into the profession. Thus, I met two of the kindest and best teachers I ever enjoyed working for. Mrs Exton in the infant department rescued me from boring alphabet cards and the “Letter A says a (as in fat)”  method of teaching Reading. She insisted that on the previous day she had said I was ready for a proper book and brought me to the front of the class to sit on the readers’ table. I could not remember her saying any such thing, but I did not argue and amazingly, she was right, I could read the book she gave to me! Under her guidance, we built and furnished a dolls’ house out of matchboxes. Collecting the material was, alas, quite easy. Almost all the fathers, uncles and big brothers smoked. We gave the finished house to the evacuees since they had been obliged to leave their toys behind.

She did have one failure: trying to teach Reggie Johnson to skip! Reggie was a serious little boy, with an ingrained frown on his forehead. We were skipping round the school hall as instructed, to the sound of a wind-up gramophone but Reggie could not skip. He could only gallop. I see them now as tall, slim Mrs. Exton took Reggie’s hand and skipped and Reggie, hanging on, continued to gallop. We were all shown how to march, and we marched everywhere, coming out of Assembly, coming back from the playground, wherever. At the end of Playtime one whistle would blow. We stopped still. At the second whistle we lined up two by two in our class groups and began to “mark time” until it was our turn to move forward. In the Juniors, if marching indoors, we did it to rousing music and we even did some elementary formation marching. (This is sounding very like what was going on in Hitler’s Germany!)  Before we left the Infants, we were taught to knit and produced scarves for soldiers. Poor men. I pity the one who got mine.

In the Junior Department, I met Mrs Toon, a woman I admire more every time I think of her. She had a class of 50 children. At the front, a table of five 7-year-olds promoted to Class 3 because class 2 had no space for them. At the back, sat John, seemingly forgotten by everyone except Mrs Toon. He was 13-years old and had never “made it” to secondary   school. Then there were more than 40 children in between. No-one got special treatment. We all got special treatment. Despite her shouting at us (she had a resounding voice) it did not upset us and on the whole, we were obedient. We actually enjoyed it when one or other of us was called a “Nincompoop” for doing something foolish. It went like this: “Youuuuuuuuuuuu……” on a rising crescendo and “Nincompoop” spat out on the top note.

Standard punishments were rarely used in Mrs. Toon’s class. But we knew what went on. The very worst was being sent out of the room to stand in the corridor or given “lines” to be written at home.  If the class got too noisy or fidgety the lesson was paused and the order given was “Fingers on lips.”  Or it could be “Hands on heads - place”. 

Caning was still allowed, and Mr. Smith the Headmaster did it viciously, especially to the boys from the local Children’s Home. He made the culprit stand facing him with head bowed, and beat him between the shoulder blades. When I saw it, I knew it was wrong but small children do not have a voice. What might I have said and to whom? What could my parents have done on the evidence of a child who had never been harmed and, of course, girls were never caned?

When I recall some of the “horrors”, I am surprised to find how much I enjoyed going to school. As an only child, I loved the sociability, and I enjoyed learning. It was a strange world to which we adapted. Maybe, “School” is an odd place whether or not there is a war on. We were all waiting for the end of the “Duration” whatever that was and then it would be Paradise!

bottom of page