My earliest childhood memories

The earliest actual thing I can remember with any certainty (the chronology can get a bit confused, so long ago), was the wailing of the air-raid siren the first time we were attacked by German bombers, in 1940. I was five at the time and in bed asleep until the din started, then Mum came into my room with some clothes and I was dressed and whisked off to the air-raid shelter at the bottom of our garden for the night. Fortunately, nothing explosive landed near to us that night, in fact we never did get a bomb too close – about a quarter of a mile was the nearest – but that wailing was a sound everyone grew to hate, because at the very least it meant a disturbed night’s sleep.

My next sharp memory was in fact from the day after one of the aforementioned air raids, because during the action we could hear shrapnel falling all around us from the exploding anti-aircraft shells shot at enemy bombers, and in the morning we kids would all go wandering around back lanes and gardens, looking for pieces. If you were really lucky you might find a nose-cone off of a shell (a real collector’s item!), but more often what we would discover were odd bits of shattered metal, anything from a hundred millimetres long, up to five or six hundred millimetres. If we found newly fallen pieces, they were all bright and silvery and easy to find, but they very quickly went rusty, which made things a lot more difficult against the colour of the earth.

I also remember going grocery shopping with my mother, to her favourite store. But it was about as different from the supermarkets we are accustomed to today as a modern Ford is from a Model ‘T’. For a start, the shop was quite small; about the same as all the other shops around it, and there were no aisles to wander about in. No, my mother would sit on a chair at the counter with the grocer, Mr Pont, standing on the other side waiting for her instructions while she looked through her shopping list. I should add here that it was a pretty small shopping list too by today’s standards, not helped by the fact that there was a war on and everything seemed to be either rationed or unobtainable!

Mum would, after a short pause say something like, “Four ounces of butter please, Mr Pont”, and off that gentleman would trot to what looked to me like a massive block of butter on the other side of the shop. He would then expertly cut off a piece, weigh it and return triumphantly to Mum. Then he would write on a piece of paper the price of the item. Mum might then say, “Four rashers of bacon please”, and off he’d go again to another part of the store, where a side of bacon hung from a hook in the ceiling, ready for him to cut slices with a large, sharp knife. Then the weighing ritual and the jotting down of the price again, ready for the next thing required. And so it would go on, the grocer rushing about all over his premises, while Mum just sat there telling him her requirements until it was all complete and Mr Pont would lick his pencil stub before adding up the bill. Mum, of course, paid in cash; it was to be MANY years before credit cards and bank cards were invented, though some richer ladies did have accounts, paid monthly. 

Another treasured memory is of going with Mum and Dad to Weston Super Mare on the train for a day by the seaside (though at Weston it tended to be more ‘mud-side’ than seaside!). During the war there wasn’t much to be had in the way of actual holidays due to travel restrictions and tight limits on how much money you could carry (and don’t forget this was just in the UK – holidays abroad weren’t available until after the war finished). But once we got there Dad would get some folding deckchairs, and we’d all sit out in the middle of the beach for a few hours, with several thousand other people, my parents dressed as if they were going to the office for the day and me in my swimming trunks, playing with a bucket and spade in the sand.

Mum would have brought sandwiches and cake with her to save money, and we’d eat those in the middle of the day. Then, if I was lucky, Dad would take me up onto the pier for an hour, so I could try some of the rides. And that one day at Weston pretty well amounted to our annual summer holidays. And yet we loved it; after all everyone else was just about as unlikely to go away because of the war and we made the most of the simple pleasures available. I still prefer the simple life now, most likely because of that early training!

These are just a few of my childhood memories. I could go on retelling about a thousand more, but then there’d be no room for anyone else to recall their early days, so “I’ll ‘ang up me ‘at now, and go back ‘ome to bed!”