Don’t you know there’s a war on?

Don't you know there’s a war on? Well, hardly. During the years 1939-1945, I went from 4 to 9 years old. All the same, memories of the war and its aftermath are still vivid.
For many of my generation, the war was immediate and terrifying: the blitz in London, the bombing raids on major cities, the mass evacuation of city children to rural areas, deaths of relatives and neighbours, and so on. But, for a child like me, living in a small farming village in an obscure part of an unimportant rural county, the war was on the periphery of our vision. What follows is my war, nothing you could make a blockbuster movie about, that’s for sure:


ARP
I remember my dad in his Air Raid Patrol uniform. What I liked best was his police whistle, which he carried on a braided yellow cord over his shoulder. I still have the whistle.
Shopping baskets

With rationing and shortages, the British learned to queue. Outside the village bakery, early in the morning before it opened, a queue would form. Not a queue of people, but of their shopping baskets. A touching demonstration of trust, honesty and civic spirit.
Dried egg
Packets of dried (powdered) egg were only one of many food substitutes that came – I think – in food parcels from North America. Dried egg made thin leathery omelettes, which is why to this day, I prefer my omelettes that way. I can remember, too, a sardine substitute, a grotesque fish called Snoek, but only its name, not what it tasted like. And whale meat (Punsters, remember the wartime song sung by Vera Lynn: “Whale meat again……” Groan).
Foil strips
Strips of silvery foil were dropped from aeroplanes to confuse radar, lots and lots. These silvery ribbons were like a currency, along with circular card milk-bottle-tops, so part of my childhood was devoted to scouring the fields round the village looking for this precious booty, as negotiable as coin of the realm. You could swap it for marbles or comics or all sorts of treasures...
Air Raids
Some nights, we heard the German bombers going over to bomb Liverpool and Manchester, but we knew they weren’t going to waste bombs on our scruffy little village. One night, though, for reasons I never discovered, my mother, sister and I slept the night under the huge oak farmhouse table in the living-room while my father spent his on ARP vigil, whistle at the ready. That was fun.
Soldiers
We didn’t see many, but my cousin Ray Wetton came by once (His Company were billeted at a nearby camp for two days en route to god knows where). He was desperate for a bath. He let me hold his rifle, so naturally he became my hero (after Tarzan) . After the war, we were aware of the village men who were not coming back. Their names were inscribed on the Village War Memorial, family names I knew because their younger brothers and sisters were my schoolfellows: Stringers and Sherwoods and Perrys….
Bananas
We had seen pictures of bananas but had never the fruit itself, till one day a cruel boy called Turner brought one into the school playground (His sailor father had brought some when he came home on leave). Turner shared it with his friends. Those of us, including me, who weren’t his friends, looked on enviously, our flabbers utterly gasted. Then he magnanimously gave us the skin. Greedily, our front teeth scraped the lining off the skins, rabbitlike. We had sore lips for days afterwards.
Evacuees
We had a few, including a cockney boy whom we envied for his ability to spit a great distance through a gap in his front teeth. We called him Spitty, but we didn’t like him, because he talked funny, and because the village girls preferred him to us locals.
Daily Mirror
Preferred reading, mainly because of the cartoon strips: Belinda, Garth, the megamuscled hero, Just Jake… And Jane (Wow! So that’s what girls turn into!).
But the issue of the Mirror that I can never forget was the one that published photographs of the liberation of Belsen in the autumn of 1945. Heaps of emaciated bodies, faces showing suffering beyond human understanding. Horrible. Years later, I met a man who was with the Company that first entered the concentration camp. His job was to drive one of the machines that shovelled the dead bodies into mass graves where quicklime finished them off. Forgive me if I don't post pictures of this.

To tell you the truth, I prefer now to remember the silver foil, the dried egg, Jane and my father’s whistle on its braided yellow cord.