In my recent ramble ‘A well-travelled wartime child’ I wrote about my sister Rhondda during WW2. I have recently helped her record her memoirs and am in the process of typing it out for her to check.
Rhondda was born in March 1942 which, if my calculations are correct, makes her 82 years old. Unfortunately, she can’t get out much now, and can’t get out at all without the help of her son, Steven. Steven also cares for his dad John. Luckily, he’s lived with his parents for the past 15 to 20 years and is readily available to care for Rhondda and John, but it is now a 24-hour job with little in the way of respite.
If I knew how to go about it, I would propose Steven for some sort of hero recognition. He is a star and if it wasn’t for his very relaxed and laid-back attitude, I’m sure he would have torn his hair out years ago.
The extracts that follow are some of Rhondda’s memories about the start of her life as a wartime child.
Rhondda recounts her wartime birth
I was born at tea time, 5pm on Sunday 8 March 1942, at Princess Royal Maternity Hospital in Huddersfield, weighing 7lbs 4 oz. after a long labour. Mum was allowed to have me free of charge in hospital because Dad was serving in the Royal Navy at the time. Mum told me that Dad had made her pregnant so she would be a good girl whilst he was travelling around the world on merchant ships. Of course there was another reason: men going to war didn’t know if they were coming back and wanted to leave behind a legacy.
Dad was in London at the time of my birth, though he could have been anywhere in the world. He was given compassionate leave and was the first person in the family to see me, which was amazing considering how far away he could have been. It was he who registered me at Mary Freeman solicitors in Slaithwaite, and it was he who named me Rhondda with a double D, and he never let on where he got the name from.
He was stationed in Wales for a time, and it was one of the places that Mum took me during the war. Even though it was assumed within the family that Dad had carried out some of his training somewhere near the Rhondda Valley, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case. He was stationed at HMS Glendower near Pwllheli, North Wales, which is nowhere near the Rhondda Valley. So the mystery continues. Incidentally, HMS Glendower became Butlin’s Pwllheli after the war.
A narrow escape on a mystery bike
We lived with Aunty Eva McInnes (Mum’s sister) at Westwood for a while, so the sisters could keep each other company immediately after both husbands, my dad and uncle Mac, had been called up. Mum then managed to find a house up Scape (Scapegoat Hill), where we were very happy and the neighbours were very good to us.
One day a young girl from along the road managed to push me out into the middle of High Street on my little tin Tri-ang three-wheeler and left me there just before the bus arrived. The driver had to get out and push me to the side before he could continue. I have no idea where that Tri-ang three-wheeler came from – it just seemed to appear one day.
The house on Scapegoat Hill
The house had a cellar and one room downstairs with a gas oven by the cellar door opposite the window, just by the door to the upstairs. There was a big mangle and a sink with cold water where washing was done. We had a set-pot with a gas burner and a flexible rubber hose for boiling the water. Near the mangle was a dolly tub or pos tub, which had a long wooden handle with a silver (galvanised) thing at the end that we pushed and twisted the clothes around then put them through the mangle. A sink with one cold tap, a set-pot, a mangle and dolly tub at the rear of the living room was our washing area.
In the living room was the gas cooker and, like everybody else we knew, we had an open coal fire in the sitting room in front of which we had our Friday night baths in the tin bath. There was also a fireplace upstairs that was never lit. There were two 15 amp, round pin electric sockets in the house, one downstairs and one up. The downstairs one was used for the radio.
A vacuum cleaner was a rare commodity. Most of the floor coverings were rugs, often rag-rugs made by Mum, that were periodically taken outside and hung over the clothes line and beaten with a stick to within an inch of their lives. Lino (Linoleum) was also a popular floor covering that could be washed at the same time as the front doorstep was made sparkling again with the use of a ruddle stone.
There was an upstairs landing bedroom and two front bedrooms. The toilets were in a row up the side of our house. They were proper flush toilets but the paper was cut up newspaper hung on a string. At night we used a potty (chamber pot) named a gazunder as it went under the bed.
School days and a naughty friend
I kept wandering into the local school and eventually I was allowed to stay in the baby class, after which my parents were told I may as well come properly. There was a black stove fireplace in the classroom with a big fireguard around it. We had a nap every afternoon on bunk beds that had been placed around this stove, although I can’t remember it ever being lit. I can remember steam pipes along the wall, where our daily milk ration was placed to thaw out in winter.
I loved school and did well. Marcia Heather Haigh was a school mate who lived in the big house next to the Co-op with both parents and two aunts. The house had two staircases and a summer house. Marcia was spoilt rotten and was always misbehaving. Her mother often came to the school and was cross with the teachers for chastising Marcia.
Not much money for toys but you don’t miss what you’ve never had
We had discs of coloured cardboard or paper to learn to count but very little in the way of toys. Plasticine was a favourite, bought from the shop at the top of High Street, near the pub.
Across the road from our house next to the Liberal Club was a field where Dad kept hens. When we were old enough, we were allowed to play on the common ground just outside school, and there were depressions in the ground that we could use to make little houses.
Me not having toys worried Mum for years but I think it eased her mind when I said “We never missed what we didn’t have, cos we didn’t know any difference”. I was only jealous once when Marcia showed me their real Christmas tree with electric lights. We had an artificial tree that was made up of an upright stick with sticking out branches with green artificial foliage to represent a real tree. The baubles came from Grandma Norcliffe and metal candle holders were clipped to the ends of the branches with wax candles in them that we hoped didn’t set fire to everything when they were lit. When Christmas was over, the branches were folded back towards the central trunk and put away until next year.
Illness strikes – and the doctor braves a snowstorm
At the beginning of 1947 there was a terrible snowstorm and the snow at Scapegoat Hill was as high as the lamp posts. People had to dig their way out of their front doors, and coal and coke had to be dragged up by hand from Golcar.
This was the time I had measles and I was very poorly. Brown paper was placed around the lampshade because bright light wasn’t supposed to be good for ya for some reason. Doctor Hall – can you imagine the GPs today! – walked up through the snow from his Golcar surgery at least three times while I was ill. As I was getting better, Mrs Ivy Gledhill from the shop next door said that she knew what was good for me – a teaspoon of butter, apparently, which made me sick. I couldn’t stand butter until my son was born many years later.
Ways of getting around rationing (and acquiring a tricycle?)
Rationing dictated that lots of things were on coupons but this didn’t affect me much as I didn’t know any better, and anyway our landlord was a farmer and we got foodstuffs from him sometimes. Also, when Dad was back from the war on leave, he brought stuff back from America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere – tinned meat and tinned fruit, and there was also food that “fell off ships” when unloading that was smuggled out of ports.
Dad told me he once smuggled a bike out in bits under various sailors’ overcoats. This possibly explains where the three-wheeler Tri-ang tin tricycle came from.
