Read Online Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army by Jacky Hyams - Free Book Online Page B

friends around us. My mother, Elizabeth Jane, was a good manager. My dad was allowed to hunt rabbits by a local farmer, so we had chickens, ducks, geese. Everything had a home with us: cats, dogs, even people sometimes. My mother was a good cook, too. At home we had porridge or boiled eggs, and sandwiches in school – it was too far away to go home for lunch – and always a cooked meal at 5pm, when Dad came home from work.
    Our home revolved around our father, which the way life was then. If my mother said ‘no’, it was no good going to my father. We all knew the rules and we didn’t go beyond them. My mother was a churchgoer and my father’s favourite saying was: ‘You be careful of our name. You’ve got it till you marry – the boys have to carry it all their lives.’ It was our good name we lived to. That was it.
    In 1930, I started school. Bryndu was the name of the school. Walk a mile-and-a-half to the village, then walk another mile up the road to get to the school. We could have gone to a nearer school, but we chose to go there. My brother Jack was there, my sister Mary, and then me. As long as you behaved yourself, it was fine.
    I was bright enough, I suppose. I wasn’t naughty, not in school. We had a very old teacher who lived in Porthcawl. Any naughtiness and he’d be warning us: ‘I’ll see your father.’ We didn’t know if he did see him, but we didn’t risk Dad’s displeasure. It was my mother who was the ‘flipper’, who had a bit of a temper. I only saw my father lose his temper once. If you were reading something, whatever it was, my mother, if she wanted me to do something would give me a ‘flip’ – not exactly a smack, but you knew she meant business. I can still hear her now: ‘Betty, get your ’ead out o’ that tuppeny novel.’
    Us kids played out everywhere – under the trees, in the woods, the fields, by water, everything a kid could wish for. I was good at sports, especially rounders [a game played with bat and ball]. And I was a good sprinter. My sisters would come home from their jobs in service once a year, just for a week. They’d get half a day off a week and that one week a year. The world they lived in seemed so far away to us then.Today, of course, you’ve got that world in your living room. We had radio and the newspapers to tell us about the world. We’d listen to things like Children’s Hour or Dick Barton or a variety show. But you didn’t have much interest in politics because it wasn’t there, in your living room, in the way it is now. I honestly don’t remember my parents ever talking to us about what was happening in Germany with Hitler. So we lived with ignorance, and innocence, too. There is a real difference. You had a life to live and none of that stuff about the world concerned you in the way it does now. And I don’t think you really looked to the future; the idea of the future didn’t push me forward that much. As a kid, you lived in the present. Whatever else was going on was very far away.
    At school, there were poor, sickly kids who would have to be given things like malt regularly [malt extract was popular in the twenties and thirties as a dietary supplement for children who might be deficient in minerals and vitamins] but my mother kept us fit, both with what we ate and certain things she would do.
    For instance, every spring my mother would mix up a basinful of treacle and sulphur till you could stand your spoon in it. Each one of us would give our spoon to our mother and she would put it through the mixture. We’d line up for that spoonful; we called it medicine. In the winter, if you had a cold coming, you either got elderflower tea or a blackberry concoction with hot water and sugar to sip. Now, of course, we call those things natural remedies, buy them in a shop. But then, they were never shop-bought.
    Every Monday morning, a man with a horse-drawn cart would come round; he’d sell everything you could think of – soap, cloths,