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Bombing, Evacuation and Street Games.

Childhood War Memories of Alan Marshfield (b.1933), in four parts

PART 2 (continued from Part 1)

So my brother Bill and I returned with our mother to the height of the blitz in Portsmouth, from our safe evacuee lodging in the country, in early 1942. Our dad’s regiment had left the same village (Bishop’s Waltham, in Hampshire) by that time, having given a farewell concert at which various soldiers sang popular music hall songs. I had been disappointed that Dad hadn’t sung his own party piece, Trumpeter. ‘Trumpeter, what are you sounding now? Is it the call I’m seeking? Come to the call, said the trumpeter tall…’. He would sing it at family Christmas parties but was too reticent to appear on stage before a large audience. I was proud of his singing of that song and frustrated that he wouldn’t make me even prouder by doing a turn in public. That bare concrete floored Nissen hut with its dim stage lighting, wonky piano and cheerful audience in reeking wet winter overcoats was as good as a music hall.

It was a bad Christmas. Mum had dressed up. Many of the village people rather resented, or even hated, the townsfolk who had been thrust upon them. The woman of the house in Shore Crescent sneered at Mum and said, ‘What are you dressed up for, you’ve got no one coming!’ Why we had moved from our previous room with a family on the other side of the village I don’t know. I learnt later that Mum had had a miscarriage there. She and Dad occupied a bed in the corner of the same room where Bill and I slept. Or perhaps it had something to do with me and Hetty.

Hetty (not her real name) was the daughter of the previous house and about my own age, that is eight or nine. There was an orchard behind the house containing apple trees, mulberry bushes and a wooden privy. I would spend long hours in that privy, squinting through the cracks at the garden outside, lost in daydreams. But that’s beside the point. Hetty was the first girl I’d had a chance to know at close quarters, and she was an early embodiment of the eternal mystery of the feminine. I think there was a peeing exhibition.

Brother Bill and cousins Johnny and Kenny were not the only lads I played with at the end of the road in that first placement of ours. There was also a boy we called ‘Monk’. Perhaps because that was his surname. One of his legs was in callipers and he lived in a big house with a high garden wall along the unmade, pocked road. As one of the natives he was sometimes against us, sometimes for. We played with hazel-switch bows and arrows, went scrumping apples from the orchards along the road that led to Tangier Farm, explored copses and hedgerows, made holes in birds’ eggs and blew out the goo, discovered when eggs were addled. We also, as children in wartime will, played at soldiers, drilling with sticks for rifles and cardboard boxes for cartridge pouches. Dad had taught me the moves and I passed them on. Shoulder arms. Slope arms. Present arms. Stand at ease. Attention! There was also a trench the soldiers had dug for training but never used. It was muddy and we never used it either. Besides, it was so deep we might never have got out again.

At the bottom of that first road, not far from our house, at the start of the lane that led up left to the Priory Farm and the soldiers’ camp, was a forked oak-tree. This was our assembly point. Or if you wanted to spend a restful half-hour in the sun, sitting in the crook of the double trunk with chin on one bony knee, it was a good place for contemplation. Gathered around it as we so often were, anyone passing down the lane could stop and talk to us. Not that many did, but one person lingered often and we looked out for her. An old woman in layers of dark, ragged clothes and to all appearances crazy, she was, of course, she just had to be, The Witch. There were many farms around and she had scurrilous stories to tell about the farmers who owned them, no doubt because they were always at pains to be rid of her. One of these, she swore, standing back and frightening the crows, one of those evil old men was so filthy he would wipe his nose in his hands before he milked the cows. We believed her, sometimes. More often we scoffed. We exercised that healthy scepticism which comes from being brought up in no faith at all.

Farming at Bishop’s Waltham also entered our lives. We were allowed to watch pigs being fed. I saw my first live hens and geese at the Priory Farm. At harvest time we were allowed to stray through the stubble among the stooks, and one time I addressed one of the well-known monks as Paddy, to be rebuked with, ‘Father Patrick to you, son.’ Later I wrote this poem.

COUNTRY MATTERS

Before Hitler’s bombs made their pits
in the districts of Portsea (it’s
timely now to offer late thanks
to those who rid our mums of angst),
we were all packed off to the sticks.

The evacuation gave us
townee refugees a focus
on a new way of life, like see-
ing grass every day. The country
was a thrill wrapped up in a buzz.

Dad, from Dunkirk, was billeted
near a farming monastery.
Mum, kid brother Bill and I lived
with a family and orchard, we
made do as all wanderers did.

We thought bow-and-arrow games good
till a girl was nicked in the hand;
then we dribbled off to the wood
where she took down her knickers and
we played peeing games, foraged food.

Hetty was the girl I liked most,
our landlady’s daughter. She had
Shirley Temple hair; bluebell moist
eyes; sturdy, quick legs. I was daft
about her, but those times are lost.

We hindered the monks at harvest;
mooned over pigsties; jumped from ricks
(I blacked my eye leaping too fast,
landing head against knee); used sticks
for rifle drill. An old witch cursed

the farmers when we hunched round by
the forked oak tree at the lane’s end:
she spat on her hands in the byre
before milking their cows, she claimed.
Grandmothers and crones had a way.

I didn’t need Robert Graves’ tale
when Bishops Waltham filled my skull
with the female trinity theme.
Oak crone, saintly mum, and the dim
haze of sweet Hetty said it all.

I was tasting the Other: maps
on the school wall; bulrush, rosehips;
millpond, quarry, slippery trench;
cows and hazelnuts and bullfinch:
townee finding God in the crops.

Dad’s transit camp, when he’d returned from Dunkirk, was in huts on the property of the Priory, which was a Catholic seminary for the education of boys who might enter the missionary order of the White Friars who ran the place. The boys from the seminary had been evacuated to Scotland. A history of the Priory was later written by Paddy and put on a web site. Look up Bishop’s Waltham Priory.

Whilst we were living at the next house, in Stone Crescent, I made friends with a boy whose mother was, as far as I could make out later, ostracised by the village. She treated me well, having me stay for tea sometimes. Dad told me, in his cups and old age, that he himself used to visit a Petty Officer’s wife in the village. The same woman? Who knows?

By early 1942 we were back in Portsmouth for good. Mum had had enough of the country. Despite the continuing air-raids we returned to, it was still better for her to be near the rest of her family than isolated and desperately unhappy in a village which suffered its flock of townees with fairly bad grace. At first, after we returned, we lived in Northam Street, Landport, on the eastern side beside the alley which led to Netley Street. We were back in old haunts, just around the corner from Waltham Street and Fyning Street where we’d lived before.

Now we added the bombing to our street excitements. One night the western block between Fyning Street and Waltham Street was completely demolished. There used to be a sweetshop on the corner, outside of which skipped a girl, let’s call her Joyce, who lived above the shop and was distant and laughing and desirable. One day the shop was there and the next day it wasn’t. I don’t know if Joyce and her family escaped. Mum had run with us along the alley to Charles Street where a brick shelter housed everyone around during raids. These one-storey, thick-walled retreats, with their chilly, viscous walls, were used by kids as latrines during the day. By night we groped in them with candles through fetid puddles. They could withstand anything but a direct hit, so the story went. That was the one thing we prayed to escape, a direct hit. When the all-clear siren went and we trailed back along the alley, we saw one night by moonlight that it was strewn thick with glass shards from nearby windows, and Mum wondered what would have happened to us if we’d been caught in the blast. Next morning we returned to Charles Street to pick up shrapnel.

On another occasion Mum hid with us under the table in the living room as the noise of bombs nearby scared the life out of us. We did a lot of praying in those days. At night before we slept we’d been taught by Mum to repeat a litany of blessings for all her extended family and beyond: ‘God bless Mummy and Daddy and Billie and Auntie Elsie and Uncle Fred and Molly and Auntie Ena and Uncle Harold and David and Uncle Ted and Uncle Charlie and Auntie Dolly and Auntie Nellie and Uncle Percy and Don and Auntie Allie and Uncle Jack and Johnnie and Kenny (cousin Billie Barr wasn’t born until after the war) and Uncle George (he didn’t marry Joan until later) and Auntie Gladdie (that accounted for the Watermans, then came the Marshfield uncles and aunts and cousins) and Uncle Tom and Uncle Jack and Auntie Susan and Frances and Sheila and Uncle Ken and Auntie Reenie and John and Christine….’ We did not include the King and Queen and Princesses: they could say their own prayers. The last two cousins, John and Christine, were barely a few years old and we never saw them as children. Dad’s side of the family was more remote than my mother’s.

On the bomb site where Joyce’s sweetshop had stood we had many brick-fights, building defence walls out of the rubble, rushing forward with dustbin lids for shields. We also explored the shells of the bombed houses, clambering up the strewn stairs looking down through holes in the floors, opening cupboards, breaking everything we could. Bill and I were smashing glass lamp-shades in one house when a policeman came in and shocked us rigid. I was so scared that I wet myself. ‘Do it in the corner, son,’ the copper said, then took us home to get properly scolded by Mum.

One consequence of the war was our precocious knowledge of bombs. On one occasion it was rumoured that a few streets away had been hit by a land mine. I’ve looked it up and apparently it was a bomb dropped by parachute. All I gathered at the time was that it lay waste a wider area than an ordinary bomb. We were in fact not as expert as we thought we were. Incendiary bombs we knew about, and again they struck another area ‘a few streets away’, but from personal experience we saw just the aftermath, and the effects were the same everywhere, blocks of devastated houses, the bomb-sites we played on.

The restrictions due to war included rationing and the blackout. We accompanied Mum on her visits to the Arundel Street shops and watched her hand over her ration books to have the tokens torn out for our allowance of butter, sugar, meat and so on. The blackout meant having heavy black drapes, usually dyed sheets, for curtains, and making sure no light leaked round the edges. Walking the streets at night, which we sometimes did to visit relatives, meant carrying a hand-torch, hoping the batteries didn’t run out, and occasionally flashing it on to cross a road. Those were the days of gasmasks and slogans: Dig for Victory, Careless Talk Costs Lives. I carried my gasmask to school in a cardboard box slung over my body with a loop of string.

From Northam Street Mum used to take us to Little Gran’s. The journey was but a short walk and, as before, mother would buy her goods from the shops near the end of Mary Street. One of these was the butcher’s in which Uncle Harold, a tall man with a long face and thick glasses, the husband of Mum’s sister Ena, would hand her lamb chops, stewing steak, and—near the end of the war—inedible whale meat. From the greengrocer’s came turnips and carrots for the stew we had every Monday, comprising the left-overs from Sunday with pearl barley and Oxo cubes added. From the grocer’s came tea, sugar, Sunlight soap for our necks, carbolic soap and caustic soda for the galvanised wash-tub, flour and sultanas for cakes. From the sweetshop, if we were lucky, we had sherbet bags with liquorice straws, black-striped aniseed gobstoppers, jelly babies, liquorice allsorts and sticky boiled sweets, all at a penny-ha’penny a two-ounce bag. There was also a pawn shop in Arundel Street to which I once went with Dad to pawn our radio.

From Northam Street we visited buxom Auntie Elsie with her little husband Fred and exciting daughter Molly, three years older than I was. Molly used to grip my hand very hard (I never minded) in the cinema when Tarzan fought the crocodiles. Aunt Elsie lived in Guildford Street and had a front room with a piano which no one ever played. She was the oldest aunt and was treated as the head of the family. She looked after everyone’s Christmas Club money, more trustworthy than the Post Office, which after all might get bombed without notice.

Lots of places went up without notice. The Guildhall, the Landport Drapery Bazaar, a great many acres south of the main railway station, and random places, streets in Southsea and Cosham and Copnor. I have a post-war issue of the Portsmouth Evening News with pictures of the bombing. Such sights were not published at the time. At that time in Northam Street, which couldn’t have lasted more than a year, 1942—3, many things happened. Brother Bill and I attended Arundel Street school, which lay a little way off Arundel Street up a paved lane called Upper Church Path. We usually walked there via Waltham Street, Wilton Terrace and Upper Church Path. Where Church Path met Arundel Street was a cake shop in which we bought lardy cakes during school breaks. I believe I started a mini-craze for eating raw carrots when we couldn’t afford cakes.

In the area between Church Path North and Crasswell Street was the Mission Hall Bill and I attended for Sunday School and Cub Scouts. In the cubs we did knots. Nothing from Sunday School stuck, but I picked up the habit later when I caught religion more seriously—for a while. I think the church was St Faith’s.

At Arundel Street School I got the cane, the only time at any school I was ever punished. It was for wandering out of line in the playground when the classes were lining up. The following day I was among the batch to be caned in front of the school after assembly. It was only one whack but the unfairness smarted and has never been forgotten. I was not the sort who got caned! These public humiliations were part of the routine in a school I otherwise enjoyed. I never disliked school.

[END OF PART 2. Continued in Parts 3 & 4.]

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