Wartime cartoon drawn by my Father
During the war, the GWR works hooter was joined by an Air-raid siren which always used to scare me. As it happened, Swindon escaped very lightly but I remember having a lecture at school after one particular raid. A bomb was dropped in the Ferndale Road area and a lady was killed because she ignored the siren and stayed in her bedroom. Our teacher told us that she had been standing in front of her bedroom mirror when the bomb hit nearby. The blast shattered the mirror and she was cut so badly that she bled to death. The moral was, do not ignore the siren and get to the shelter as fast as possible.
This was all very well but we didn't have a shelter until well on into the war. In the meantime we sheltered under the stairs until the All-clear sounded. Our shelter, when it eventually came, consisted of a metal cage which went under the front-room table and we all had to squeeze into that. It was a good place to play and I made a sort of a nest in there out of old newspapers. The newspapers we had were the Daily Mirror each weekday and the News of the World on Sundays. My nest often got raided because the newspapers were also used by the family for toilet paper because spending money on toilet rolls would have been an unthinkable extravagance.
Dad took me outside the front door one day to look at a German aeroplane. It was flying low and very slowly from the direction of the GWR factory and then on almost directly over us. I could see it very clearly and I felt that we were being watched. The plane was black and shiny and I remember wondering why such a marvellous machine would want to hurt us.
Another time Dad was taking us for a walk along the Old Canal, which had water in it at that time. I was in a pushchair and we were on our way home when Dad stopped and pointed to the sky. It was a bright Summer day and the sky was very blue. All I could see was a lot of white trails in the sky. Dad explained that it was a dog-fight and he pointed out the little black dots which were circling round and round and which were making the trails. All at once, one little black dot detached itself and got bigger and bigger as it swiftly came down. What was my surprise when another little black dot fell from the falling plane and blossomed white as a parachute opened. At least, this is what Dad's running commentary led me to understand. I wonder what all that was about?
I also remember a peculiar incident when we were all lounging by the lake at Coate Water. Suddenly, a biplane scooted across our view from right to left, getting rapidly lower and obviously on fire. It just cleared the trees at the far side of the lake and disappeared from view. The only other thing I remember is Dad saying, "My God, He's had it!"
At another time during the war a German plane was (presumably) shot down while I was out playing with my elder brother, Doug, and some of his friends. They instantly decided to see where it was going to crash, if possible, and hopefully get some bits, especially perspex, which could be used for making all sorts of things.
We all ran like mad up to the town centre, then on up Victoria Hill, then along Broome Manor Lane where we turned right under a railway bridge and then left into a field. And there was the crashed aircraft spread over the grass. How did my brother and his friends know where to go? By this time, having lagged behind but still keeping them in sight, I was totally lost and winded. I could do nothing more except watch. Doug and his friends were busy pulling bits off when the police arrived and stopped them. Even worse, they had to surrender up what they already had in their pockets. Somehow, Doug still managed to get away with some perspex which Dad later made into a beautifully painted Mickey Mouse brooch.
We often watched the Home Guard practising by the Drill Hall in the GWR Park. At one stage I watched them from the front window of 6 Emlyn Square as they advanced from the Park, up Exeter Street into Emlyn Square, where they made for our front garden and pretended to attack the Gluepot pub from there. Dad wouldn't let me go out until they had captured the pub and it was all over.
The Home Guard often used our front garden, suddenly invading it, lying down and aiming in various directions, shouting and then just as suddenly departing again. I suppose that was because we were on the corner. I don't remember much more about them except that they were of all shapes, sizes and ages and that they put their hearts into whatever exercise they were doing.
When the Americans came, life took a change for the better. They parked their trucks nose-to-tail along all the streets in the Railway Village and left them unguarded while they visited the three pubs in Emlyn Square or attended the frequent dances which were held in a part of the Mechanics Institute. Many a Summer night I have lain awake in my bed unable to sleep because of the strains of the Glen Miller type music wafting in through the bedroom window. The sessions usually ended with, "We'll Meet Again," or "Should old acquaintance be forgot.." followed by the fights and yelling when they turned out.
Long before this, however, some of us kids had quietly nipped up into the backs of a few of the the trucks, where the highly-prized American Comics were just lying around for the taking. Comics like Batman and Robin, Superman, Wonderwoman and Sad Sack. Packs of chewing gum were often left around too. One day, I picked up an American Forces magazine which really stunned me when I opened it up to the double-page-spread across the centre pages. It was a brilliant piece of realistic artwork depicting two soldiers advancing together against the enemy. They had obviously just been talking together and the picture captured the instant when one of them, head slightly turned towards his comrade and the viewer, had the whole side of his face blown away. Every detail was there with no holds barred, the exposed eyeball, the facial muscles and the blood. The warning was to keep your head down in battle. I tore this picture out, kept it in my pocket, and studied it on many occasions. I tried to put myself in their place and eventually came to the conclusion that war was horrible and rotten. On one of these occasions I was at school and had finished what I was doing. While waiting for the others, I unfolded the picture and became deeply engrossed until a teacher quietly came up from behind me. There was a sharp intake of breath and he snatched the picture from me saying, "You shouldn't be looking at things like that, Williams!" I never saw that picture again.
My sister Edna was courting an American soldier who often brought us not just sweets but whole cartons of sweets. With all the rationing we were subject to, it was hard to believe that such abundance existed. Food in general was in very short supply at that time and we had never seen bananas although we were sometimes allowed half of an orange. Mum was a good cook but she had very little to work with and often went short herself to feed us. It seems incredible now but eggs were in such short supply that we could only have half of a boiled egg once a week.
We had some rather odd foods during that period. There was the occasional illegal rabbit which was very nice but we had to remember to spit out the lead shotgun pellets and not swallow them. Pigs' Trotters were a more common dish and quite nice because we didn't know any better. Eels caught by Dad and us kids were part of our staple diet and I really liked those. Mum used to skin them, cut them in sections about one inch long and then cook them in Parsley Sauce. To eat them, we picked up a section between a finger and thumb at each end of the severed backbone and then sucked the flesh from the skeleton.
There were also officially supplied foods such as Orange Juice for children, Codliver-oil and Malt either eaten from a spoon or spread on bread. Then there were Dried Eggs in powder form which came in a dark brown oiled carton. When we had normal food such as bread and jam, it was a matter of spreading the margarine on first and scraping it off again, then spreading the jam on and scraping that off too. Not surprisingly, this was called Bread-and-Scrape. When things improved, we had margarine on our bread thinly sprinkled with sugar.
When chocolate was on ration and very scarce, a friend and I made a startling discovery as walked through The British Home Stores on our way home from school. I often did this just to see what interesting things were on display on all those flat, compartmented counters with which the shop was filled.
On this occasion I spotted some miniature bars of chocolate which were not on ration and also fairly cheap. Each bar was beautifully wrapped in silver paper enclosed by a colourful wrapper bearing the name, "Ex-lax." As I offered the money for one bar to the lady assistant she asked, "Are you sure you know what this is for?"
"Oh yes," I said, "of course I do." Daft question, I thought, what else is chocolate for if not to eat?
Outside, I carefully opened the wrapper and peeled back the silver foil to reveal an exquisite little bar of chocolate divided up into tiny squares. After breaking some off for my friend and having some myself, we continued slowly on our way home, gradually eating the lot between us.
As we got to the end of Regent Street (the Centre, it was called), my friend suddenly gripped his trousers and said, "Oh, oh, oh, I've got to go!" and off he went like lightning. I thought nothing more of this until I was well along Faringdon Road and near home, which was just as well because I was taken short, as was my friend.
When I eventually emerged from the toilet, Mum said, "That's a terrible stench. What have you been eating?"
"Nothing," I replied, "only some chocolate."
"What chocolate?" she demanded, "Where did you get the chocolate from?" When I told her and then showed her the wrapper which I had carefully kept she burst out laughing. "You daft 'appoth!" she said, "You'll do yourself a mischief. That was LAXATIVE chocolate that was, and it's a medicine, not sweets."
Oh well. At least, for a while, I didn't have to have any of our usual laxative, which was a heaped spoonful of bright yellow Flowers of Sulphur. That stuff was terrible to get down and it made my teeth creak if I tried to chew it. It was really effective the next morning though and Mum said that it also cleansed the blood. Dad always said that it turned the air blue as well!
At some point during the war, all the iron railings were removed from the Railway Village to help with the war effort.
I remember being allowed outside the front door to watch the workmen cutting our railings off. The first to go were those along our front wall and next were the railings which lined the path to our front door and which divided our front path from No. 7 next door. Everything seemed very wide open after that.
Next to go were the iron railings around the Mechanics Institute and it looked very sad and bare when they were gone. The railings were cut off by two men using what I now know were oxy-acetelyne guns.
Italian prisoners of war were employed at one period in the GWR factory. Unlike the normal workers, they had to line up along both sides of the Mechanics Institute and wait to be escorted in. I don't remember that they were guarded at all. Anyway, they looked mysteriously interesting and I would often go over and sit on the corner of the Mechanics Institute wall, which now had no railings, and just say, "Hello," if any of them looked at me. Some ignored me, some were suspicious and could speak no English, but others treated me like a long lost friend.
I found out a lot later that if you gave one of them a silver sixpence coin (it had to be silver) as they went in to work, they would make it into a silver Spitfire which they would hand over to you on the way out. I tried this one day and spent the rest of the time until they reappeared worrying about my lost sixpence. I needn't have worried because the Italian I had chosen was actually looking out for me and handed over the Spitfire with a warm smile. I wonder what they got out of it? A share of the silver?
Click on any of the pictures below for a larger version.
| My Identity Card, issued to me in 1940 when I was aged three! |  |
| My last Ration Book issued in the 1950s (cover). |  |
| My last Ration Book (inside). Shows the last few things on ration and the registered traders. |  |
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Page updated 26 July 2008