A Wartime Childhood
Tomatoes! That’ll do it every time. The smell of tomatoes ripening in the sun takes me right back to early childhood. It was wartime and nearly everything was rationed yet somehow all I can remember is not shortages but love, attention, books to listen to (and very soon to read) and wonderful food. It helped that my grandfather was a retired baker and could make lovely homemade bread and pies. Also he was a keen gardener and grew lovely sweet rhubarb, covered with old buckets to ‘force’ it; potatoes and other root vegetables; green beans and of course the wonderful tomatoes that grew by the back door. There was a glass extension, a conservatory it might be called now, though its main purpose was to roof in the paved area that led to the outside privy, the washhouse where the laundry was done with a ‘dolly tub’ and a mangle, and the bakehouse where Grandad’s oven was housed. The kitchen which was the main living room of the bungalow had a deep stone sink but the only cooking facility was a trivet beside the open fire for boiling a kettle or heating up warm milk for cocoa.
Looking back everything seems very high and out of reach to me, especially the doorknobs but, as my present home is of a similar vintage and the door handles are four feet from the floor it’s not surprising that I had a burning ambition to reach them. The mantelpiece was high as well so I must have been lifted up to see the treasures that lived there. I remember clearly two china dogs, a jar of pipe cleaners and another of spills, for lighting both pipe and fire, which lived in a little china tower.
My favourites were Darby and Joan. They were two china figurines of children dressed to look like an old couple, complete with wire rimmed glasses, who sat in tiny bentwood chairs, facing each other either side of an imaginary fire.
There was a proper bathroom but it was freezing cold and I had my baths in a tin bath on the hearthrug in front of the living room fire.
My toys were few and simple; a bear, predictably called Teddy Edward, a rag doll called Daisy Bell and a rubber doll called Eliza- Jane and produced from goodness knows where, a doll’s pram. There was tiny china tea-set too, only allowed out on special occasions. It was a great thrill to visit a neighbour’s sister who would allow me to play, carefully, with a large beautifully dressed china doll with long hair. As it was a condition of playing with this treasure that I had to be quiet I realise, looking back, that this was to stem my incessant chatter so that the two elderly sisters could have a pleasant gossip.
My other favourite playthings were a collection of Edwardian fans, lace handkerchiefs and other such treasures that lived in my Grandma’s dresser drawers. Almost as exciting were the boxes that held them as they were chocolate boxes, saved from when such things could be bought, even if only for special occasions, and I ate those imaginary chocolates that were pictured on the covers over and over again. And reading, of course; Milly Molly Mandy and Enid Blyton, Rupert Bear every day in Grandad’s ‘Daily Express’, me reading the rhyming story and Grandad the longer prose version, and sometimes, as a book, perhaps at Christmas.
When I went back as an adult the bungalow seemed dim, damp and depressing with its garden overgrown with dark laurels, the sepia photographs and the heavy velvet furniture in the parlour but, as a child, I remember the shiny piano, the paper flowers and the lovely embroidered footstool on which, after many re-coverings, I now rest my feet as I write.