My Memories of the early forties
Just a few of my early memories
My first memory was of a Sunday morning in 1940. It must have been a Sunday because I was sat on the kitchen table having my brown shoes laced up when the barrage balloon landed, and my best brown shoes were only worn on a Sunday.
The barrage balloon had broken away from it's moorings and landed in a garden a few doors away, I say a garden, but this massive object covered about four or five gardens. There was great excitement while watching efforts by the Home Guard to deflate it.
The ringing of a bell meant that the rag and bone man was coming, and there was a mad dash to find some old clothing which I could exchange for a goldfish with a very limited life span.
Friday was bath night and what a performance. The tin bath, which was hanging on an outside wall, was brought into the kitchen. Water was carried from the boiler, bucket by bucket to fill the bath. I tried to convince my mother that it was not worth the trouble, but it never worked.
No batteries in those days, our radio was powered by this strange looking object called a accumulator. Once a week it was my job to take this to the local shop to have it re-charged and collect the charged one from last week.
This is the Anderson shelter where we, and three other families spent many nights sheltering from the bombing in Birmingham.
Monday was wash day and my job was to turn the handle of the mangle while mom fed the washing though the wringers to squeeze some of the water out.
Every Sunday morning I would hear the sound of a band in the distance and dash outside waiting for it to arrive in our street, and then tag on behind and follow it. It was usually the Boys Brigade or the Scouts.
My dad was an Air Raid Warden and when the air raid sirens sounded he would stand in front of our house with the standard issue of one stirrup pump, one bucket of water, and a bucket of sand. If a bomb did hit the house, I'm not to sure that one bucket would be enough.
One of my regular jobs was to go to the "out-door" with a jug and collect a couple of pints of beer to take home to my parents. Every pub had a small door that you could go to without going into the main "smoke" or "lounge" rooms.
My best christmas present was a Meccano set which enabled me to build everything I would ever need for the rest of my life.
This was the best diet program ever. No need for weight watchers when I was young. The only overweight people were those dealing in the black market.
On the way to school I would collect the shrapnel from last nights air raid. If I found a piece with German writing on it, it was worth 10 marbles.
This was an open top packet of five cigarettes and was quite usual for the shopkeeper to sell you just one for a couple of pence.
We did, and they were lovely.
My mom used to run a small grocery shop. Most items such as butter, lard, tea, and sugar would be delivered in bulk then weighed out, and wrapped in brown paper, or bagged as required. No waste problems in those days, there wasn't any. There were five other shops in the same street so everyone shopped daily as required, so no wasted food either.
I must have had some entrepreneurial qualities from a very early age as I found a simple way to double my weekly pocket money of 10 pennies. I always asked for my pocket money to be in half pennies, I would then go to Snow Hill railway station and through a side door onto the tracks. The half pennies would then be placed on the line and after the train had gone over them they would be squashed flat to the size of a well worn penny.
Shop keepers never checked, if it was the size of a penny it must be a penny.
This is where I lived for 17 years.
When VE day was announced everyone went crazy. Massive street parties during the day , and equally massive bonfires during the evening. I remember in my street alone there were at least four bonfires right in the middle of the road. No problem for the car drivers, there weren’t any.
This is the same area today.
Knives, guns, drugs, killings.
A couple of inches of snow these days and everything grinds to a halt, but in the forties it was not unusual to have drifts four to five feet deep. It didn’t cause any problems for cars in my area because there wasn’t any, and your local shop was never more than a few yards away, so you never went short of food, and we never had electric cuts because we never had electric, but plenty of coal in the cellar.
During the war everyone was considered to be a possible spy, although I had great difficulty in trying to imagine my uncle or aunt as spies but not to sure about my cousin.
I used to live near a factory called Joseph Lucas that used to make gun turrets for the war. It was a favourite target for the German bombers, they never hit the factory but they sure made a mess of the surrounding houses. On our long walk to school we would count the number of gaps where the day before there were houses. It never occurred to us that people may have died.
Best day of the week was Tuesday, because at lunchtime on Tuesday the local shop had their weekly delivery of Midland Counties ice cream. Although this poster shows their full range, due to rationing the shop only had a small delivery of Melorols at one penny each. The would be sold out within minutes but I would be first in the queue.
A Melorol would be a small round block of ice cream wrapped round in paper but open both ends. The picture shows them being produced.
This was another sign that appeared on the billboards. I would have loved to be able to switch off, but we didn’t have a switch because we didn’t have an electric supply to our street.
My mother believed all the posters, so she gave me a bag of carrots, no bread, a gas mask, and sent me away to some place called Stoney Stratford. I still hate carrots.
