Polly (11 page)

Anyway, we got married on 20 February 1932. It was a bit of a shock when we woke up to find thick snow on the ground, but it did not deter Mum from
any of her plans. Nobody could afford to hire halls or anything like that for the reception, and so we got married from home. The first job, then, was to make room for the party and, never mind the snow, we carried most of the furniture out into the backyard. In fact, pretty well everything except Mum's bed – her bed wasn't going to stand out in the snow! We also needed somewhere to hang the coats, but that too was easily solved. Mum bought a couple of ounces of 6in nails and simply drove them into the wall of the small bedroom.

Certificate of direct donor-to-patient blood donation.

We got married in St John's Church, Stratford. Fred was ever so well known around Stratford, and as we drove back from the church all the stall-holders and quite a few of the passers-by stopped to cheer, shout their best wishes, and all the rest. It really was quite some fun. Back home, Mum had laid on a full hot meal wedding breakfast. She bought and cooked two aitch-bones of beef and two hams all in our tiny little kitchen, while Dad had used his market job to get loads of potatoes and fresh salad, including cucumbers and tomatoes. That might seem pretty ordinary now, but back in 1932 fresh salad in February was almost unheard of.

The big disadvantage of having the reception at home was that it was too small for everybody to sit down together so we ate in two sittings! Dad, as ever, hadn't come straight back home from the church and instead stopped at the pub on the way. Just as the first sitting was finishing its meal he arrived back, already well drunk and in high spirits. He was also terribly pleased with himself.

‘'Ere Doll!' he shouted up the stairs as he came in, ‘look who I ran into on my way home. We stopped for a drink at the pub and I bought them home for a meal.' ‘They' were Fred's mum and dad (well, his step-mum and dad) so where on earth did he think they were going before he waylaid them into the pub? The party went on well into the night and spread all over the house, up and down the stairs, and out into the road. Just across the road from our house was a cast-iron public urinal and my lasting memory of that day was seeing everybody linking hands around this urinal to play ring-a-ring-a-roses.

I
suppose it sounds like a joke, but I actually do remember the day that war broke out. Every Sunday we used to go over to the City of London cemetery at Manor Park to visit Dad's grave and then go on to Mum's for the afternoon. Of course, on this particular Sunday there was all sorts of tension in the air and we wanted to wait for the Prime Minister's broadcast at eleven o'clock on the radio. Sure enough, the broadcast came and it was war. Suddenly, all the old routines went out the window. We decided to go over and see sister Doll instead. By now she had two children and had been told that if there was war she would be evacuated. We wanted to see her before she went. It sounds silly now; as if anything would have got sorted out on the first afternoon of the war. Still, we were young and naïve, and at first you thought that the government knew what it was doing. We learned pretty quickly, but these were early days. So we walked round to Doll's, but she wasn't there. It turns out that, because of the children, she had been told to report to the school around the corner to arrange for evacuation.

As we were walking back home the air raid alarm went off. Of course, it was a false alarm but we didn't know that at the time. You wouldn't believe the panic and confusion, because nobody had the faintest idea what to do. Then somebody said it was a gas attack. This was always the great fear at the start of the war; I suppose it was a hangover from the stories of the First World War.
We had already been issued with gas masks so lots of people put them on. I can still remember walking up the street with people standing at their doorways wearing gas masks and looking up at the sky searching for the bombers.

Anyway, Doll told us later that she had gone round to the school and was waiting in the playground when the warning went off. They were all hustled inside ‘for protection', I think that later on that would have been seen as a mistake – if you couldn't get into a proper shelter it was better to stay out in the open. Just as she reached the door of the school the excitement, the heat, and no doubt the worry of the two kids, finally got the better of Doll and she fainted. Apparently, a man rushed off to get her a drink of water but had no idea where the kitchens or anything were and so, in desperation, grabbed a vase of flowers, threw out the flowers and gave Doll the water! She still remembers waking up with little leaves stuck all around her mouth.

In fact, Doll soon got a house out in Buckhurst Hill so she was out of the real danger. Her husband was called up into the army straight away at the start of the war and was soon away in France. One day Doll was cleaning her windows when she saw this soldier coming up the street. He was in a dreadful state; a total wreck, scruffy and staggering all over the place. He looked more like a tramp than a soldier. She assumed he must be totally drunk and was quite scandalised, but she watched him steadily making his way towards her. Eventually he stopped at the little wall in front of the house and looked up at Doll, who was still standing at the window watching him.

‘Let me in, Doll,' he said.

It was her husband just back from Dunkirk. The effect of the exhaustion, the strain, the battering and all the rest had changed him so much that she hadn't recognised him. He had got back with nothing except the clothes he was wearing – he had even lost his tin hat. It must have been bad, because my brother Bob always maintained that the one thing you never took off, never let go of, hung on to at all costs, was your tin hat. Your rifle might get ‘too heavy' or ‘get in the way', but you wore your tin hat to the last.

Those early days were pretty chaotic and Hitler could have had anything he wanted if he had bothered to turn up. Fred's brother George was working down on the south coast, where he joined the Home Guard. He was given a large spike and told to protect the coast from invasion! Nobody told him what to do with this spike if the invasion did come, but he still swears that he saw it approaching at least half-a-dozen times on his first night of sentry duty. My sister's husband-to-be, also a George, was also in the Home Guard. They had an anti-invasion exercise one night and he was ever so excited because
his platoon had been chosen as one of the attackers. With all the anti-German feeling around we couldn't understand why anybody would even want to play-act being a German. But, he explained, the defenders were on duty all night while the attackers were sooner or later rounded up and then sent back to the HQ where they could have a cup of cocoa. It was much better to be an attacker.

Fred and Polly at about the time of their wedding (1932).

The war took quite a toll, though. Fred was in a reserved occupation – he was a toolmaker – though he was silly enough to volunteer. When he told the recruiting officer what job he did he got sent home with a flea in his ear for wasting their time! Apart from him, though, all my brothers, and most of the other men I knew, ended up in the forces. None of them was killed, in fact none was physically wounded, but looking back most of them paid a high price for their service. Daisy's husband John was blown up in the desert. He was in the artillery and his gun got a direct hit. I suppose it must have set off some of the ammunition because there was an enormous explosion and all that was left
was a hole in the ground. Anyway, John was assumed dead, along with all the other blokes who were never found, but a couple of days later he wandered in from the desert. He didn't know who he was, what he had done, or where he had been. He was eventually invalided home but was always a bit vacant, and had to be told what to do next. If they were going out he had to be told to put his shoes on because otherwise he would carry on wearing his slippers. He became a bit of a joke among people who had not known him before the war. But honestly, when he went off into the army he was the finest man who ever walked God's earth; the man who came back was nothing like the man who went out. It was heartbreaking.

Looking back, most of my friends and relatives who were in the forces seemed to end up in the desert and then Italy. Eddy, my friend's husband, was captured in the desert and spent the rest of the war as a PoW. On his first day home after the war he sat at the kitchen table, looked at the wall opposite, and said that if there was another war he would go again, he would fight if he had to, but he would never be taken prisoner again. He never said another word about his experiences. My brother-in-law Bert never said anything either, not until almost his last words that is. In the late 1980s he spent his last days in a local hospice and by the end wasn't really conscious. As far as we could tell, he didn't know what was going on around him and barely spoke. However, one day a priest went in to see him. Bert didn't look at him or even open his eyes, but must have sensed the priest and was quite rude.

‘You can go away,' he said, ‘I'll never get to heaven. I killed a man in the war and I never even knew his name.' He had never said anything about any such incident, and we have no idea what happened, but it must have been preying on his mind all those years. He had never got over it.

My brother Bob went all through the desert and then on into Italy. In fact, every year at Christmas I still have to weep when the news on TV reports that the Pope has given his blessing to the ‘City and the World' – and especially when television shows the picture of the crowds in St Peter's Square. You see, I listened to the live radio broadcast from Rome on Christmas Day 1944. I cannot remember who the reporter was or anything like that, but he was talking about the vast crowd of mainly servicemen crowding the square with their eyes glued to the balcony of the Vatican (or wherever it was that the Pope appears). Then he turned his attention to ‘a lone RASC driver, sitting on the running board of his lorry parked just beyond the edge of the crowd and enjoying a cigarette.' After the war Bob told us how on Christmas Day there really wasn't very much to do so he volunteered to drive the Catholics from
his unit into Rome to see the Pope, and how he watched it all sitting on the running board of his lorry. So that must have been him. It sent a shiver up my spine then, and it still does every year.

I said that I remembered the day the war broke out. I also remember the day the war ended, or at least, the day it ended in Europe – VE Day. We had, by then, been bombed out of Keogh Road and they moved us into a half-house about half a mile away in Earlham Grove. We had the ground floor and another family lived upstairs. Anyway, on VE Day I was at home on my own, apart from the kids that is. Somehow you felt that you had to do something, but there was nothing to do. I couldn't think of anything better than to stand at the front gate and find somebody to talk to. Even then, the street was pretty well empty. It was very long and right up at the far end I could see a young woman coming along. I stood there and watched her, thinking of all the wonderful things I could say and how happy we would be. Eventually she got within speaking range.