Childhood Memories of Wartime Oxfordshire Village

Between 1942 and 1944, my family lived in Wootton, near Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, in a rented house. At home were my mother, one, later two younger sisters and a young woman who helped my mother. My father, who worked in London as a wartime civil servant in the Board of Trade, came at weekends. An aunt working in Oxford also visited, and I remember other relatives coming to stay or visit from time to time. The house was spacious, with a large garden, fruit trees, a hen run and a farm next door. The weather seems often to have been fine, and as a four-to-six-year-old, I roamed with other children around the village and was taken on walks through the surrounding countryside. My memories of the lush English country enveloping us have stayed with me ever since. It was a calm and stimulating environment. Although I knew a war was on, I felt no anxiety. We had to observe blackout, but that was not my responsibility. My parents' aim, to keep their children safe, was surely realised.

I started school in Wootton, in the single-room primary schoolhouse opposite our house. There, the village children aged between five and twelve came under the care of 'Teacher', a middle-aged woman of great skill and charm who, without assistance, as I recall, took us through the basic elements of education. (At twelve, you went next door to the upper school to be taught by another teacher until you were fourteen, when you could leave school.) My strongest memories of being in school were realising there was a national anthem, which you were supposed to know, of receiving instructions on escaping a bomb attack on the schoolhouse - "run away from the school as far as you can" - and on using my gas mask. This took the shape of a grotesque Mickey Mouse face and was carried in a cardboard box on a strap. We also had a nice Christmas dinner when the season came round.

Another eating experience had to do with oranges. A box of these was delivered to the village grocer, who widely decided to offer them to the school rather than deal with the demand from his adult customers. I suppose we received one each. It is the colour of the fruit that remains with me, rather than the taste. On another occasion, which my father related to me (I have no recollection), he showed me a lemon and asked if I knew what it was. "Yes", I told him but then asked if you could eat it. I recognised the shape and colour, even possibly the smell, from having seen a lemon soap. In 1944, after we had moved back to our hometown of Oxford, I remember the first dried bananas. And rationing was always part of the background of life.

My view of life was suddenly expanded one summer day in probably 1943 when lorries full of black GIs drove through Wootton. They must have been heading for an army camp somewhere in the surrounding countryside. Segregation was still enforced in the US armed forces, which would have accounted for the density of black faces in the lorries. I had never seen such a sight before or realised that not all skin was white. I sat in the open window and waved to all these new faces. In return, I was rewarded with dazzling smiles; white teeth against the dark skin, beneath the GI helmets. Ordinarily, I would not have been allowed to leave the dining table to wave out of the window, but my parents clearly felt that this new experience should be savoured.

In 1945 came VE day and VJ day. In Oxford, my father took me and my sister out on VE day. We climbed the tower of his college and looked down on crowds dancing in lines across the High Street. Later in the year, we were in Portmahomack on the Dornoch Firth in the far north of Scotland, where a bonfire was lit on the beach for VJ day and I had to have it explained to me why we were celebrating a second time.