Open Writing

The American Lease-lend Agreement passed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 was ended by President Harry S.Truman in May 1945. It entailed Britain and her Allies offering bases and assistance to American forces in exchange for food, equipment and weapons.

On July 16th 1945 the Allies tested the Atom Bomb in Mexico. Tests also took place in some of the Pacific islands.Three weeks later on August 6th the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and on August 15th president Hirohito surrendered and the war in the Far East was over.

I did not go to the Albert Hall any more for the Henry Wood promenade concerts as I had done many times before I was married. I used to go up to London on my own. I shall always remember the last night of the Proms, when every year they finished with everyone singing a rousing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

Films were better than ever. ’Brief Encounter’ with Trevor Howard, and ‘A Song to Remember’ with Paul Muni. I took Mum to the Harrow Coliseum to see the D’Oyley Carte Opera company in Madame Butterfly, and then to see Cavalleria Rusticana.

After our marriage in July 1945 Les hardly had any leave. In November he went from Drem, - where I had spent a few days with him at North Berwick, - to a wild and lonely spot named Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre on Scotland’s west coast. There his squadron of American Hellcats practised simulated flight-deck landings.

The nearest town to them was Campbeltown – in those days a pretty much dead-and-alive dump, but it did have one cinema. They were then sent across to Rosyth to join the brand-new aircraft carrier H.M.S.Ocean, captained by Caspar Johns, son of the Bohemian artist Augustus Johns. It proceeded down to the Channel to cruise up and down while U.S.Hellcats and Fairey Aviation Fireflies practised landings on the carrier’s real flight deck. Then in November they sailed away, crossing the Bay of Biscay, where Les and many of the crew were very seasick, and spent Christmas 1945 in Gibraltar. Malta became their base.
Their commission in 1946 was to tour the Mediterranean to ‘show the flag’, calling at Alexandria and Cyprus. Their planes assisted destroyers in locating and heading off the crammed passenger ships that sought to bring Jewish refugees to the new Israel in Palestine. Later they brought back troops from Malta, making room on board for mainly Army personnel who slept in the hangars. To create more space, many damaged planes were ‘ditched’ overboard in the Bay of Biscay.

Les was demobbed in June 1946 when the Ocean docked at Plymouth. He handed in his uniform and brought home his ‘issue’ demob suit. We had not been together for months.

After we were married I had given up working at the Port of London Authority to find a local job in Queensbury, working as a book-keeper clerk at Rotaprint in Honeypot Lane. No more long tube train rides, just a short walk round to work every day. I learnt typing, and caught on to the quick way of adding up, for which I have been eternally grateful.

One of their directors, Mr.Thomson had once had a pet lion named Rota, kept in his back garden in Pinner. Because of war-time danger should the lion escape in an air raid, they had presented it to Winston Churchill, and it was housed in the London Zoo.

Rationing continued. We were paying my parents something like 15 shillings a week, and intent on saving every penny to buy our own house, I would not include things like biscuits or tomato sauce in our food budget. We would walk round the neighbourhood looking at houses all beyond our means.

We put our names down on the Council Housing List, but houses were in short supply and the chance of getting one was nil, unless you had a readymade family.

Les cycled to work in Long Acre, Covent Garden, which took about an hour, all along the Edgware Road from Kingsbury to Cricklewood, and on to Marble Arch and down Oxford and Regent Street to Piccadilly, Leicester Square and Covent Garden.

One of the printers Les knew said he had solved the problem of posters in the paper shortage by printing on pieces of linen shrouds, now being sold by the government, as surplus to requirements.

We still enjoyed the cinema, seeing ‘The Way to the Stars’ with John Mills and Michael Redgrave and ‘Great Expectations’ with John Mills and Bernard Miles, the American film ‘Duel in the Sun’ with Gregory Peck, and the Australian epic ‘The Overlanders’.

In 1946 we went for a week to Eastbourne, having bus rides to the villages in the area. I still did knitting as I had all through the war. Les took up rug-making. I still have four rugs he made while sitting by Mum’s fire in her dining room in the winter evenings.

In 1947 we got together with our friends Louie Gibbons, Joan Reynolds, Elsie Knight, Fred Cartland and his wife and formed the Get Together Club, having days out to Kew Gardens, Hampton Court and the Tower of London, and that summer Les and I had a lovely Cornish holiday staying in Falmouth, and visiting St. Ives and Lands End.

In August 1947 the newsreels dealt with the terrible slaughter taking place between those of different religions at the Partition of India and Pakistan.
In December we all went to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane to see ‘Oklahoma’.By this time I was pregnant with our first baby. Val was born the following year in our upstairs front bedroom, at 37 Tiverton Road, on a freezing cold February Friday: temperature minus 8 degrees. With no central heating, the fire had been lit in the bedroom grate.

Nurse Speight, the midwife, arrived on her bicycle along the icy roads. She called in another of her colleagues as the baby seemed to have trouble breathing and feeding at the same time, and Nurse Robertson pushed a tube down his throat to clear the obstruction. He was a hefty 9lb. 12oz, and as I had practised Dr. Grantly Dick Read’s relaxation method during the birth I did not have to have any stitches.

As advised, our doctor came to circumcise him, and commented that baby Val’s name was rather short, so we decided to add the middle name of Lawrence which was the name of the church where we married.

Val was christened in a small temporary church in Waltham Drive, a short walk from Tiverton Road. His godparents were Louie Gibbons and Tom Sign.

Mum soon showed me what to do in looking after a baby. I used terry towelling nappies in addition to muslin under-nappies, and a daily pail full of dirty nappies were soaked in a corner of the kitchen. After rinsing they were boiled in the zinc pail on top of the gas stove, to be dried on the garden washing line, or in wet weather on a wooden clothes-horse round the fire.

At the local clinic I took Val to be weighed and also collected his orange juice, cod liver oil and the Ostermilk with which I supplemented his feed.

Early in the year 1948 we heard that Gandhi had been assassinated. In July that same year, with Prime Minister Attlee in office, who succeeded Churchill, Labour minister Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan fought for a new National Health Service. This was introduced on July 5th bringing free healthcare for all ‘from the cradle to the grave’.