March 2002 Issue - Essay # 4
My War
Years
By Brenda Ross
|
I remember the war years as a series of strange dreams. I was ten years old on September 3rd 1939 when war was declared. We sat listening to the radio with our parents when the news broke. It didn’t bother my sister and I very much until we went outside to play and a very emotional Belgium neighbor ran out of her house sobbing hysterically. We looked at each other, Joan and I, and decided that this was perhaps the thing to do, so we went home and began to weep, but Daddy laughed and reassured us that there was nothing to be concerned about, it would all be over in a few weeks. In 1941, the German Luftwaffe began an intensive series of bombings on Liverpool and the surrounding area. It must have been devastating for the adults, but my sister and I and our baby brother, David, took it in our stride. We soon became accustomed to the nightly sound of the air-raid warning that had us scuttling out of bed and down to the comparative safety of the reinforced cellar. We were soon joined there by many of our neighbors whose houses were not equipped with the three large underground rooms that ran the length of ours. The radio played an important role in our lives. There were the inspirational pep talks of Winston Churchill after he became Prime Minister in 1940 including his speech promising England "blood, sweat and tears" and declaring in his strong voice that we would "never surrender." Then there was the English traitor, William Joyce, whose broadcasts were beamed to us from Germany. It was scary when he mentioned actual streets in the Liverpool area that were scheduled to be bombed that night. I don’t know why everyone listened to him, but they did. They called him "Lord Haw Haw" as a gesture of defiance. After the war was over he was tried for treason and hanged. There was much propaganda on the radio about the invincibility of the British, but the adults all knew that we were not prepared for invasion. Britain is an island and its shores were manned against the enemy by old men and young boys (the soldiers were fighting battles in Europe and North Africa) armed with rusty old farm implements and useless anti-aircraft balloons. All the names of the streets were removed, presumably so spies would get lost and we were constantly warned not to give any information to strangers. There were many food shortages, we had ration books for everything. I remember we were allowed one egg per person a month, my brother never saw a banana until he was 9 years old. Everyone was limited to one small chocolate bar a month but my sister and I did not suffer in that respect, because the neighbors who came to our cellar during the air raids used to give us their ration. Most of the air raids took place in the middle of the night. This was exciting enough but when they occurred during school hours and we all had to abandon the classroom and go beneath the ground into air-raid shelters, long narrow domed shelters made out of corrugated iron, I thought it was wonderful. There were benches running the length of the shelters, and we sat facing each other with nothing to read from or write on. I went to a girl’s convent school, most of our teachers were Catholic nuns, and after they had done what they did best—prayed—we spent the endless hours playing charades. Some of the girls, Kathleen Youd, Sheila Broome, Sheena Bunce and Betty Hoy developed this old parlor game into an art form. They would enact complicated scenes with the relevant words so deeply hidden that we seldom guessed the answer. We didn’t care, and looked forward to these underground theater sessions. Sometimes bombs fell in the next street. Our house shook from the blast, but no-one I knew was killed, although several of the girls at school lost their parents and other relatives, usually because they didn’t bother to use the shelters which did supply some protection from shrapnel and blast but would not survive a direct hit. I never dwelt on these tragedies. I remember going to the shop for my mother one day to queue up for some bread, when a daylight raid began and I stopped on the sidewalk to watch two airplanes engaged in battle until a worried shopkeeper came out and dragged me inside. "Don’t you know that’s dangerous," she scolded me, "you could’ve been killed." But I didn’t believe that I would die and I wanted to see the other plane, which was ‘one of there's’ and had a different sound to our own. I was sixteen before the war ended. My teen-age years were complicated by the lack of young men (they were usually away fighting in the British forces) although there were some Canadian forces in training nearby. In the later years there were American troops too and every female for miles around found them very glamorous in their tailor made expensive uniforms and ‘fancy’ way of talking. Our poor soldiers wore heavy serge outfits, scratchy and badly fitted, and they hated the young men from across the Atlantic and considered them to be "over-paid, over-sexed and over here." My friend, Betty, and I, were products of a convent school that insisted that we wear our hated ugly school uniforms at all times. The nuns frowned on the very idea that we should ever talk to a member of the opposite sex let alone flirt with them. Consequently we didn’t stand a chance against the lonely young women in the area, many of whom became war brides and ended up in Canada and the United States. My father, Thomas Sidney Sumner was born in 1895 in Liverpool, England. In later years he wrote his memoirs which served as a link between the idealistic days of his youth and the realism of modern times. He was a sensitive young man when, inspired by an attractive young stage singer who seemed to be focusing on him when she sang "Your King and Country Need You," he volunteered in World War I. He writes graphically about his experiences in the trenches, but, despite the horror, his innate sense of humor shines through as he searches for--and finds--the human, the ironic and the desperately funny anecdotes that live on in his memory. My father was a man of great charisma. He never became embittered by the constant disappointments he encountered after he returned home from the war, as he battled to provide for his family during the peacetime "Depression Years." His household may not always have abounded with material possessions, but there was much love and laughter and it became a focal point for friends and relations to gather courage from his love of life. He was a storyteller par excellence. He was not a religious man in the accepted sense of the word but his actions were full of love and acceptance of others. He was the first to tell a joke against himself. He produced an assortment of literary work, excerpts from which are contained in his memoirs. In World War II, he served his country in a special department of the censorship branch. There was no petrol so he would take the bus and during the height of the blitz however the roads were cluttered with bomb craters and he would walk seven miles through the blazing fires to our house.
|
|
Author's Biography Brenda Ross, born in England, immigrated to Canada many years ago. Since her retirement, she has become a compulsive writer. Canadian Writers Journal and other magazines have printed her articles on the process of writing, some of which are contained in her book, "On The Other Hand," published by White Mountain Publications. This year, she has had pieces published in online magazines, including Writers Life, Thought Cafe, Cenotaph Pocket Edition, Doorknobs, and Bodypaint and Kudzumonthly. Brenda invites you to view her own three Web sites: Shaking the Kaleidoscope (a variety of articles, short stories, and poems), The Silver Arrow (a novel about misadventures of two 11-year-old boys), and Rosie and Me (a collection of short stories about two school-age girls). E-mail Brenda at brerfox@dowco.com
|
Read or write reviews on this essay! Read or write reviews on this site! We'd like to know from
our readers if they enjoyed this issue of Seven Seas! Do you have praises
or complaints? Suggestions or ideas? Would you like to read other
people's reviews? Please check out our Site
Reviews Page Get notified! Would you
like to get notified as soon as new Seven Seas issues are published on the
Web? Tell A Friend! Do you enjoy
the Seven Seas site?
|
|
Go back to the
table
of contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 77 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
|
