Memoirs of Daphne

Being a young child during WW2

Being a child during World War 2 was very, very different from today. I was two when the war started. I went to school when I was four and it was wintertime, I believe. We wore black stockings and a black slip with a little square top and a black velour hat. I walked about two miles to school. It was the first school that I went to, and I was bullied by a couple of older girls. In the end, I told my father. When he was younger, he had been a great footballer and he could run! One day he was walking to meet me one afternoon, and he saw what was happening, so he ran after the girls. After that, they never bothered me again. When I went to the bigger school, I used to go on the bus. And when we heard the sirens, we all had to go a long crocodile line across the playground and down the steps into this enormous shelter that I can still smell to this day, of musty damp. We never did anything much in the shelter. We used to have to sit there until the siren went again to tell us that it was all clear. Then I would have to walk to the bus stop and come home on the bus.

When we were at home, we had an Anderson shelter across the bed. And we all crept underneath that and the next door neighbour had a proper shelter built, so we used to go through the fence and down into her shelter, which was much smaller than the one at school. The neighbours would be there passing the time chatting until the all-clear went and we would come back.

I don't remember a lot about D-Day. All I can remember is that one day we had an enormous number of airplanes coming over, and the thundering the sound of the aircraft going over the bungalow. I can still remember the noise as they all flew over.

My father was in the Home Guard to start with during the war and we used to live about two miles from Pagham Harbour. He used to cycle every evening down to Pagham Harbor to sit in this little hut and watch in case any Germans were coming over the English Channel. He then went into the RAF and became an armourer, much to the disgust of his family who went into the Navy. They were very upset that he went into the RAF, but that's what he wished to do.

Billeted in the bungalow next door to us was a family from Portsmouth. They were bombed terribly and evacuated to this house next door. They had a girl, Sheila, was two years younger than I was and we got on very well. We used to have a lot of fun together! There was a ditch with a stream at the bottom of the garden, which we used to be able to climb over to pick blackberries when the cows weren't looking and things like that. We also had a little shed in our garden, and we draped curtains all around the tools so that it looked very nice, like a little house. We used to sit there, and I would read Enid Blyton’s funny stories to her! We used to beg our parents to sleep out there, but they would never let us because they said it wasn't suitable. One day my father got very cross because he could see the shed wall at the end of the path, on the wall we'd written in chalk Cosy Cottage in our obviously child-like writing! I remember having to scrub it off.

When I was 12, I went to the grammar school in Chichester, and I used to have to get the bus. There was a very strict lady opposite the school who was a retired vicar's wife. She told my mother that I would come to no good because when I ran for the bus, my skirts were flying! I met my husband to be on that bus! I did not like him at first, but my friend Avril did like him, so she persuaded me to sit next to her so that she would talk to him on the bus. He and his friend (Ray) were very into aeroplanes, who then became head of Hendon. They used to do this zooming about, talking about the latest aeroplanes and that sort of thing.

Coronation

I cannot remember having a lot of celebrations in our village, but my father’s boss had this enormous house on the outskirts of Bognor, and I was invited to go with my sister and our friends. They had this little black and white television. I can vividly remember the Queen; she was all in white being crowned. It was very exciting to see a television for the first time, but I suppose we expected it because of how many people had talked about it before. We had to dress in our best clothes to watch it! When my father had a brain haemorrhage, one of his customers gave him a television because he was so ill. By then he was the manager of a gentleman's outfitters. He really wanted to be a professional footballer! It was one of the first televisions, I suppose. It probably wasn't coloured to start with, so we had one of the first ones.

Being a Teacher

It was very difficult being a teacher in the 1950s because we had very little equipment. We didn't have a lot of paper to write our theses on and things like that. We used to have to build things like puppet theatres for the children. When I was in Streatham, I can remember we had to go to the market to ask the chaps there if we could have their fruit boxes to make things out of them for the children. It was a very difficult time.

I lived in Streatham, school practice in the East End, in Hackney, to do a six week school practice, which is where we made things like puppet theatres for the children. I remember my husband Christopher’s father made me a hutch for my guinea pigs and said to me, “You know, Daphne, there are some people that do things and some people that get things done for them!” I shall always remember that. I shall always remember that, but I also remember carrying that guinea pig cage across the Underground, which was quite an experience in the crowded Underground in London.

When I was studying, we had a room in the college accommodation. Back then, if ever we had any chaps in our bedrooms we had to put the bed outside in the corridor, which today sounds absolutely ridiculous! But that was the situation that it was. But really it was good, we had lots of friends and it was great fun.

There were there was another college called St John's College College that had men, but we didn't have a lot to do with them. In my first teaching job there were men and women, and it was the only time that I thought that I would strike because there was an elderly lady teaching with me and looking after her mother. Meanwhile, there was a young man who hardly did any work and we didn't have equal pay. I always felt that was very unjust,  because he wasn't doing as much work as she was, and yet he was earning more than her.

Libya

My husband worked for the British Council and he was posted to Libya. He was in charge of all the British teachers at the university and the schools, and we had a flat overlooking them, about three flights up, and my daughter Candy was 11 months old. We had the pushchair that we had to lug up the steps, but it looked very beautiful from there to look out of the window. And once we saw an Assist Yacht coming across in full sail because it was very near the harbour. I remember there were enormous brown cockroaches and you had to keep everything covered in Tupperware and put away. If you went down in the night and put the light on, there was a big scurry and all the cockroaches disappeared. The surfaces were brown until they we went.

Chris went to around Libya but our problem was that Candy was very car sick so we couldn't do a lot. I remember he went out to one of the amphitheatres and was in the play - the toilet was the other side of the amphitheatre and all the little children were marched across when they were doing the play to go to the loo! It was interesting when we went out into the desert to see the old Roman ruins. It was very stony to start with. And then you walked the sand, but you didn't sit there very long before somebody came along. One of the Arabs or somebody. And there were a lot of a lot of glass out there. A lot of the Libyans were not supposed to drink, but they used to take their beer bottles out and smash them across the edge, the green milk bottles. We used to have these sort of sandstorms where sand would come down with a great big wind - a sort of hot sand... that covered the car and everything, it was intriguing.

Chris used to work in the mornings and have the afternoons off before going back and working in the evenings. We went the beach one afternoon with Candy and enjoyed the sun; she used to wear a huge hat and so did I, it was quite fun. Then one day my husband went off to work and then he rang me on the phone and said, “keep in because there’s trouble and I'm coming home”. He came home from the office and on the way, he got a lot of food from the Jewish shop. We stayed indoors because apparently there was trouble with Israel and the Arabs thought the British were helping. We weren't, but we couldn't persuade them that. We had the Forces radio that we could listen to, and they were giving messages out saying that all British citizens should pack one knife, fork, spoon, and clothes in a suitcase to be prepared for evacuation. We did as we were told, but as we were looking out of the window, we could see the library the Americans used on fire and people were being taken across on the rooftops to safety. There was a lot of rioting going on. And as we looked out of the window across the promenade, we could see crowds and crowds of Libyans shouting Nasser! Nasser! Nasser! We could hear a car horn going on and we thought it might be our car, but we couldn't do anything about it. So we just had to hope for the best. All day long we just watched things going on while singing songs and playing with Candy. She enjoyed it. When we went to bed we were absolutely, thoroughly exhausted.

About 3:00 in the morning, we had a phone call from one of Chris's colleagues saying, “Are you ready? Are you ready?” They said that we were to go downstairs with our cases to collect our car and go round to the square, which was on the other side of the building. Fortunately, the car was fine. As we were getting down the stairs Candy was saying “look at the pretty lights!” and things like that. But the gaffer at the bottom ignored us and smiled, and off we went. When we got round the corner, there were soldiers with boulders in their hands, big lorries, and a stream of cars that were going through to the barracks where the big armed guards were. They looked after us for six days and six nights. We were both put into a big hangar where they managed to get a mattress for Chris and myself and a little cot for Candy. I used to have to wash Candy's clothes in a little sink. I remember one day a German woman came in and she said to me, “You do realise that they could keep us here for four years? Because I was interned in England”, which was a bit of a cheerful thing for her to say!

On the whole, everybody was very chatty and happy. We used to have to queue up for our meals, the army fed us very well indeed. We used to have to go and meet in this square. And the Consul General used to say: "It is not safe for you to go back into your homes yet" and tell us what was going on. And he used to come down in a helicopter and all of the sand would come up. One of our friends had an aeroplane, and Chris went out with him because we were in charge of students that were doing degrees. One day, they were out with the Bedouin, but they couldn't find one of them. Suddenly, he appeared because his Libyan friends heard them saying, “You should be going into the barracks!” He got all his stuff for him, put them in the car and drove into the barracks.

One of our great friends was one of the teacher’s wives and she had a baby in the Adventist hospital, which was American. She needed to get to the British barracks, so the Libyan ambulance driver drove there. But when she got to the barracks, the soldiers pulled their guns because they didn’t recognise her and she was in the back of the ambulance with little Emily saying, “I just had a baby and I'm British!” So fortunately they let her in. But then, she and her husband flew out quite soon because he'd finished his time as a teacher there. So they flew out, and then some other people flew out. Following that, all the Americans decided that they should be taken out and they were all put in coaches ready to go, but they couldn't get their aircraft in to get them because the Libyans didn't want to go out to fight and they were coming up and down into the airport. Those poor souls all sat there for hours in the heat waiting to go! But of course, the British stayed, and we were there for six days, six nights before we were told we could go back.  I returned with Candy to a bungalow outside Benghazi because Daddy felt it would be safer. And then when we did go back to our flat, the Libyans still were a bit- they used to bang on the car and things like that. I promised Chris when I married that I would obey him, he said he wanted me to go home with my daughter. So I went home. We had permission to go out under curfew, and I went back via Rome on my own. Because it was a difficult time to sell our house and we thought we were going to Libya for four years, my mother gave up her bungalow in Sussex and came to look after our house in Kent and she was on holiday. My friend who lived down the road had the key, so my mother didn't know that we had come back until she came back a week later when I was more settled. But that's the story of our visit!