Memories of Tring
That is the first thing I can remember about the war. The evacuees coming. We took in two children, and my grandmother took in some. The charabanc stopped at the crossroads going up to Bulbourne Road. There used to be a pub on the corner there. It was the Queens Arms the last time, but prior to that it was the Red House, and the coach stopped there and everybody went out to choose someone. It was horrible really, wasn't it?
The evacuees came, and we had two boys. My brother was only two weeks old, and so I was nearly six. My grandma, who lived next door to what was the butcher’s shop in New Mill, had a four room cottage, so she had two bedrooms with a double bed each, but she chose a lady with two children, and they slept in the back bedroom. They had a toilet right up the yard; they had to share that.
We had to take our gas masks to school, and we all had to have thick curtains at the doors and the windows so that we were completely blacked out. A warden used to come round and bang on the door if they could see a little light shining because, of course, the Germans were really after bombing the flour mills. It was quite a thing: they produced flour so that's why I think there was all the trouble over us showing lights.
Just below the flour mills, if you come straight up as if you are coming up Icknield Way, on your left is now Icknield Green. That used to be called Icknield Crescent, and it was opposite number 3 that there was a bomb dropped in that field there. When we were children, there was still a big crater from where the bomb dropped. That was quite near.
And then, further up the road, past the football field, and before you get to the crossroads, in that field a German plane was shot down and that also had a big crater. It was frightening, very frightening. All the children went to look and picked up bits of shrapnel. They kept them for years, oh yes they did.
Also, on the corner of Langdon Street and Upper Albert Street, there was an incendiary bomb dropped on that house, and it burnt an awful lot of it.
They did try because the silk mill was, in the war, an ammunition factory and, of course, they learn all these things and the ammunition was being made there so it was a target.
We were rationed with everything. We had two ounces of butter each a week. Well, I tell you what, my father died very young, he went into hospital at twenty five, and died at twenty seven. I didn't realise but prior to my dad dying we would have half a pound--there were four of us--but once my dad went into hospital, we would have a bit cut off. I'm telling you, when I got married, I had no idea that you could buy a full half pound of butter--you always had to have a bit cut off. But that's the truth.
We had eight ounces of cheese a week and a pound of sugar. My mother stopped having sugar in anything, because my brother used to pinch it. Meat was rationed, of course, but not sausages or offal. So you queued as soon as you knew there was going to be any of that in. My mother used to give me a shilling and say, “if there’s a queue. join it. Don't let anything go.”
Sweets, of course, were rationed and fruit as well. The florist shop I did my apprentice at was a fruit shop as well, so we had an allocation--perhaps of one box of bananas, not very often, and a box of oranges. You had to take the people’s ration books, and on the back page, you either marked it with a B or an O, whatever it was you had, so you couldn't go to every greengrocer's shop and buy everything.
Before I did my apprenticeship, I was working at this florist shop. In Stubbings Woods, which are the woods at the back of Park Road, it was gypsies, all gypsies, and they lived under canvas. When they lost a child, which was very often, they had loads and loads and loads of flowers. Of course, there were no fridges to keep the flowers in: we didn't have any cellophane, oasis, gutta percha, nothing of that was ever heard of. It used to be quite difficult to make the wreaths, and we would make them with just moss and evergreen frames, but every flower was wired to go into it, every flower used wires. The gypsies, we got quite friendly with them all, because if they hadn't come to order some fruit they would come to order some flowers.
One day, one of the gypsies--actually she is still alive, she lives on Faversham Close--she said, “how does your mother get on with your sweet coupons?” So I said, “all right, my mum makes us sweets.” We could have Ovaltine tablets from Mr Brooks, who worked at the Ovaltine factory, because they were not on rations. My mum would buy a block of jelly, cut each square into four, and cover it with icing sugar, and we would have that for sweets if we ran out of sweet coupons. I went home and told my mum this, and she said, “when they come in next, ask them how they manage with their soap coupons” because, she said, “I cannot manage with my soap coupons.” We didn't have any washing up liquid: we had a dishcloth and rubbed a bit of soap on it, you know, and she could never manage with her soap coupons. So I said to her, the next time she came in, my mum says, “how do you manage with your washing, your soap coupons?” “Oh, we don't do much washing”, she said--which we knew they didn't--so I said, “my mum said she'll trade you and swap your coupons.” I used to take our sweet coupons and swap them for soap coupons. I am sure it was very wrong, but there were worse things done than that.
In Icknield Crescent, we lived at number twenty and we each had big back gardens. As soon as the war was declared, four out of five houses dug a dugout, dug a great big pit and blocked the soil up with stakes and things. When the air raid warning went, we used to go down there. It was just like a mud hole, really, but it my parents and their parents thought they would be safer under the ground, because we had a bomb just opposite, so they made this. And I slept in it.
When I was a girl, my aunt was a fire watcher on top of St Peter and St Paul's church. You went right up, past the belfry, and right out onto the top, and she took me there once or twice with her. We looked to see if there were any planes. I still don't know how we got the message to anybody, because we didn’t have mobile phones, but it was a big thing for me to go up there with my aunt and look to see what was going on, especially when the sirens went. You could see the sky over London: the sky lit up very often.
I don't suppose we were as terrified as we would have been if we were grown up. At school we had to get under the desk and put our gas masks on. They were horrible things, with a bit out here, with metal on the end. They smelt, because they were all rubber.
Yes, we really saw quite a bit of it. We had still got these evacuee teenagers. Their father used to come down from London each weekend, and he would take them poaching. Of course, my mum used to get so upset: she had got her husband in Stanmore Hospital, which was a long way for her to go anyway, a baby and me, and then these two boys whose dad kept coming and taking them poaching. In the end, she had to say she couldn't keep them anymore because she was so worried that they used to take snares. He used to bring snares with him and put them down in the entrance to the rabbit holes. So we didn't have these boys for very long.
My aunt lived at Northchurch, and they just had one daughter. They always had one lad and they always came back, right up until they died they used to come back. Leslie Campison, I can remember one of them’s names because we had to spend quite a lot of time with my aunt in school holidays. My mother had to work, you see. My mother, when my dad died, she had eighteen shillings a week to look after the three of us. Three shillings for John, five shillings for me, and ten shillings for her and the house and for everything. Our rent on Icknield Crescent was six and eight pence, so you know how much we had left to spare. Do you know, we never wanted for anything? My mother made everything. She even made my wedding dress and my bridesmaids’ dresses.
I did have to go and take my brother on the bus to Northchurch for all school holidays because she couldn't have time off. She was the manageress in the Silk Mill canteen. It was a firm called Staff Caterers, and they took over the contract of the canteen at silk mills. It was a big responsibility because, of course, they was also rationed. One of the men who worked at the Silk Mill a long time after told me this. He said, “your mum used to make banana sandwiches when there was no bananas about.” So I said to Mum, “what did you make bananas out of?” She said, “I used to cook parsnips and buy a bottle of banana flavouring and put it over these parsnips. They all thought it was banana sandwiches.”
I tell you what else we did: we went and gathered things from the hedges. There is a picture of me standing at the flour mills gate with my sack and I'm leaning on the sack, waiting for the man to come in the lorry and the trailer. We collected elderflowers, elderberries, and we also collected hip and hoars, and we used to have to take those, up to what used to be a fish shop. I think it is now called The Cog Cafe, isn't it?
In Parsonage Place, there's houses now, but there was a farm, Mrs Hedge's, and we used to have to take the hips and hoars to her, and she paid us for taking them. We used the sacks from the flour mills that you bought, because most people bought a sack of flour in those days, before the war, and then of course they weren't allowed to do it afterwards. We didn't have any plastic sacks. When we was collecting elderberries -- because if we hadn't taken all the flowers off, then they came round for the berries, you see -- and of course you know what elderberries are like, and it used to run out of the sacks because they weren't plastic sacks.They would make a dreadful mess. Nobody had carpet on the floor, but it still made a mess on the lino. Not everybody had a shed, we usually did, but my grandparents used to go and get some as well for us and they would always put it in their kitchen and make an awful mess, but we didn't mind because it was a few pence. What we did with just a few pence!
My grandad used to go rabbiting. I know they weren't supposed to have a gun and shoot rabbits but they did. They had somebody go round, especially the reservoirs, and you got into real trouble if he saw you with a gun and a rabbit that you had shot. With Grandad doing that, we was always having rabbit stew.
Grandad also had a radio which wasn't electric. It was an accumulator and it was a bit like a glass vase, but it was square and it had knobs on the top. It was full of acid, so you had to go somewhere where they would refill it for you when it had run out of acid. I used to walk from where the Marmalade Cat nursery is at New Mill, because my grandparents were next door to there, I used to walk with my brother in a pram, with rabbit skins and an accumulator on the pram, up Grove Road where there was a garage. He did all repairs and he did the filling of accumulators. So I would walk from there, with John, up to Mr Sinfield, and leave the accumulator, and then walk down to the New Mill terrace, where the shop is there in Brook Street. Before that was there, there were two houses and there was a rag-and-bone man there. I used to sell rabbit skins to him, and then walk back and pay Mr Sinfield. I think I used to get probably a shilling, that is twelve pence, and there was always more than one rabbit skin. With this shilling, I paid something like six pence, might have been a bit more than that, but I finished up with a penny in the end. I always thought, I have to got o Grandad's and do that again, but I'm going to get a penny.
That is what we did, you know, and I don't regret a lot of it, I don't regret it. With a Grandma that lived next door to her great Grandma that lived next door to the little shop that is in Brook Street now , a Grandma that lived in Grove road, the one down there was my Granny's mum, and the one in Grove Road, was my Grampa's mum and dad, and then my mother's Grandma lived in the cottages,
If you go down the side of the church to the back of Metcalfe’s, on the corner there used to be two cottages as you go through the cobblestones. There were two cottages and my great-grandma Delderfield lived in the bottom one, and she used to take in washing. My mum and her sister used to fetch the washing from the big houses in Station Road, and then I would stand on the board and help her. They didn't have a copper or anything. They didn't have any hot water unless they heated it up: most of them had a brick copper outside and put sticks and paper on it and heated it up.
On VE Day in Tring, all sorts of wonderful things went on in Grove Park, because that was before the Grove school was built. Wonderful things, a Saucy Sarah to go on, all sorts of things. A Saucy Sarah was like a boat, on hinges, and if you walked up one end it rocked. Oh yes, I can always remember the Saucy Sarah, VE and VJ night you know, great excitement.
My brother-in-law went into the army because he had a dad in the army and my husband's eldest sister was in the army as well. My husband's eldest sister was Princess Elizabeth's batwoman. She thought the world of her. She wouldn't have a word said wrong about the Queen. She said, she used to drive a lorry and if anything went wrong with it she would up the bonnet, take her shoes off, bang this, bang that, to get it going again. She said she was absolutely wonderful. Beatrice emigrated to Canada. She married a Canadian service man, and she lived out there, and when the Queen went to inspect the troops for the first time to Canada, Beatrice was the flag bearer for the Legion. The Queen came along, inspecting the troops, and she saw Beatrice standing there, and -- you know her squeaky voice -- said, “Beatrice, what are you doing here?” She said, “Ma’am, I live here.” She recognised her. She wouldn't have a word said against the Queen, and it was funny really because when one of the Queen’s children called their child Beatrice, we always teased her. We always teased her and said, “She is named after you.” But of course it was not anything to do with her really.
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