About A Week: A Cake On D-Day
To an eight-year-old boy a slice of cake was more significant than the D-Day landings, as Peter Hinchliffe reveals.
The Sixth of June. A significant date. My mother’s birthday.
On June 6, 1944, she was 44, marching along in step with the century.
Of course, there was a birthday cake for tea. No candles. No icing sugar.
No icing sugar to be had in the dire days of war.
Just a plain and simple sponge cake. Though, like all mam’s sponge cakes, it was feather-light, layered with raspberry jam picked from the canes in our own garden, crowned with cream whipped up from the milk which came in a metal urn from Collins’s farm.
I was eight years old at the time, relishing each mouthful of the cake, savouring the delight of sweet food in mid-week. The only occasions when mother baked a cake in those troubled times was on a Sunday when relatives or friends were coming to tea.
There was a second slice for me, and no thought as I wolfed it down of the horror and bedlam occurring at that moment on the beaches of distant Normandy.
Oh, I knew there was a war on. We took our gas masks to the small village school. Had regular emergency drills, trooping in orderly line down to the cellar of the Victorian building.
We’d heard the air raid sirens. Seen the beams of searchlights and the flashes of bombs dropping on distant Sheffield.
Every so often RAF planes droned overhead. Then we’d stop whatever game we were playing and cheer.
I was a keen reader by the time I was eight. Regularly borrowed books from the village library. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons story. The adventures of an American girl detective.
But I had not yet become an avid newspaper reader. I didn’t register the information delivered by posh-sounding BBC radio news readers.
D-Day passed me by. So too did most of the horrors of the world war.
The majority of the men in our village worked in the coal mines. Coal was vital to turn the wheels of heavy industry. Miners stayed at the coal face instead of being compelled to don khaki and marched off to battle.
My father, then in his 40s, was involved in the manufacture of sulphuric acid, vital to the production of munitions. He too remained a civilian.
The children of Whitley were surrounded throughout the war by familiar adult faces, male as well as female.
War was a distant murmur. An inconvenience which meant we had to make do with a couple of gob-stoppers a week, instead of the bags and bags of sweets which we longed to eat.
We went about our ordinary childhood village life, hearing the cuckoo in spring, watching the rabbits run in autumn as the horse-drawn harvester reduced the standing wheat to a narrow rectangle, throwing snowballs in winter…
Now I know about D-Day. I know of the eastward march of Heinz Guderian’s raiding Panzers, of Montgomery and Eisenhower, the Battle of the Bulge and the fall of Berlin…
And I am ever more keenly aware of the good fortune of being born into a generation which has not been summoned to fight on the front line.
Even in hindsight I feel no shame in enjoying two slices of birthday cake on D-Day.
Men fought and died on those gory beaches so that forever, somewhere in England, children could play cricket and rounders.
Then sleep sound in their beds, tired out by innocent play.
