Lizzy May – Chapter 21
Evacuees
Autumn 1978
So, there we were, Pauly. Bombed out.
We’d survived, but what next, we wondered?
Well, you can either sit around feeling sorry for yourself, or you can get on with it. We recognised that there were victims of the raid worse off than us.
So when the all-clear had sounded, and we’d gone to look at the pile of smoking rubble that used to be our home, and had grieved and wept a little, Percy went off to his shift as an ARP warden, and I asked how I could help at the local Rest Centre. I spent the day making tea and sandwiches and handing out blankets.
I think we were both in shock, to be honest with you. Our situation didn’t really sink in for several days.
We’d lost our ration books. Thankfully we’d been in the habit of carrying our ID cards with us at all times, to help identify us if we, you know, ended up as casualties.
We had a little money with us, but not much. Our savings were in a Post Office account, such as they were, but the account books we needed to withdraw funds were somewhere under tons of rubble, and probably burned to ashes anyway.
All of this could be replaced, but that would take time.
It was impossible for us to do our insurance work, of course, and because we were self-employed, there would be no compensation for lost wages. All of our client information, all our financial records, everything we needed to run our business, was in our desk and filing cabinet, and those were, well, gone.
We knew there would be Government compensation after the War for the loss of our belongings. Who knew, though, when that would be?
And what if the Germans win, I thought to myself. What then?
When families were bombed out, and assuming they survived, typically Mum and the children would leave the City, and Dad would stay behind, guarding the ruins of their home against looters.
Yes, I’m sad to say looting was a daily occurrence. People romanticise the War, go on about the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ and all pulling together – but the fact of the matter is, people were still people. And some people are horrible.
What did we think of the Germans?
Oh, now that we were finally at war with them, we were encouraged to believe that they were all Nazis and fanatical supporters of Hitler, who would die for the Fatherland without a moment’s hesitation.
Many people probably believed this, but Percy and I were never convinced.
For one thing, Percy’s ancestors on his mother’s side were German, from a respected family of violin makers, the Fendt family. He and Charlie gave their son George the middle name Fendt in memory of that connection. That was before the First World War, of course; they wouldn’t have done it later.
Anyway, we’d had our own Nazis in Britain: Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. We’d had the so-called Battle of Cable Street in 1936 in the East End, and other riots, so it wasn’t as if Fascism was unknown here. There was more resistance to it, but then we had a mature, stable democracy, not one that had been patched together and imposed on us by foreign powers after a military defeat.
Nowadays, I think most people recognise that the German people were led astray and intimidated by an authoritarian regime and its thugs. There’s nothing uniquely wicked about them, and there probably never was. In a way, that’s more frightening, if you think about it. What ordinary people can be led to do.
Your friend Matthias seems a lovely young man, anyway, and I’m sure his parents are very nice, too.
You might want to be a bit diplomatic around his grandparents, though, if you ever meet them. There’s no telling what people got up to back then, or what they had to go along with, to have a bearable life. Best not to mention it.
So, back to the Blitz and our predicament. Well, in our case, there was nothing of our home left to guard and fret over. Thankfully we had no children to worry about, either.
You could wait a long time to be rehoused through official channels. Though they did their best for everyone, a big raid would overwhelm the system. Most people ended up fending for themselves.
Percy went to work on his connections, and found us a house. A whole house!
It had no gas and no electricity, and an outside toilet. But still, it had walls, windows and a roof, and it was in good repair.
It was outside London, in the Hertfordshire countryside. Safe from the air raids, as much as anywhere was. In the 1920s, the British film industry had set up studios nearby, to film in clear, clean air, away from the London smog.
The house was down a quiet lane, not far from Aldenham Reservoir, and it was owned by the couple next door, the Youngs.
Yes, that’s right. It was Alcea, where you spent the first four years of your life. Mr Young, Alfred, was still alive then. The name means ‘Hollyhock’ in Latin, and they named it for the flowers they grew in the garden.
It was the simple life, compared to our London existence, but that was exactly what we needed.
Percy talked his way into a job with ‘the Pru’ – the Prudential. He was still a claims investigator and assessor, but now he was an employee of the biggest name in the business. He worked for the Pru for the rest of his life.
We replaced our lost papers and settled into our new life.
I spent the days with housework and volunteering, and the evenings darning clothes. At the weekends, Percy patched up broken furniture using borrowed tools. The house was barely furnished, you see, and good furniture was impossible to come by.
He also helped me in our vegetable plot. If there’d been hollyhocks in the garden before, there was no room for them now. We turned over every square foot to growing our own vegetables and fruit.
Percy built cages for rabbits, which we planned to kill and eat.
The rabbits grew fat, bred and multiplied, but when it came to it, we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill them. We had to barter away the lot, before they ate us out of house and home.
We kept hens too, until the fox from the spinney came and got the whole blessed flock.
We were city folk, remember, and had a lot to learn about life in the country.
All this effort in the garden was to supplement our rations. Rations would keep you from starving, but not much more than that. ‘Dig for Victory’ was the slogan, but it was more like ‘Dig for Dinner’, in actual fact.
Mrs Young, Frances, was a strong character. She adored you when you were a little boy – little Pauly could do no wrong – but remember this was a quarter of a century earlier I’m talking about now. She was in her fifties back then, and liked to let me know who was boss, particularly when your grandfather was at work.
Then, in the autumn of 1941, I found that I was pregnant.
Coming up:
This Friday in Tales from the Wood: Pauly and Gaz embark on a life of crime. (Paid subscriptions.)
Next Tuesday in Lizzy May: Lizzy May’s and Percy’s son is born, and a fishy incident involves a Doodlebug flying bomb.