Last Sunday, Ian asked us what our memories of VE Day were. On VE Day, I was 4 and a half, so I could not appreciate the full extent of such an event, although I knew it was very exciting and we were going to have a party.

We lived in Shirley, and we had a street party on a strip of land that ran the whole length of the road. At the far end, tables and chairs were brought out from the surrounding houses, and mothers walked around with plates of sandwiches, cakes and teapots. I seem to remember that it was only the children who sat at the tables. I can’t think where the mothers got the lovely food from, as it was all rationed. They must have been saving up their coupons in anticipation of the event.

My mother was a great cook and managed to make wonderful cakes using dried eggs. We sometimes received food parcels from our friends abroad, but one such parcel of dried fruit from Rhodesia was full of weevils. My mother was not going to throw away such a precious gift, and so very carefully drowned the insects and drained the fruit through a sieve! We didn’t suffer any ill effects but just enjoyed the cakes! She also told the grocer that she had broken all her eggs, and so he sympathetically replaced them. She had broken them, but only one by one, into a frying pan! If we had a boiled egg, my sister and I used to cut it in half, as it was a luxury. I remember eating a piece of my first banana that my mother had queued to get. She carefully smashed it up with sugar and cream off the top of the milk while I waited in great anticipation to taste this rare delicacy. One spoonful and I burst into tears. It was horrible! I think I was not used to eating something so sweet and creamy.

There were several times when I could have died or been killed during those war years, but the Lord seems to have had other plans for me. At the beginning of the war, we lived nearer Croydon and were on the direct flight path for Croydon Airport. A bomb landed on a house just a bit further up our road, and my father was at that time an ARP Warden, and so it was his and his colleague’s job to retrieve the bodies. That could have been our house. On another occasion, my mother and I were returning from shopping down an unmade road where new bungalows were being built before the war, when a German plane flew low over us with its guns shooting. We managed to roll into a ditch at the side of the road, but what if it had been an ordinary road?

My aunt worked for the RAF and had been posted to North Yorkshire, so she was not used to the situation in London. She was terrified when she came home on leave and immediately told my mother that she was coming in an hour with a taxi to take my older sister, and me, with my grandmother and her daughter, to a safe place. The Taxi just drove until it came to Burford, a lovely village near Oxford and there we were given a beautiful cottage to live in that was attached to a big house owned by a Quaker Family who were very kind to us. While there, I caught Whooping Cough and Bronchitis and very nearly died. My grandmother asked the doctor if a mustard poultice on my back would save me. He didn’t think that it would, but anything was worth trying at that stage. It worked, and so my grandmother saved my life. We stayed there for about 18 months until things quietened down in London for a while, as my grandmother was longing to get home. 

Later, when I started school, I was puzzled that there were two schools on our campus, both with children of the same age. The second school was a church school that had been bombed, and many children were killed. The church was some distance from our house, but for some reason, I was taken to Sunday School there once, and I remember colouring in a lovely picture of flowers, but could not finish it. When I heard that the school had been bombed, I was more sorry about my lovely picture that I couldn’t finish than I was about the poor children who had been killed.

After VE Day, my ‘normal’ life gradually changed – no more air-raid sirens, guns booming, flights of planes flying over us, my mother rushing around with a dustbin full of sand to put out the incendiary bombs that landed in our garden. (She said that one came through our roof and rick-a-shaded off the bedroom ceiling and out again, but we are not so sure that this could have been possible. It may have been that she didn’t want to frighten us.) No more rushing to shelters, eating our meals in a cupboard under the stairs if the siren went off during meal times, no more sleeping in the Morrison Shelter that took up most of our sitting room, no more evacuations and, best of all, seeing my father when he was demobbed from the RAF and getting to know him as I was only a baby when he joined up.

I am so grateful to my mother that she coped so well with my father being away and two children to look after. She never showed us how frightened she must have been, so we just took things as if they were normal.

Diana Knights