For the Duration: A Lighthearted WAAF Memoir

11. And OUT!: 1945-1946

158 11.And OUT! 1945–1946 Meanwhile the members of my own family were scattered over various parts of the country, not to mention sister Helen still in America . Godden Green, the big family home in Kent, which had been commandeered by the Army on my father’s death in 1942, had not yet been derequisitioned. My mother had at first been staying nearby, and then living with my elder sister, Mary, in Marlborough to help when her second child [Francis] was born. They had at once been asked to “find other accommodation ,” for many people forced to let their spare rooms drew the line at children. Mary’s third child [Richard] was due in January 1945, and warning noises were already being made by their current landlady about not being able to keep the family after the event, which as it happened was pretty traumatic. It was a bitter January in many parts of the country, and Marlborough was under deep snow. The hospital was some distance from where they were living, and there was no available ambulance service. When Mary’s time came, her husband, Ted, who had arrived on compassionate leave from Yatesbury, went next door to phone for the member of the Women’s Volunteer Service who was supposed to be ferrying them to the hospital, only to find that the system had broken down and no one was available. In the end, the two of them had to walk in the dark in deep snow to the hospital in Savernake Forest, Mary already in labour. They came to no harm, however, and both mother and baby Richard were soon reported to be “doing well.” To start with, at least. But nobody realised that the fouryear -old Olivia had contracted measles at her play group, and before it was diagnosed she and the one-year-old Francis were brought to visit the new baby brother in hospital and the whole family came down with the And OUT! 1945–1946 | 159 disease as soon as mother and child came home. This was the signal for the landlady to give them notice to quit. The Charity Commission, for which Ted worked before he was called up, had been evacuated to Morecambe in 1939. It had stayed there throughout the war, and there was a distinct possibility that, come the peace, it might remain there. Mary was still in touch with the wives of some of Ted’s colleagues, and they wrote that houses up there were going cheap. So a decision was taken, and before things became impossible in Marlborough my mother found and bought a small house in Hest Bank, midway between Morecambe and Lancaster. She, Mary, and the three children moved there in the spring of 1945, and Ted got a commission as a Met Officer around that time. He was soon posted to one of the East Anglian airfields and was able to snatch the odd forty-eight hours to visit his family. Horst, with his Pioneer Corps detachment, had been moved from the Forest of Dean and, in spite of their status as noncombatants, which precluded their being used in any proximity to military action, had been sent to France in the wake of the Second Front. Their duties were connected with the War Graves Commission,1 and they were supposedly unarmed, though they were issued rifles, and if by bad luck they had come into direct contact with the German army they wouldn’t have stood much of a chance. Indeed on one occasion Horst almost came to grief. He had been doing some sketching of the Normandy scenery, his rifle propped beside him, and had not noticed that he had been left behind by his platoon, when suddenly he found himself caught up in the platoon’s action. He made an undignified bolt for it, his precious water-colour paint box in one hand, his nearly forgotten and incriminating .303 in the other. Meanwhile, my sister Prue and five-year-old Conrad moved back to London, where Prue found them a room. Unfortunately Prue and Horst’s enforced separation led, the following year, to the breakdown of their marriage . This happened in many unions where one or other of the partners simply could not withstand the double pressure of coping alone while 1. A private commission that registered the names of those lost and buried in France. 160 | From the...