We weren't evacuated: everyday life in North London

Some stories of my early childhood, written for my grandchildren.
Memories of my early childhood
Ella Young (nee Eleanor Catherine James)
January 1942-202?

Blackout and no taxis on my birthday: If they could see lighted windows and streetlights, the enemy planes knew where to drop bombs. London in late January 1942 was a black and white picture with unwanted slithers of gold. The snow reflected and amplified the cracks of light from windows, as the ARP wardens made their rounds to check the blackout. My mother received a note telling her the blackout was not good enough on a certain window on a particular date. The blitz nighttime bombing was fresh in people's memories, and the wail of the air raid siren was dreaded.

My mother was frying onions for supper one Friday when I decided to enter the world. She knew second babies often came quickly, and began to panic. No taxi would come out on such a night, least of all to transport a woman in labour. One of our neighbours, a grocer, Mr Hagger, valiantly came to the rescue, driving her to a nursing home a couple of miles away. I arrived rapidly at 10.15 pm weighing seven and a half pounds. I wonder if my parents were a little disappointed to have another girl. I proved very delicate, with a gut blockage, so I kept sicking up all my feeds and not gaining weight. History tells of our diplomatic family doctor who called after a few weeks and tactfully asked: "Is that baby still alive?" Our supportive neighbours gave their one egg a week ration to my mother for me, and gradually I picked up and started to grow.

I was named after Eleanor Roosevelt, the much-admired wife of the President of the USA. None of us were christened as babies: my mother was an atheist who didn't believe in infant baptism.

My sister, who was breastfed, remembers I was bottle-fed. Maybe that poor nutritional start was why my hair has never grown long or thick. I was always jealous that her thick plaits reached her waist, while my thin ones only touched my shoulders.

'No bath tonight, girls!'

There was an anti-aircraft station only a few hundred metres away from where we lived, on the edge of Hampstead Heath Extension in North London. This was a target for enemy attack. People sold up and left the area; this enabled my parents to buy a large house very cheaply.

We didn't have an air raid shelter, nor do I recollect hiding under the kitchen table. I remember only one bomb falling nearby. We were ready to get into the bath, and after a loud bang, soot fell into the water from an air brick above. As she pulled out the plug, our mother calmly said 'No bath tonight, girls!' Her calmness was infectious.

I'm not sure if my memories of lights searching the night sky for enemy aircraft are real memories, or from films. I've never enjoyed fireworks, perhaps because the noisy explosive experience is similar to being bombed. So even though I wasn't scared at the time, there can be hidden and long-lasting scars from memories of war.

Doodle-bugs, toys and playing shop: We spent a long time in queues in food shops. 'Doodlebugs' was a game our mother invented to stop us being frightened when we heard people talking about them. With our arms held out sideways, we ran around the small garden chanting "Doodle-doodle--doodle..." and then after running silently for a while we fell down on the grass. This was the way the real doodlebug bombs behaved: when they were noisy, you were safe, but when they were silent, you knew bombs were about to fall.

Due to the war we had very few bought toys, and most of our stuffed toys were home-made. 'Luck-dums' was a favourite game we played in the summer - possibly its origin came from baby talk for 'look-downs'. We would throw all our toys out of a first floor window into the garden, then rush downstairs and gather them up to do it over and over again. The teddies and knitted and stuffed animals were tough!

We enjoyed playing shop, and as well as real tins and vegetables our mother ingeniously found all sorts of goods we could sell to and buy from each other. This was much more fun than the endless queuing at each counter when shopping in Sainsbury's.

When shopping in Golders Green, which was full of German Jewish refugees, my mother recalled that only those who asked for 'Kartoffeln' got any potatoes!

The war and rationed food: When the Second World War ended, I was only three years old, so I don't remember much of it - just a few fragments. Because of the war there was a food shortage: Germany had many submarines attacking ships. There wasn't any food imported from other countries, and it was rationed. Everybody had a fair share of what food here was, whether you were rich or poor. There was some unusual wartime food, like powdered eggs and whale meat the colour of liver. To keep us healthy, children had free orange juice, and we also had a teaspoon of 'Codvers' - malt extract with cod liver oil, which I found delicious.

Each person had a ration of each food every week, like one egg per person, and you had to give the shopkeeper your ration book before you could buy anything. People living in the country often kept chickens as well as growing vegetables and fruits, and shot rabbits for free meat. Sometimes kind people would give us eggs as presents. My mother put them into a large metal lidded container under a liquid called 'water glass' to keep them fresh for longer. Scrambled eggs made with powdered eggs tasted disgusting!

The last food to be rationed was sweets, and on Saturday mornings my elder sister Phyllida and I used to cycle to Woolworths, which was next to the Library, with our ration books and pocket money to buy our sweets and change our library books.

Queueing for broken biscuits. Burnt milk and sums - Miss Arthur's: Our first school was known as 'Miss Arthur's' after the kindly grey-haired head. We were fortunate to have a school at all, as most London children had been evacuated due to the blitz. It was held in the hall of St. Ninian's Church, on the far side of the Golders Green shopping centre, and became a mosque in the 1980s. The main smell at the school was of boiled milk: whenever I smell it these days, I'm carried right back to my early childhood. Smells are so evocative, and deeply connected to both memory and emotions. Our free elevenses break time milk came in two varieties: hot and cold. The cold milk was in a little bottle with a straw, but how the hot milk was served escapes me. My un-favourite teacher was Mrs Hawkes, who taught us sums. She used visual aids, displaying a few pencils and then removing some, to teach us subtraction, and somehow terrorised me. I have absolutely no confidence in my mathematical ability. It is alarming the way our parents and first teachers can influence us, for better or for worse, for the rest of our lives.

Our little brothers: The walk to and from school must have taxed my mother, now with two little boys: Richard born in 1944 and Chris in 1947. I was very jealous of my younger brother Richard, who was such a beautiful baby he won a prize. Strangers would stop the pram and admire him.

My mother was a wonderful storyteller: whether she invented the stories or retold them, I don't know. Our incipient cockney accents were not welcome, and she made us say "How now, brown cow!" to get rid of the London vowels.

Children's books were few and far between during and immediately after the war, and our chief source of stories and poems was a series of heavy books called Joy Street from the 1920s. My mother made it clear she didn't like Enid Blyton stories. When we went out, Phyllida and I would hold on to the pram handle on each side, with our little brothers facing each other, and the shopping between them.

Seaside holidays: Family holidays were two weeks at the seaside on the south coast. Travelling by steam train was a great adventure: flocks of lapwing flew up where ploughing was being done, and rabbits scuttled away at the sound of the engine. When we arrived our faces had little black smuts on them, even though we weren't supposed to put our heads out of the window.