by Mary Arden
Then one of the men wolf whistled at me, which I found rather embarrassing so I looked away, but then when a couple of other soldiers whistled and waved at me I realised that this is what men did and there was no harm in it, so I might as well just smile and wave back. It didn’t take long before I was running up and down the platform, shaking hands with the men and blowing kisses back.
After the train had pulled out of the station, I grabbed the cart I had spotted earlier and once I had piled the dirty crockery onto trays and carefully balanced them on the cart, I asked one of the Porters if he could help me push it over to the café, which he was more than happy to do.
An hour later everything was washed and stacked on clean trays ready for the next train. One of the WVS ladies then asked me to pop over to Sainsbury’s to tell them that we needed some more milk, packets of sugar, butter or margarine.’
‘Of course, I’d be happy to,’ I said, ‘but what’s margarine?’
‘It’s imitation butter, dear, and it helps out with the rationing,’ the WVS lady replied. So that was what the soft strange looking and odd tasting butter was I realised. Butter rationing had come into force in January, along with bacon and sugar, but as the war continued, other rations had followed and now included meat, cheese, eggs, milk, jam, canned fruit, tea, cereals and biscuits.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t brought any money with me, shall I ask them to put the things you’ve asked me to get on my mother’s account?’ I asked.
The WVS lady replied, ‘That’s very kind dear, but not necessary. Sainsbury’s has offered to give us anything we need for the troops at no cost. Ask one of the errand boys to help you to carry it back, as the milk will be heavy for a little one like you, and it’ll save time, we need you back here as quickly as possible.’
When I arrived at Sainsbury’s, I asked for the manager and requested the items for the café. The order was promptly made up, and I was handed several packets of biscuits, as a treat for the soldiers. The manager wrote down the Woking branch telephone number and his name, and told me that if we needed any more supplies not to come back but to just ring up and someone would bring over whatever was required.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said.
‘Not at all. I’d do anything for those poor men after what they’ve been through,’ the manger said quietly.
When I got back to the station, the trains were still coming and going thick and fast and we had to ring up Sainsbury’s almost every hour for more supplies. Then some of the local people began to turn up with whatever spare provisions they had at home. Some brought biscuits, others sandwiches, cigarettes and sweets, and some brought warm jumpers and even a few blankets. Word must have spread that our brave soldiers were returning from Dunkirk and were passing through the station.
I noticed two soldiers standing close together, one was only wearing a pair of underpants and the other had a blanket around his shoulders; but both of them clutched their rifles as if they were the crown jewels. The porter told me that the reason so many of the soldiers were no longer wearing uniforms was that they had got them drenched when they had come off the beaches and been forced to wade through the sea to get on board the small vessels that were then able to transfer them to the bigger ships that had brought them home.
‘One of the men told me that they had been under constant attack from machine gun fire and that the explosions had sent shrapnel everywhere,’ the porter said solemnly, ‘It must have been chaos… poor bastards,’ As soon as the porter had gone I started to cry but managed to pull myself together before going back to the café.
An hour later Mrs Brown came and told me that as no more trains were due to arrive, I could go home. My feet felt as if they were on fire and I was exhausted. I didn’t even have the strength to ride my bicycle home, so I walked to the nearest telephone box to ring home and ask if someone could come and collect me, but just as I was about to put the money in the slot, I saw my mother’s car pull up near where I had left my bike.
As I staggered towards her she put her arm around me and said, ‘Oh, my poor little lamb. Nancy told me you’d been here all day and I thought I’d come and bring you home. We’ll leave your bike here and you can collect it tomorrow.’
When we got home my mother made me put my blistered feet in a washing-up bowl filled with warm water and added a few drops of disinfectant, which stung so much that I cried out with pain. My mother gave me a spoonful of brandy ‘for medical purposes only’ and when my father got home, he took one look at my feet and decided he would have a swig of brandy too!
‘Why on earth did you wear your summer sandals?’ he asked me.
‘It was Lady Albright,’ I replied, ‘She told me to wear comfortable shoes and as I couldn’t wear my school walking shoes with my summer dress, I thought sandals would be nice and cool. I didn’t realise I’d be on my feet for so long.’
The following morning, my mother told me that Lady Albright had phoned her and was full of praise for what I had achieved. She then took me to the local cottage hospital to get her doctor to look at my sore feet.
A few days later, on the 4th June 1940, Winston Churchill made an uplifting speech on the radio telling everyone to be prepared to fight when the Germans invaded our country, which my father told me was expected any day now.
‘We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…’
On 10th June, Italy declared war with Britain and France. My father came back from the War Office that evening, and told us that after hearing this news, Churchill had apparently said, ‘People who go to Italy to look at the ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii again.’
I then had to go back to school to sit my exams for my School Certificate, so the rest of that term it was all work and very little play. When it was finally all over, we broke up for the summer holidays and I went home again.
Much to my delight, the next weekend Henry turned up at our house.
‘So Goldilocks, I hear you’ve left school and you’re off to Finishing School in the autumn, is that right?’ he asked, as we walked around our garden.
‘Yes, but I’d much rather do some proper war work than go to a Finishing School and have to do all this silly ‘Coming Out’ business,’ I replied. ‘To be honest, Henry, all this nonsense about taking one’s rightful place in society seems very wrong when there is a war going on. It’s really just an excuse to get me married off to a suitable man, but if I want to marry the milkman I shall do it!’
‘Lucky milkman!’ Henry teased and then leant over and kissed my cheek, whispering, ‘I thoroughly agree with you by the way, except about the milkman of course. You should at least aim for the farmer that owns the cows!’
‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ I asked him.
‘Dozens!’ Henry said laughing.
‘Well they are not invited to the party tonight!’ I joked back.
My father had agreed for Peter to put on a dance in the Big Room that evening for his friends, and my parents would avoid the noise by going next door to play cards with the Derwents. William and I were allowed to go to the party, as long as we helped get it all ready. William helped Peter choose the music and I helped Nancy bake some vol-au-vent cases and then filled them with chicken and mushroom in a white sauce. We then fried lots of chipolata sausages, which William cut in half and spiked with wooden sticks. We picked lettuce leaves, tomatoes, cucumbers and cress from the garden to make a huge salad and it all looked absolutely delicious. We then covered the ping-pong table with a sheet and put the plates, cutlery and glasses on it.
After we had done everything we could to help, I went upstairs to choose something to wear. I couldn’t make up my m
ind between a long dress, which I thought might be a bit too formal for this occasion and a short one, which might be too casual and make me look younger than I was, but then I remembered that my mother’s sister, Aunt Beth, had given me a very pretty Hungarian-style three-quarter-length skirt and a white embroidered blouse that she’d found in a box of discarded theatrical costumes.
I felt quite grown up in my new outfit but my confidence soon evaporated, when I saw to my dismay that most of the other girls were wearing much prettier and more sophisticated dresses than mine. I looked more like a twelve year-old child than a girl of sixteen.
‘Lovely dress Mary,’ I heard a voice say behind me, ‘just right for dancing.’
It was Henry, which boosted my confidence considerably. However, the feeling only lasted briefly, as I then saw him flirting with a very attractive girl who had just arrived.
It didn’t take long before the party was in full swing. William kept himself busy changing the records, while I kept running to the pantry to wash endless dirty glasses, checking the next batch of vol-au-vents was ready and generally making myself useful. But after a while, I got fed up of being ‘invisible’ and decided that I would have to do something about it. I ran upstairs to my parent’s bedroom and on my mother’s dressing table I found a lipstick, so I dabbed some of the colour on my finger and used it to blush my cheeks and then patted the rest on my lips. I then put a little blue eyes shadow on my eyelids and brushed some mascara onto my lashes. Admiring myself in the mirror, I thought that I now looked far more grown up and in a final desperate attempt to be more sophisticated I squirted some of my mother’s most expensive perfume behind each ear.
Feeling much better about myself, I then went back downstairs to join the others in the Big Room. Peter walked straight past me not recognizing that I was his little sister at all, which made me smile. Within a moment or two I was invited to dance, first with one boy and then another. Hmmm… I thought, if it only takes a bit of makeup to look older, I might start using it every day.
I was happily dancing with a boy called Malcolm when he became a little too friendly and tried to fondle one of my breasts. Shocked, I immediately pulled away, muttering something about checking the vol-au-vents, and ran out of the room. Henry must have seen what happened, as he followed me into the kitchen, took one look at my face and then pulling out his handkerchief, he dragged me, protesting, over to the sink.
‘You don’t need to put paint on your face to look pretty Mary,’ he admonished, running the corner of his hanky under the tap, and then washing the lipstick off my face.
‘I wasn’t trying to look pretty!’ I protested ‘I just wanted to look older so someone would dance with me.’
Before I could say anything else, Henry took me in his arms and holding me close whispered, ‘I will dance with you.’ We then danced together in a slow sleepy waltz and I felt as though I was in heaven until the spell was suddenly broken by Agnes who called out, ‘Sir Henry, you’re needed urgently on the telephone. It’s Mr Derwent for you.’
Henry went into the hall where the phone was and after listening for a moment he then mouthed to me, ‘Pen. Paper.’ I found both under the telephone table and gave them to him; he quickly wrote down a telephone number, only saying ‘Yes… Yes I understand… thank you,’ and then he hung up the phone.
‘May I use your telephone Mary? It’s urgent.’ I told him that of course he could and then went into the drawing room to give him some privacy but overheard him say, ‘Yes Sir, at once. It will take me a couple of hours, I have to pack and then drive back.’ When he joined me in the drawing room he immediately explained what the call was about.
‘Mary, I’ve been recalled urgently. Apparently German bombers are collecting over the sea and heading towards England. They’re aiming for London. All fighter pilots are needed right away to stop them.’
‘Are you frightened?’ I asked him.
‘A little, but this is what we’ve been training for over the last few months.’ He then looked down at my face ‘Mary, there is something I have been wanting to do all evening so I’d better do it now just in case I don’t make it,’ He then lifted up my chin and very gently and slowly put his lips on mine. I felt for one wonderful moment that I was floating but then crash-landed quickly, as Henry grabbed my hand and we went back into the Big Room together. He switched on the lights, which made everyone cover their eyes to cover the glare, and yelled at his RAF friends, ‘Tally-Ho, the fox has been spotted! Come on chaps, action stations.’
Andrew was the first to react saying to Peter. ‘I’d better return to base too, thanks for a smashing party,’ I hurried into the hallway to give him a kiss goodbye and said, ‘Take care dearest Andrew.’
‘You too Mary, and please say goodbye to your parents for me,’ he then walked out and everyone else began to collect their things and get ready to leave too. The party was over.
Having heard the reason why the party had ended so abruptly, my parents quickly returned home and told us that we must prepare for the worst, as the invasion might begin that very night. My father carefully checked all the blackout curtains were in place, as he was frightened that if the Germans flew over Woking that night, we would all be killed if any house lights were seen from the air. My mother didn’t think it was a good idea making the entire family sleep in the air raid shelter and told us that we should all get a good night’s rest in our own beds tonight before we faced ‘heaven knows what’.
Thankfully we had a peaceful night and the next morning everything remained quiet until about eleven when we could see white vapour trails begin to appear in the cloudless sky. My father said that it was a dog-fight, but you could have been forgiven for thinking there was a rugby match going on instead, as we all started to yell to our boys in their Spitfires to ‘Give ‘em hell!’
These dogfights became a regular occurrence and every time I heard a Spitfire fly overhead I wondered whether it could be Henry.
On the 20th August 1940 we heard Winston Churchill give another of his wonderful speeches referring to the brave RAF pilots who were fighting what we now called the Battle of Britain.
‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day, but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate, careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power.’
Less than a month later, the Battle of Britain was over but the Germans were now dropping bombs on London every night. Many houses were completely destroyed or damaged and there had been many civilian casualties already. I was very concerned for Jane, as her family lived there, so rang her as often as my mother would allow me to.
‘Is it very scary Jane?’ I asked my cousin.
‘Yes it’s terrifying but we have got used to it somehow, and if I am going to die I would rather be with my family when that happens,’ she said bravely.
I suppose I felt much the same but that we were most probably much safer in Woking than our cousins were in London.
The entire country was now asked to raise money, so that more Spitfires could be built to win the war in the skies. We were asked to put on Bring-and-Buy sales, clear our attics of saleable goods, and do anything possible to raise money for the war effort.
Agnes proudly announced one day that she was now making spare parts for the Spitfires at ‘the Munitions’.
‘What parts?’ William asked her.
‘Your guess is as good as mine, Master William, but every bit helps.’
As the weeks went by, I made myself more and more busy, frantically doing my nurse’s training and practising bandaging on William. I soon became an expert at making
a head bandage, which didn’t slip or fall over his eyes. I also volunteered for extra hours at the YMCA and, when I had time, I would go to Kay’s house and clean for her, look after baby Richard or help her with the ironing. All this activity filled my days and made me feel that at least I was doing ‘something’ towards the war effort but I couldn’t wait until I could become a real nurse.
One evening after we’d listened to the news on the wireless, William switched channels to a different wavelength and we heard a very strange voice with a rather comic upper class accent saying, ‘Jairmany calling. Jairmany calling.’
‘Is he trying to say Germany?’ I said. The comical voice continued, telling the public how many British fighter planes had been shot down. The number was so high that we all looked at each other in disbelief.
‘He’s lying again, we haven’t got that amount of planes to shoot down,’ my father remarked.
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure exactly Mary, as there seem to be a few different announcers trying to demoralise us this way but they have all been given the nickname Lord Haw-Haw at the War Office. We soon realised that he… or they… were telling lies, because we knew from our own broadcasts that we were winning the war in the skies. These broadcasts are designed simply to undermine the morale of the British people, but it won’t work.’
A week later the Germans were still bombing London every night and the residents had to seek shelter in the underground stations or wherever they could find it. The bombing only seemed to make the British people more determined to fight on. Every now and then Winston Churchill would address the people on the wireless to rally everybody to be brave.
‘These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler’s invasion plans. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise and cow the people of this mighty imperial city, and make them a burden and anxiety to the Government… Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners… who have been bred to value freedom far above their lives. This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed.’