Polly (16 page)

Later in the war we were evacuated to Six Mile Bottom, about halfway between Cambridge and Newmarket. Our Jane was out there with the Land Army and she fixed it all up for me. We stayed with ‘Aunty Blinco' in one of six terraced farm cottages, which stood alone at the end of a long tree-lined drive coming up from the main road. It was in the middle of nowhere. It was just like the romantic idea of a cottage, with two rooms downstairs and two up. The floors were made of brick, but until very recently they had still been dirt. The ceilings were low, you stooped to go through a door, and the staircase was almost a ladder in the corner of the front room. Water came from a pump outside and the garden looked like a ‘cottage garden' illustration on the box of a jigsaw puzzle.

Aunty had her own story to tell. She had married young and soon had a small family. Disaster struck when her husband died, leaving her to be the youngest widow anybody in the area could ever remember. She had no means of support apart from a tiny plot of land but she was a worker and set-to, just so that she and the kids could survive. She used the plot of land to grow onions and sold them locally. She got just about enough money each year to scrape through to the next. Eventually she remarried, and after that life was much easier. ‘Uncle' was much younger than her, but they were a devoted couple and lived out a long life together. He was a farm worker on the estate, which was how they came to be living in one of the estate cottages. He worked long hours on the estate and when he got home from there he would work more hours in the garden growing their vegetables. He used to go out once a week, regular as clockwork, every Saturday night down to the pub with his mates.

One Saturday, as he was going out, he mentioned that he might bring back some greengages – his friend, ‘A', had said he would let him have a basketful. Aunty hit the roof!

‘There is absolutely no way I am going to have his greengages in the house!'

‘But they are free and will bottle well – make jam!'

‘That doesn't matter, there are none of his greengages coming into this house!'

‘Well it seems silly to waste them, and they are good ones…'

‘That's even worse, if they come back I will leave home…'

They carried on to and fro like this for at least a quarter of an hour until
Uncle gave in and left for the pub. I was terribly embarrassed, because I had never seen Uncle and Aunty argue like that and I didn't know what to say. So I just kept my mouth shut and tried to avoid the subject, but in the end, Aunty told me anyway. Apparently ‘A' and his wife lived in one of the cottages over at somewhere or other. His wife was always pregnant and must have had a baby every year, but never did they have a child. Of course, out in those remote areas you never got a midwife and I don't suppose they could have afforded one anyway. Come to that, they couldn't have afforded any extra mouths to feed either. Whether those two facts were related or just coincidence I don't know, but every year another baby went under that greengage tree – and there was no way on God's earth that Aunty was going to eat the fruit that came off it! It was just another sign of how rough life could be out in the remote country areas in the first half of the century.

It was amazing to hear what went on. I remember once talking to an older lady who was dreadfully sad about how she had no family. She was ever so vague though, and I couldn't really make sense of the bits of stories and hints she was giving me. So I just agreed with her and sympathised. When I got back to the cottage I asked Aunty about her. It took Aunty a little while to work out who I was talking about, but then she told me the story. Her husband used to be head gardener up at the big house and they had quite a good little family. But then one winter one of the children caught diphtheria and in no time all the kids had caught it. Eventually they had to call the doctor in and his only advice was that the children had to be kept warm and cosy. That was much easier said than done, especially living in a small, unheated estate cottage and eventually, in desperation, the father made up beds for the children in one of the heated greenhouses and nursed them there. It is amazing to think that they could heat greenhouses but not homes for sick children, and nobody thought that it was at all unreasonable! Anyway, it was all to no avail and one-by-one the children died. Of course, you couldn't keep that sort of thing quiet and slowly the story came out. When the master heard about it he was livid – children dying is one thing but up at the house they ate food that had been grown in those greenhouses. He promptly had the greenhouses burnt down and sacked the father. Of course, that was a real disaster in those days and though he did his best to make a living he soon gave up the struggle and died young. His wife never really recovered her wits and was always a bit touched, unsurprisingly. The master and his wife went down on the
Titanic
, but I don't think anybody was too upset.

A
fter the Blitz things went a bit quiet until near the end of the war, when we got the doodlebugs and rockets. We were living in Keogh Road and I already had a great big lump, expecting my second boy. By then doodlebugs were getting a bit routine so we always used to sleep in the Morrison shelter, with a piano between us and the window for extra protection. I made a small bag out of a bit of spare cloth and every night I packed this with a towel, some water, a baby's bottle and a sandwich, and I used to put this in the shelter ‘just in case' of emergencies. Well, this night the warning went and so I hurriedly packed the bag and put it, and the baby (well, he was more of a toddler by then), in the shelter. Fred, of course, was already down at the warden post. He used to work all day, be at the post all night, then just come in for breakfast before going to work again. God knows how he kept it up.

My brother George had been visiting us that night but had left to go home and I had done various odd jobs before getting ready for bed. Nearly an hour later there was a knock on the door and there stood George. Now George suffered from night blindness, in fact he couldn't see a thing in the dark. He hadn't been gone long when the warning went and, of course, they turned off all the lights. There wasn't much light to find your way around at the best of times, but in a raid there was none and poor old George was totally blind.
It seems that he had wandered round in circles for ages, trying to recognise something or somewhere by feel. Some fellow had asked him where Keogh Road was, but George couldn't help because he didn't know where he was! At least, though, he now had a companion in his search. Anyway, they then found somebody else who gave them directions and so the second fellow was able to bring George back to our house. I was dumbstruck to see him on the doorstep, but then the warden from somewhere shouted about closing down the light from the door and so I pulled him inside.

It was obvious that he wasn't going home that night so he stayed with me. I suppose he could have come into the shelter but it didn't seem quite right to me so he went upstairs to the spare bed. It was late summer and ever so warm, besides which he didn't have any pyjamas with him anyway, so he slept in the nude. The next morning I was sort of woken up by Fred's voice, far away, shouting to ‘stay in the shelter!' I didn't quite take it in, and promptly climbed out of the shelter. Suddenly WHUMMMPHT – the world started shaking, bits
of the house fell in, there were clouds of plaster everywhere and I didn't know whether I was on my head or my feet. At which moment George appeared, stark naked.

One of Fred's (many) ARP training certificates
.

A letter of commendation for Fred's handling of the Keogh Road incident
.

I got Fred's side of the story later. Having spent the night at the post he was on his way home for breakfast when the warning went again. This time it was a doodlebug coming our way and that was when he had to run the last few yards home, screaming to me to stay put and waking me up in the process. It had just passed over when the engine cut out, but for some reason it didn't carry straight on but turned and came back again diving straight towards him. Looking back it was just plain stupid, but at the time Fred could think of nothing better to do than lift his arms up to catch the thing and stop it hitting the ground! He said he felt that he could almost touch it and always remembered its great shadow passing over him. It landed just a few houses away, but somehow we were sheltered from the very worst of the blast. Needless to say it killed the couple
in the house where it landed. We had always thought that they were brother and sister but it emerged from all the fuss that they were an unmarried couple living together; quite a scandal then but nobody had suspected anything.

Of course, Fred was the senior person on site and as soon as he saw that I was alright he went back to the post and immediately took control. He set up his control post and in no time at all was busy organising rescues here, cars there, checking for people trapped in ruins, clearing the street and all the rest. Truth be told, he was in his element organising things, but he did do a marvellous job. In fact, he later got an official Letter of Commendation from the Borough ARP Controller for the exemplary work he had done in the situation, despite his own home being among those wrecked in the incident.

Anyway, back home, George was standing there stark naked in the rubble of our front room. He too had heard Fred shouting and was rushing downstairs to tell me to stay put when the bomb went off. I found an old sheet and tore it in half so he could wrap it around himself and then he gingerly cleared a way up what remained of the staircase – and it wasn't very much – to the ruin of the bedroom. He managed to find his clothes and got dressed, though he looked a bit of a shambles. I then got Robert out of the shelter and we went out in the street and sat on a low wall. I could see Fred up the road surrounded by loads of people and doing his organising. I was happy to leave him to it, when along came a nurse.

Polly's casualty card
.