Child from Home (22 page)

Some of the older boys at the main school were kept busy digging, planting and weeding on the school allotments. This backbreaking activity had assumed much greater significance as many vegetables were now in very short supply. A certain group of older boys, who the headmaster classed as thickheads or numbskulls, had to take care of his garden and woe betide them if he saw any of them messing about. He used to give them a crack on the back of the neck with the end of his RAF swagger stick. He thought that these lads would be more gainfully employed out of the classroom where a close eye could be kept on them. They were quite happy to be outside away from the soul-destroying syllabus, averring, ‘School's a bloody waste o' time any'ow. It stops us gettin' on wi' t'real work on t'farm. Yer can't learn farm jobs from books!'

Mrs Harris always seemed to send us on errands just as we were planning to go out to play and, when I came back empty-handed, Mrs Harris shouted in my face, ‘Are you completely empty-headed or what?' Due to daydreaming I often forgot what I had been sent for, and after getting a clip round the lug I had to go back with a written order.

Chalked drawings had started to appear on walls and doors in the village showing the top half of a face of a bald-headed character, with a question mark growing from the top like a single hair. He had big round eyes, a long, blobby nose and the fingers of both hands showing over the top of a brick wall. Remarks like, ‘Wot no jam!' (or any other commodity) were written beneath it. This little character, known as ‘Chad', became a symbol for the increasing wartime shortages.

Poor Dot was made to clear out the fire-grate every morning and reset the fire for the day. She would put loose paper on the grate, place screwed-up newspaper and small sticks above it, before adding a few lumps of coal and lighting it. When the fire took hold she would prop the shovel up and cover it with an opened-out sheet of newspaper to make it draw. Sometimes the sulky fire went out and at other times the newspaper caught fire sending bits of black, charred paper floating everywhere; either way, Dot, who just stood there looking blank, got an earful and a clip round the ear from the irascible Mrs Harris. She was told to put yesterday's ashes on the flower borders and to spread the cinders on the garden path, as Mr Harris said they kept the weeds down and helped kill slugs and snails.

Mr and Mrs Winterburn, a childless couple, were our next-door neighbours and had a succession of airmen billeted with them. On Saturday mornings Jimmy's chore was to stand in the queue for bread; it was the custom that only regular customers could have it put aside for them. It seemed that every time Jimmy left the house Mrs Winterburn would stop him and ask him to fetch her bread. He willingly obliged but, after a time, he got fed up with it as he suspected that she must be hiding behind her net curtain waiting to waylay him and she had never given him a penny for saving her the time and effort of going for it herself. So, one Saturday, when he had been waylaid for the umpteenth time, he went to the bakery for our bread and told Mr Rowland that Mrs Winterburn was not happy with the bread and that she did not want any more from him. When the angry Mrs Winterburn told Mrs Harris of this, she was furious and made her husband punish him. Reluctant to do so, but not daring to oppose her, he took Jimmy up to the bedroom where he administered half a dozen whacks with his thick leather belt. One landed on his backside, but five of them ‘accidentally' landed on the bed, and he told Jimmy to cry out at each stroke so that Mrs Harris would be none the wiser.

The lend-lease system with the USA was agreed, as the country was on the verge of bankruptcy, and a relieved Winston Churchill made one of his more eloquent and stirring speeches in which he said: ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.' The loan was needed to provide these tools as well as food and weapons. Rowntrees was one of the factories involved. Single women aged twenty to twenty-one years of age had recently been ‘called up' by Ernest Bevin, the Minister for Labour, so that more men could be released for active service. Thousands of women chose to go into the works and factories but married women with young children were still exempt. Men aged over forty-one years of age, who were exempt from military service, were also involved and they were paid a basic wage of
£
3.0.6. (
£
3.02p) a week, while the women received only
£
1.18.0. (
£
1.90p) for doing the same work.

The outside of the huge chocolate factory was camouflaged in green and brown, and the windows were blacked out making the atmosphere inside claustrophobic and the lights were kept on all day. The Rowntree family held anti-war convictions like all Quakers, but this did not prevent them from forming a new company under the innocuous-sounding name of
County Industries Limited.
Under the umbrella of this company the upper floors of the building, which had formerly produced Rowntrees Fruit Gums, were being used to pack and arm 37mm shells, with only a small part of the factory now making chocolate. The fuses were inserted into the nose of the shells on the top floor behind a protective screen. It was a highly dangerous occupation, but the workers were prepared to do it if they felt they were making a significant contribution to the war effort, and the factory was in full production twenty-four hours a day, six days a week.

They worked twelve-hour day shifts for two weeks, then night shifts for the next two, and as a precaution they were obliged to rub a clear, red, jelly-like barrier cream called Rosalex onto their hands to reduce the risk of dermatitis, as some had developed red and itchy skin rashes in the early days. They were entertained, during the long boring work hours, by means of a Tannoy system that blared out popular music and songs recorded by the stars and the big bands of the day. The BBC broadcast
Music While You Work
twice a day, especially for war workers, and a new variety show called
Workers' Playtime
was relayed at lunchtimes. Big names of the day, like Vera Lynn and Flanagan and Allen, broadcast
from a factory somewhere in England
– the place never being named for security reasons. These broadcasts were received in households all over the country and were very popular. Mrs Harris always had her wireless on.

The factory had installed a huge reservoir of water on the roof, the contents of which could be released to dowse any fires that broke out. Royal Observer Corps members on the roof worked shifts round-the-clock, straining their eyes searching for the tiny specks in the sky. It was not easy to identify enemy planes when there was cloud cover and so they kept in contact with a linked network of military tracking stations; these relayed messages informing them of the whereabouts and numbers of enemy aircraft sighted while a small army of girls worked below. They were still producing the famous Rowntrees milk chocolate bars, fruit gums and pastilles, and the air was full of the sickly sweet smell of cocoa and chocolate. A great deal of the dark chocolate was used in aircrew rations and it was an important component of their escape kits, along with maps, a compass, a razor and a rubber water bottle, only to be used if they crashed or had to bail out in enemy territory.

At least once a week our Jimmy took me to Bryant's shop to buy sweets with our bit of pocket money. We liked the black liquorice bootlaces and the round, penny-sized Pontefract cakes the best and, for some reason, we always called them Pomfret cakes. Bryant's shop no longer housed the post office, which had been taken over by Mr Eric Rowland and his family and set up in what had been the bakery. Where the post office counter had been there was now a wooden framework with rows of biscuit boxes fitted into it. Broken biscuits could be bought quite cheaply.

The large and fast four-engined Halifax bomber had only recently been brought in to service and we heard on the grapevine that a squadron of them had arrived at Linton-on-Ouse airfield. We often saw them over the village and new aircraft were being delivered every few days. The exhaust flames from the cowlings of their Hercules engines could be clearly seen at dusk, and their vibration rattled the ornaments and plates on our shelves. It seems that they were to replace the relatively slow and obsolete Whitleys that were by then nobody's friend. In the early months of the year the newspapers reported that Halifaxes of Bomber Command were attacking targets on the French coast.

The air-raid warnings had increased in recent weeks and one night in early March the mournful wail of the siren sounded yet again. Just after 9. 30 p.m. we were rushed downstairs to lie under the front room table, which had been pushed against the wall as directed. The girls were with Mrs Harris in the cupboard under the stairs but the long sustained note of the all-clear was not sounded until quarter to four in the morning. We trooped wearily back to bed, but at least we didn't have to start school until ten o'clock that morning. In the darkness of those winter mornings we sometimes saw the returning bombers briefly lit up by the beam of the local searchlight, which was flicked on and off to show that the aircraft had been recognised. Our sleep was often disturbed and we turned up at school dull from the lack of it.

On my sixth birthday Mam, with her gentle ways and winsome smile, paid us a short visit, and whenever she appeared it felt as though the sun had just emerged from the clouds. Before she left she gave us a few coppers to buy sweets and a comic, and Jimmy still had a bit of the money that his mother had given him on his seventh birthday two weeks back. We thought we might try another visit to Torville's little shop, as Bryant's was always busy and crowded. It was set back behind the wide grass verge that bordered the south side of the main road and the front door was a bit difficult to open, as its wooden frame tended to swell after a spell of wet weather. On this occasion, Jimmy gave it a hefty shove with his shoulder and it burst open, and we startled the customers as we staggered in amongst them accompanied by the loud clanging of the bell above the door.

The wooden counter was almost hidden beneath newspapers, magazines and comics. It was owned and run by a small, busty spinster called Miss Susanna Torville who was going grey, even though she was probably only in her fifties. She seemed like a real old biddy to us and her parents had bought the shop before the turn of the century and it had not changed much in all that time. Miss Torville weighed our sweets in the large, gleaming brass pan of the Avery scales with extreme care, even to the point of taking off three small sweets and replacing them with two slightly heavier ones to make sure that the weight was absolutely spot on and not a fraction of an ounce over. There was a step towards the rear of the old shop, which led to her private living quarters, and in the gloom of the interior customers, including us, had a habit of stumbling down it. After that we went to Bryant's for our sweets as they were not so fussy if the sweets weighed a little more than our few coppers justified, and they always put them into a conical-shaped paper bag twisted at the top to close it.

Comics were very popular with children in those days before there were any television sets, but many of them, such as
Tiger Tim's Weekly,
had been forced to close down due to paper shortages. The
Beano,
which cost tuppence (less than 1p), had previously had twenty-eight coloured pages, but now it was smaller and only had eight with coloured print only used on the cover pages. The comics were now full of war themes, with spy stories and tales of unexploded bombs, and every day, while we waited for our tea in the kitchen, Thelma would read to me out loud the rhyming couplets under the Rupert Bear cartoon strip in the paper. I really looked forward to this as I loved the adventures of the little bear in the red, high-necked jumper, yellow scarf and large-checked trousers.

In April it was said that Mr Harris's hero, Leonard Cheshire, had completed his tour of thirty operations when he flew out on his first bombing expedition in one of the new Halifax bombers; he was assigned to attack the Baltic port of Kiel with its dockyard facilities and U-boat pens. The Germans had destroyed Yugoslavia's army in just one week and had driven the Allies out of Greece with another Dunkirk-type retreat to the beaches. This was terrible news for the people at home, with Crete and Malta now the only British outposts in the Mediterranean Sea.

On 13 April 1941, Easter Sunday, we were bathed and put in our Sunday best, and I remember wincing as Mrs Harris roughly combed the cotters out of my hair. We were then taken to matins at St Mary's church. At the end of Holy Week, as the large, brown, sticky buds on the horse chestnut tree by the gate were starting to open, it was nice to see the greenery and the spring flowers after the long, snow-covered winter. The daffodils, growing in profusion on the green and between the graves, were dancing and rocking in the gentle breeze as our group of seven went in through the arched doorway of the old stone porch. As we walked behind the high-backed wooden pews, Mr Harris, looking very smart in his highly polished Sunday shoes and dark pinstriped suit, removed his black trilby hat, but the women kept their hats on. A musty smell mingled with the pungent, earthy odours emanating from the villagers packed in serried ranks on the shiny pews. ‘Was it the smell of God?' we wondered, as the slanting rays of the sun shone through the lancet windows illuminating the dancing dust motes. It took some time for our eyes to adjust to the dim interior, where stained-glass windows depicted saints with links to the North Country such as Bede, Hilda, Oswald and Cuthbert; each one crowned by delicately carved, cinquefoil, stone tracery.

My Uncle Harry – now thirteen years of age – was prinked out in his Sunday best, wearing a smart, short-trousered suit with a white shirt and tie. The Misses Law and Barker, resplendent in white gloves, smart hats and fashionable coats with expensive brooches on the lapels, were a picture of sartorial elegance as they listened intently to the resonant voice of the Reverend Donald. When we stood up we were always slightly behind everybody else, opening and closing our mouths pretending to sing hymn number 143 that begins ‘Christ the Lord is risen today, Hallelujah!' Our voices were drowned out by the loud, heartily singing congregation and the choir, who stood behind the intricately carved reredos screen looking clean and smart in their long cassocks and freshly starched white surplices.