Bevin’s Babes
Christine’s Story

My parents were both serving in the Army when they first met. Sometime later, when my Mother fell pregnant with me, she left the services, whilst my Father stayed on. Although he was then too old to go to the front, he worked in an administrative job in Oxford for the duration of the war.

Sadly, soon after my birth in South London, my Mother and I were bombed out of our flat in Battersea. So finding ourselves homeless, it was decided that we would evacuate to live with my Father's family at South Shields on Tyneside in North East England —leaving our maternal family behind.

Then a year or so later, after my Mother's sister Joan, had also been bombed out of her London home, my Grandmother asked my Mother if she could find somewhere near us in South Shields where Joan and her little daughter, my older cousin Jill, could lodge.

With the area already chock-a-block with evacuees, accommodation was scarce. However, after enquiries had been made at their local church, my Father's sister, Isobel, eventually found them a room in a house belonging to two elderly ladies.

With hindsight, my Mother now suspects, the pair were probably living as a lesbian couple. Although back in those days of total innocence, it never crossed her mind! But whatever, their preferences, they generously agreed to take Joan and Jill into their home — for what I believe was the princely sum of £1 per evacuee.

Although they were both very kind and welcoming, unfortunately they apparantly had an aversion to paying their water bills! Consequently, the supply was constantly being turned off. And every time my Aunt wanted to boil a kettle, she was reduced to banging on the pipes with a hammer to encourage a "weak flow"!

Needless to say, baths were not a very common occurrence either, although to compensate, their landladies did provide them with plenty to eat.

My Mother, on the other hand, had a ready supply of water, but not nearly enough to eat. My Grandparents were then over 70 with small appetites and it never occurred to them that as a Nursing Mother she might have a need to eat more than they did! Fortunately, as I understand, an eventual solution was found. And from time to time forays between their respective lodgings were discreetly arranged. Thus by exchange, happily we all survived the war!

In early 1945, we returned to London and I well remember the journey back home. The train was full of Military Personnel and we could hardly get through the corridors for sleeping soldiers crammed into every nook and cranny trying to get home on leave. They had even taken over the lavatories just to get a seat!

Soon we were eventually reunited with my maternal family — an Aunt who had been posted to Egypt with the "R.A.F", my Grandmother and my Grandfather, who had volunteered as an Air Raid Warden. Thankfully they all had remained unscathed.

Not long afterwards, my Mother and I were fortunate enough to be re-housed in a "Pre-Fab" — one of the first of 500,000 which were designed for demobilised servicemen and bombed-out families. Then when the war finally ended, my Father joined us in our new home. But due to his age — then 42 — he found it extremely difficult to find a job. Until eventually, he found a position as a travelling salesman and was "on the road" from Monday to Friday. So sadly, he was only a shadowy figure in my early life.

Nevertheless, despite his absences, as soon as the settling-in process was over, my Mother and I began to make friends with our new neighbours.

Our "Pre-Fab" was one of four, created on a bomb-site in the middle of a row of terraced houses. And if I remember rightly, the weekly rent cost £1.1d!

These single- storey detached dwellings were built of steel and had a living room with an open fireplace, two bedrooms, a bathroom, separate toilet and a 1940's style fitted kitchen. There was a copper for washing clothes, a stove, a sink, a modern fridge and a small table which folded up into the wall.

Each unit stood in its own small garden, where many families grew their vegetables. A couple of our neighbours kept chickens, so we were lucky enough to be given a fresh egg or two. I have happy memories of feeding the birds with chicken mash, from our potato peelings, and I was enchanted when the family next door, brought back several day-old chickens, which took up residence in their garden! When my Father was home at weekends he planted runner beans and tomatoes. To this day I still love the smell of tomato plants.

Although these dwellings were only intended as a temporary solution to the housing shortage, in reality they soon became a permanent feature of the post-war landscape.

And I have recently been told — I now live in America — a few of these "Pre-Fabs" are still standing today!

Back then, we had little in the way of toys, but I never felt deprived in anyway. I remember making dolls from sticks collected from the garden and dressing them in old bits of material and I made a dolls house out of the privet hedge!

But I think one of my most vivid recollections of the war and its immediate aftermath, were mostly about food or the lack of it! I remember clearly queuing up with my Mother in nearby Clapham Junction to renew our Ration Books — RB1 for adults and RB6 for children under 6 — and walking quite a distance to exchange our sugar rations for the few sweets, then available to us.

I can still remember the taste of Winter Mixture and Aniseed Twist! And of course the simulated orange juice and later the organic rosehips — which country women volunteered to harvest — to make into bottled syrup to boost our vitamin C intake. Then there was the never- to- be- forgotten taste of malt and cod liver oil, which our Mother's dutifully tried to spoon into us!

But perhaps my most vivid wartime recollection of all — were the Bomb Sites. Blanketed with brambles and clumps of pink willow herb, we peered down the gaping craters, littered with crumbling bricks, pipes and planks and wondered about the houses which had once stood there and the families who had lived in them.

And for many children of my generation, these ruins became our personal playgrounds. Of course we all knew that they did not really belong to us, but in our childish fantasies we liked to think that they did!

In my mind's eye, I can see them still and oh, there were so very, very many of them.