round the bend

I had a draft ready to publish and then changed my mind. It was about the mess on USA’s southern border – however, I decided to write about something entirely different. I will tell you about my early years in a country under siege during WWII.

I slid into an unsettled world in England mid April 1939 joining my siblings, Jennifer and John. I was named Rosemary Lilian but everyone called me Mary. We lived in a beautiful bungalow that had been built by my grandfather as a wedding gift for my parents, Gladys and Harold. Those idyllic days would come to a screeching halt in September of that year when war was declared and we moved to Hayling Island in the south of England where my Grandparents lived.

There’s no doubt in my mind that there has to be a genetic link that flows through the generations. I don’t think I’m like my father Harold, who at the age of seventeen joined the Irish Guards in the First World War, it was then that he received the Military Medal for bravery having helped save the battalion he was with. His officer was awarded the more esteemed Victoria Cross medal for doing the same thing – Dad was an enlisted man and during those times the powers-that-be felt he didn’t deserve the same recognition. His bravery gene continued through to my sister, Jennifer, no adventure was too frightening for her having sailed across the Atlantic from Cape Town in South Africa to the Caribbean in a 34ft. yacht with four shipmates – or when she drove across mine fields, just for fun, to visit Victoria Falls when Rhodesia was being threatened by Robert Mugabe and before that particular country was renamed Zimbabwe.

But what about me?

I’m really a coward at heart. I very much doubt that I would have the courage to put my life on the line, but of course I haven’t been tested. Perhaps, after all, I’m more like my mother, Gladys, however, she was an accomplished classical violinist and I can’t play a note. But she was a very strong woman. Oddly enough she was very shy and I recall seeing a photo of her with her younger sister Kathleen who was a tall beautiful woman. In that particular photo, my mother had her knees pressed together and looked as though she wanted to escape the glamour of her want-to-be actress sibling. However, once mother was on the stage and dressed to the nines, she was transformed and her eyes would shine like the sequins on her dress as she flung her bow across the strings of an ancient Italian violin. When all was quiet in our house, she would relax in her music room and write poetry or invite a trio over to practice chosen pieces from well-known composers. Captain Parsons, one of the three, would tramp across the meadow behind our house with his violin case clasped tightly in his hands. Mr. Edgar would come prepared to play the piano that stood in the corner of the music room. And, who could forget Mrs. Konnody, a sight to behold when she arrived on her tricycle with her cello propped up in her back basket. No-one was allowed to impose on the sacred group, not even my father, but my duty was to appear after an hour of music to offer the foursome sustenance. So, why do I consider her to be a strong woman, you may well ask? To me, her strength shone through during the second world war.

My father was sequestered with Churchill and other notables in the Portsmouth area during the war for which he was awarded the M.B.E. (Member of the British Empire) the third highest award offered in those days by King George VI. My mother was left alone with five young children; my brother Hugh was born seventeen months after me and the youngest of the five was Alison and she joined us in 1943. Mother was like bantam hen trying to corral her chicks in the midst of those years of chaos. She should have been awarded a medal as well.

One cannot imagine the horrors we endured during those war years. Children were evacuated from the large cities for safe keeping when the bombs started falling. My father encouraged my mother to take us north to stay with her aunts in Doncaster. I was terribly young when we made the train trip north. But I remember it vividly as we were chugging our way out of London when the train’s lights were extinguished and we came to a halt and in complete darkness as the Blitz of London was occurring (blitz came from the word ‘blitzkrieg’ a new technique of mass-bombing raids). I recall looking out of the train’s windows as the planes were dive-bombing and letting loose of their bombs. Flashes of light, like a flash-lightning storm, lit up the sky. Fires blazed in the distance as the flames devoured everything in its path. Houses and factories fell in smoking heaps leaving death and destruction under the barrage. Fleeing from these ongoing onslaughts, people in London would sleep in the underground train stations and at one time local authorities placed beds in the tunnels. Often many of these terrified people would stagger out from hiding places and find their homes totally destroyed. Chaos was evident, thousands of people lost their lives. It was horrific. And, yet, and yet, the Londoners would keep their sense of humor and keep on going. I recall seeing a photo of a group of people surrounding a piano that had been salvaged from one of the bomb sites. One person was playing the instrument while others were smiling and singing whilst accompanying him. It brought some joy to those around them whose need was so obvious during that time of dread. We returned from Doncaster after a week, my mother declaring that she’d sooner face the bombs rather than living with relatives. It was during this time that many children from London and the southeast were evacuated to safe refuges and were temporarily adopted by families for the duration of the war. When sent away, the children wore luggage labels around their necks with their name and addresses on them and also the name of the school they were from. It was terrifying for those children to be separated from their parents and the trauma at times was far worse than the bombing. Some evacuees were even sent overseas to Canada and America. My parents would never allow our family to be separated. My young mother stayed calm, and, in my mind, she remained, and stayed, a stable being in the midst of a nightmare. She must have been terrified. All able-bodied men were called to arms. My father joined the home guard as a Major – he had only one lung as he had been gassed during WWI. Women joined the Women’s Land Army or worked in factories helping with the war effort. Women were taught to shoot anti-aircraft guns during air raids, and yet they managed to look feminine and even though clothing was rationed, the women made do, altering their old clothes to look new. No silk stockings were available, or too expensive to buy on the black market, so the ladies would draw a black pencil line up the back of their legs to give the appearance of actually wearing stockings with seams. During the war, a marvelous new material was introduced by the Americans that they used for parachutes, it was called ‘nylon’ and later that same magic thread was turned into silk-like stockings. During those days, my mother stayed at home and tried to raise a rambunctious hoard of kids while trying to keep them safe from the bombs that fell on our small island that lay so close to the main port of Portsmouth. Her days were filled with fear for herself and for her young brood and her only mental escape being her music. My sister told us how one day, while mother was locked in her music room, she had banged on the door telling her that Alison’s diapers needed changing and that we were hungry. Mother’s response was, as the music stopped sharply on a high note : ”God brought you, and God will provide.” She continued to play her violin. So, according to my sister, she, and my brother John, ran down to the north shore with a bucket, dug up cockles and winkles in the black mud, brought them home where she boiled them up for us to eat. Hence, God had provided ! She must have been all of ten years old.

During the war years, everyone possessed a ‘gas mask’. They made people look like aliens from outer space. The masks were made from a red rubber-like mould that encased large round glass eyes that bulged close to a long red nose that jutted out over a blue filter. When these brutal devices are placed onto young faces, the smelly and obscene torturous protection covered the mouth while the rubber sucked down like a vacuum that made us gag for breath and the feeling of being suffocated. At that stage I would have preferred the poison gas. Houses had their own form of a mask. Heavy black-out curtains dropped down over windows at night sealing out all light; specially trained people would trudge the island at night looking for violations of this law.

Hayling Island, once a special place to visit for picnics on the seafront by tourists arriving by the hundreds via the steam-driven Puffing Billy train, was now a deserted atoll, one that was surrounded by barbed wire. Dotted along the shore were ‘pill boxes’ which were constructed from precast concrete blocks and topped with steel roofs. Soldiers would hide in these anti-invasion boxes and place their ack-acking sounding machine guns through windowless holes as they aimed them at the deadly German Messerschmitt fighters. Every possible landing place was covered by fire power and the coast was lined with guns of every calibre.

My sister, Jennifer, remembers the bracing and invigorating breezes that had started to bring in odors of dust and rubble of the burning houses These smells were mingled with the fumes of smoke and flames of the German, British, and later, American, planes as they fell from the sky and made a graveyard of the debris that was piling up on the once pristine white sands. Rotting bodies of dead pilots were washed up on shore and the stench, at times, became overpowering. Large grotesque magnetic iron mines were parachuted into the waters and harbors waiting to attach to, and explode, incoming metal-sided warships. Barrage balloons hovered overhead the shores as they tried to protect Portsmouth – and to the islanders’ dismay, decoy lights were placed on our little isle trying to lure the German Luftwaffe’s planes away from the major military target. Portsmouth had been named a ‘tomb of darkness’. We must have been part of the cemetery. Our little island bore the brunt of attacks and a technique for deflecting radio beams was used and dummy target areas drew the attention of the raiders. These targets were skillfully planned structures erected in locations some distance from Portsmouth and designed to suggest the presence of built-up areas at night. Some of the structures would let out a certain amount of light. Flares and fires simulated the glare that a bomber’s crew might expect to see. One of these buildings was on Sinah Common, just down the street from our house.

I was too young to recognize the smell of the dead, but the reek of fear enveloped me when awoken during an air-raid. The bombing often occurred on a moon-lit night; the bright orb was known as a ‘bombers’ moon’. Warning sirens would pierce the air at the dead of night and my mother would hasten to gather her flock around her. My father was rarely there to help her. If there was not enough time to get us to the shelter, we would either hide under the bed or in the ‘dark cupboard’ which was a space under the stairs where blankets and candles were stored awaiting our use. (In collapsed buildings, unless it got a direct hit, the staircase was often left standing after a raid, thus it was considered a ‘safe’ place to be.) The house next to my grandparents’ home got a direct hit, the impact so strong that it lifted their bomb shelter out of the ground and when they climbed out, all that was left of their house was rubble and a solitary bathtub hanging from a drain pipe. One night, a house down the street from our home got a direct hit, but all we got was a cracked window. We were lucky that night. As the warning sirens awoke us, and if possible, we would scurry down to our bomb shelter during the attack, the moon would throw menacing-looking shadows across the pathway and, in our terror, we thought the enemy was hiding behind the trees. And as I fled down the narrow pathway the rose bushes would thrust out their branches and grab my nightie with their sharp thorns. During my nightmares, I would yank my hair out by its roots and wind the blond strands around my nose as I sucked my thumb. All evidence of my being a little girl was lost in the baldness that spread across my skull. I became so shy in school that I would weep if a teacher called upon me. I suffered in school preferring to hide myself in stories of fictional children who didn’t have to hide from the horrors of the war that I had been exposed to. Looking back, I see now that I, like so many at that time, was probably experiencing post traumatic stress syndrome but no-one at that time knew how to help those who battled depression. But slowly, oh so slowly, some teachers believed in me and I started to shine when I was chosen to read the part of Amy from the book Little Women by Louisa Alcott as my reading was, apparently, superior to others in my class. I was encouraged to further my education and not follow in the footsteps of many girls on the Island who, at that time, had married young and had already started families. Today, I salute those educators, and my parents.

When we reached the sanctuary of the bomb shelter which was built into a dirt mound at the end of our backyard, Mother, with Jennifer’s help, would tug at, and struggle with, the heavy slanted iron door that covered the entrance to the blackness below and we would quickly jump down into the concrete depths of dread and, invariably, land with a splash in a puddle that lay in wait for us on the floor. On one side of the cramped quarters, bunk beds stood and, on the other side, a small table and a couple of chairs. How my mother was able to rest during those nights is anyone’s guess. When the bombs got too close, neighbors would sometimes join us as we had one of the few Anderson shelters, otherwise only iron ‘tables’ were available for them to hide beneath. We would stay in this confining space until the all-clear siren screeched. From this experience, even until today, the feeling of claustrophobia often overwhelms me when I’m in a confined place and then my breath becomes shallow and my heart starts to beat out a rhythm of fear.

As the war continued and the nightly bombing raids went on, new V-1 flying bombs called ‘doodlebugs or buzz bombs’ were terrorizing us and we would wait in mind-numbing fear as the sputtering engines cut out, fall, and then explode in a fireball. We would pray that we weren’t the intended target.

But we survived those horrific years and my hair started to grow back and normality slowly returned to our old three-storied Victorian semi-detached house that had a parapet on the third floor that connected our house with the one next door. That parapet was wide enough to allow my outrageous brothers, sisters – and me – to creep along to peer into our neighbor’s bedroom. Yep, we were dreadful kids but starting to forget the angst of the war years and my poor long-suffering mother still had no control over us.  

Several of my readers are already familiar with this story and I do hope my new supporters haven’t been bored and that you have enjoyed my story. And – I trust that I have reminded you that there are wars going on throughout the world and we must remember that millions of people are suffering the same fears and fates that I have experienced. We must keep them in our prayers and thoughts.