Our lives during the second World War

This is an edited transcription of an interview which took place at
Gillingham Library (Kent,) on July 7th. 2005.

Mrs. Strong: We both lived in Hersham, Surrey as children. Hersham is a village near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey. We married in 1951. We went to the same school on the Burwood road!

Mr. Strong: We’re Surrey people from Walton-on-Thames, near Sandown Park Race Course. I finished school, went to work, and then the war started.

Working in the Factory

Mr. Strong: I joined the War in 1939; I started off in the Home Guard. I had to guard the factory where we worked together at night-time. I used to go to work during the day, knock off at six and come back at eight o’clock at night on Home Guard duties, and then just walked around it! I suppose it was really in case the Germans came over and dropped any bombs on it, and then we could notify someone.

Mrs. Strong: I was fourteen at the start of the War. I had just started work for the electric company. I left school in the April and war started in September, so I had only been working six months. Funnily enough, my sister worked there as well - everyone did on Hersham, it was a factory which manufactured transformers. When Coventry got bombed, we worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, until we got their lights going again. It was terrific.

Trenches were built in the factory so that we could take shelter when the doodlebugs came. We had to take shelter at about 8 o’clock one night when this doodlebug came over - we prayed “Keep going, keep going!” It stopped and fell on the road at the back of the factory, where friends of mine lived. As I’d done a First Aid course, I jumped on my bike and went to see if I could help. As I got there, little children came out of the houses, some of whom I knew. They’d just got out of the bath, and they had pure white vests on, with big black soot spots all over them. The memory will stay with me for the rest of my life. We took them to the church hall, where they stayed for the night - but nobody was killed that night.

Well of course it was dark at night when we came home from work; we worked twelve hours a day most of the time. I remember one night which was the only one when I ever felt really petrified, I really ran. It was a Friday night and I was told afterwards that it was a V2, which had frightened me.

Life in the Armed Forces

Mr. Strong: I started off in the Navy in 1943 and was there for about 9 months. Then they wanted men to go to get ready for D-Day so they transferred volunteers from the Army, RAF and Navy to train. I volunteered and transferred to the Army and trained in Northern Ireland. It always seemed to rain in Ireland! But after all this, instead of sending us over to be part of D-Day, they sent us out to Burma to fight out there!

Mrs. Strong: Jack didn’t like the Navy because he’s colour blind.

Mr. Strong: Fancy calling up a person who’s colour-blind, and has to wear glasses, in the Navy! Stupid, isn’t it? Nobody in the navy should ever wear glasses, especially in the wartime, in case you got sunk! You can’t see nothing then, you need your glasses don’t you!

We traveled by ship from Liverpool out to Bombay, then by train to Calcutta. I was 21 at the time as I had my 21st in Northern Ireland. I was part of the Queen’s Royal Regiment, their HQ’s in Guildford, so we were based down in Surrey. For the final part of our service we flew out from Rangoon to Bangkok, I suppose we were out there about seven months altogether. We were stationed in the big university there, and assigned to look after the captured Japanese officers. The officers had to give up their swords and the like.

We guarded Bang Kang prison, where the Japanese were held in cages. We used to walk around the outside of the cages. I was quite frightened of them escaping from those cages, even though they were locked up. We used to say, “Watch it! I wouldn’t get anywhere near them, you don’t want them getting out of that cage, mate!” We were frightened of them, and they were in a cage!

A couple of the Japanese got hold of two of ours, and tied them up to a tree. Luckily we came along and found them.

Mrs. Strong: Were they going to kill them, or leave them there to die?

Mr. Strong: Leave them there, but of course we got there first.

Mrs. Strong: He never really talks much about his experiences in the war.

Evacuation

Mrs. Strong: We weren't evacuated but we had an evacuee who came to live next door to us, from Kent. She was in the shelter one night and a screaming bomb came down and she screamed with it all the way down, she went back to Kent! We didn’t have it as bad as she did in Kent.

Air raids

Mrs. Strong: I'll always remember the incident at Sevenoaks, where my sister was stationed when a bomb came down. Two girls were at there having a cigarette together, one girl that came from London had gone over to the other and she said “I’m going to die with a box of Swan Vesta matches in my hand!” Anyway, they were lucky, the pair of them, as a lot of people did get killed or badly injured that day.

We had an Anderson metal shelter, an extra large one because we were a big family. We all helped my dad to dig the hole to put it down and then he concreted inside it, and then put boards on the concrete. All the children slept up on the boards and all the bigger children like me plus mum and dad, slept on the floor, with our legs underneath the younger children

Mr. Strong: We had an Anderson shelter. It was a small one for the four of us.

Mrs. Strong: After the war, when we no longer need the shelters, my dad turned ours into a rabbit warren. He put in a three-foot layer of earth and then, because of the concrete, the rabbits could burrow into the earth but couldn’t get out, so they lived an almost normal life!

Do you remember a night when you were on guard, when two sisters got killed when a bomb fell on their bungalow? Their auntie and uncle were also killed. The girls had already been injured in the Vicker’s bombing; Vicker’s was at Weybridge where the Spitfires were made.

Mr. Strong: We lived near a railway line, which was on a direct route to Waterloo station. It was only about twenty minutes to half an hour by train.

Mrs. Strong: When the old guns used to go on the railway, a right banging, you knew an aircraft was going over.

Rationing

Mrs. Strong: Food didn’t change an awful lot, because we were a poor family, a big family. We had two big allotments during the war and we had big gardens, all given over to food. I always loved gardening. I can always remember when my father had a row of sprouts and he gave me some plants to grow in my own couple of little rows. They weren’t doing so well so he said, "I think I’ll have a look at these" and dug one up - it had club root. He dug another one up, and to cut a story short, he dug the whole row up and they all had club root! Mine were fine, I thought, but he said, “Now dig one of yours up,” so I did, and of course mine had club root too! I’d already laughed at him, so he said, “He who laughs last, laughs longest.”

Mr. Strong: My parents grew vegetables too; all the houses in those days did in allotments and big gardens.

Mrs. Strong: I never took sugar before the War, but when the War started I began to use it, because it was part of the rations, that were allocated to you.

My mum worked in the First World War - she was in the Land Army and so naturally in this war she went back to work on the land. She used to work in greenhouses and she brought home all these half tomatoes. She used to take the seeds out of the tomatoes for the next year’s crop. Then we used to have a big fry up, with tomatoes and bread and butter for tea! That was lovely!

We used to have two pennyworth of corned beef - that was your ration for the week and one egg. If we ever got more than one egg, which we did one week, we used to give mum one of our eggs to make cakes with. My brother Lesley ate all his eggs in one go and when he went for his medical for the forces, he failed. He’d got too many eggs in his body; I think he’d eaten about four in about twenty-four hours. He had to go without eggs, so that when he went back in again he was ok - it had quickened his heart, they said. Jack’s mum used to have chickens, she had to give up her egg ration to be able to have corn for the chickens - it was like a swap. We also had rabbits. We ate the rabbits! In actual fact my father used to stand me at the sink, to teach me how to skin a rabbit, it didn’t worry us. I couldn’t touch them now! Poor little animals. Mind you, I eat meat. We didn’t have chickens but grandma did.

I’ll tell you a story about my mum in the Second World War. The young ones had been out in the fields, the back fields as we called them, and they had collected shrapnel, which they’d put it in a bucket. The bucket was at the end of the air raid shelter for use in case we wanted to go to the toilet during the night. One night mum, who didn't know about the shrapnel, got out of bed and went to the toilet in the bucket. All her inside was burnt from the acid in the shrapnel. Oh she did scream. She called the children everything! But people coped; they just got on with it. She always managed to put a meal on the table. Mind you, we could only have one slice of bread, we could never have two.

Celebrating the end of the War

Mrs. Strong: We had a whale of a party at the end of both wars. When they announced that the war would be over at 11 o’clock the following morning, five of us went up to Kingston. We bought all the cakes we could and we had a party the next day for the children, they had a whale of a time, they’d never had all those cakes before! Jack had a photograph of my dad and he said, "Look, there’s your dad, drunk!"

I went up to London to the Thanksgiving, for the people you know, it was at a weekend after the war, I’m not sure whether it was a Sunday or a Saturday, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, it was absolutely packed.

Reflections on the end of the War

Mrs. Strong: We felt that we were going to win the War. We had to, didn’t we?

Mr. Strong: We could always to the German war, but people never related to the Japanese war, did they?

Mrs. Strong: No, we didn’t feel that one as much.

Mr. Strong: No, you didn’t, and a lot of other English people didn’t either. They were known as the Forgotten Army, and sure enough they were.

Mrs. Strong: Well, they are being remembered now. I’m afraid this is the first time it’s all come out, made it more intimate story, really, the Japanese part. Well you’ve never spoken about your experiences in the war before, have you?

After the War.

Mrs. Strong: It was quite a long time before rationing finished. Eggs were still rationed and flour - until 1951. The man who made our wedding cake, he collected an egg from all our friends to make the cake with. People gave us their sugar rations too - so sugar and eggs were definitely still rationed. We got our first pair of nylon tights at this time because I had a Nan in America - she said to say that they were normal tights! I received silk knickers as well. We had a big family and we weren’t very well off. When this parcel came, my mum couldn’t afford to pay for it! So my sister, who was still in the army, got it through free! You had to pay to have things like that sent in, it was like a tax. Still, we got them! They didn’t send food parcels though, I don’t know why.

We made all our underclothes - from a parachute that came down, we made knickers and petticoats! Actually we made all our clothes; we had to, apart from a jacket and shoes. I used to get through so many shoes; I'd spend all my clothes coupons on them!
I remember my twenty-first birthday. We didn’t have a celebration at home. My youngest sister was very ill. I never had a party, really. I don’t remember anything about other birthdays. But I can remember that the first Christmas after the war when my uncle came home from France and brought me a purse as a present. I’d never had a purse before, we never had presents from my parents as children, and it was always a pair of shoes or a new dress.

I never had a holiday until I was twenty-one. Four girls were going on holiday in a caravan to Whitstable and they asked if I wanted to go with them - I slept on the floor. That was quite fun. When the war was over, we used to go up to Nottingham with Mum and Dad.

Jack and I rode everywhere on bikes. Matter of fact, my sister Joan was trying to get my mother to ride on her bike. We went down a little lane and she was riding down with Joan holding the saddle - but Joan let go and poor mum fell down the ditch!!

The War was very different for my younger sister Valerie, who was born in 1941 - she was born in bed too, not down the air raid shelter or anywhere! At that time we had a lull in the bombing and Valerie was born upstairs, I had the day off to look after my mum

Jack came back home in 1947 when we had the big snowstorms, do you remember, 6 weeks of that!

Mr. Strong: When you retired from the army, you got a pin-striped suit, if you wanted it.

Mrs. Strong: I hated you in it. I remember the first time we actually went out on a date, was to Hampton Court Fair in September; and he turned up in the morning in that brown suit.

Mr. Strong: After the War we went back to work at the same factory. Life had been very different during the War; a lot of marriages broke up too.

Mrs. Strong: We used to put on concerts in our work place hall. One of the people we had there was Petula Clark who was about seven years old at the time. Usually you paid a shilling to see the artists, but to see Petula Clark you paid a half a crown. With the money we collected, we put boxes together filled with things like shaving cream, soaps, toothpaste, rations and cigarettes. Then we wrote ‘military’ on it to give to all the wounded lads in the local military hospital called Botley Park Hospital. I looked after one particular boy, who had no arms or legs at all. I can see him now — he was just a torso. I had to light his cigarettes; it really was one of the saddest things.

Mr. Strong: The Germans must have known that the Canadian and the American forces were stationed at Sandown Park Race Course.

Mrs. Strong: I used to go dancing with a group of friends at Hackbridge. I liked to dance with a Canadian who always wore spurs when he was dancing.

One of the forces stationed at Sandown who we met just after the war, turned out to be a relation. Through him my mum found out that her mum had died. He told us that our relatives in Canada had lost our address when my auntie’s house had got burned down. My mum was the only one in the family that didn’t immigrate to Canada.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.