'Nanny'

         From the time Eileen and little Jean came home to Frensham that baby became my special one – she was my pet, then and still.  When Allan came home on his occasional leave and took Eileen off for a few days in Portsmouth, or when they would go down to the pub, Jean and I would spend wonderful times together.  When Jean’s sister Mary Florence was born a little over a year since Jean’s birth, we grew even closer. 

         Two babies in the household, along with the continual worry over the war and rationing and never knowing when my husband would make one of his rare appearances made me feel more and more nervous.  Len was running around the village with his wild friends getting up to mischief at all hours, and more than once brought home by a home guard warden with orders to keep him out of trouble. Too often, it seemed, Eileen and Pete asked me to take care of the babies when he was on leave.   Finally, worn down by sleepless nights I went to see my doctor.  He told me it was because I wasn’t getting my monthlies any more, and I needed a few weeks of rest and quiet. 

         Where was I to find a few weeks of rest and quiet?  “I’ll take the girls and go visit Aunt Emily and Uncle William in Portsmouth for a while,” she told me.  It was a good solution.  They had lots of room in their house, and it would make it easier for Allan to visit her. 

         For two weeks I stayed in my dark house, taking the medicine the doctor had recommended and trying to ignore Len’s comings and goings.  I kept my handbag with he so he couldn’t filch what little money I had, and stayed in my bedroom as much as possible.  No sooner had I started to feel better when Eileen and the girls returned.  A bomb had destroyed the houses just across the street, and Eileen wanted to get back to my safe house.

         Mary had just started to walk when Eileen announced she was in the family way again.  By then Len was old enough to go out on his own and help with the war effort, so we had a little more room to put the babies.  Little Allan made Eileen very happy, to have a boy at last.  She admitted to being a little disappointed Mary had not been a boy.  I had been please Mary’s second name was Florence, but I never felt as close to her as I did to little Jean, who was my shadow.

         Despite the stresses of having Eileen’s family living with me, and despite the hardships of wartime, they were happy years for me.  Despite rationing, birthdays and Christmas holidays were special, times to look forward to and celebrate.  I had given little thought to the end of the war, and what would happen to the children.  Would they stay with me, in our little English village, or go to far away Canada?

The War-Weary Years, con't

As time went on life got harder.  We were strictly rationed as to our food, and on the ‘kitchen front’, as it was called, the shortages continued long after the war ended.  Access to sugar, eggs, cheese, margarine, tea, sweets, bread and all kinds of meat were controlled by ration books, which had to be presented before we were allowed to buy groceries of any kind.  New clothing, let alone cloth to make it, was almost unheard of until after the war.  We collected scrap metal of all kinds, glass bottles and rubber products to donate to the war effort.  Every window had to have blackout curtains, and the Home Guard wardens patrolled at night to make sure not a crack of light showed.   We were encouraged to build air-raid shelters in our gardens.  The precious space left over was devoted to growing as many vegetables as possible.  Fruit trees became even more important to harvest, for without them a supply of fresh fruit would be nonexistent.  We couldn’t go anywhere without our gas masks.  And always we listened to the wireless, in desperate need of the war news as well as encouraging messages from the prime minister.  ‘Steadfastness and Resolution’ was the motto we lived by in those years. 

         

The War-Weary Years

         By 1941 Eileen was expecting her first baby, and in Frensham we had first-row seating to watch the results of the bombings of London lighting the night sky.  We were near enough London to see the fires, but we hoped far enough away to avoid being a target of the Luftwaffe. 

         The worst time was one night in May, when over a thousand Londoners wee killed.  They said four hundred bombers crossed the channel, guided by a full moon.   The houses of Parliament were made unusable, so badly were they hit.  Waterloo Station was destroyed, as well as the Bow Church.  The British Museum lost almost a quarter of a million books.  Two thousand fires were started that night, and many of them continued burning through the next day.  On that night six firemen died and almost three hundred were injured.  London was bruised and battered.

         Prime Minister Churchill gave a wonderful speech over the wireless, and I remember some of it.  He said Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.  He said we must brace ourselves to our duties and bear ourselves so that if the British Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say that ‘This was their finest hour.’

         In late August Eileen went to Farnham to have her baby in the nursing home.  She and her new daughter stayed  there for two weeks.  That was normal in those days.  Not only that, the new mothers were given a pint of Guiness every night to help their milk production.  I was only able to make the trip to visit her once, and was only allowed to stay one hour, although the new fathers were allowed two.  Allan was away on a training exercise, but I learned they had agreed to name their daughter Eileen Jean.

         As I travelled home on the bus I couldn’t help but wonder what my granddaughter’s future would be like – I had no doubt we would defeat Hitler, but at what cost?

War and Weddings

         By the time Britain declared war on Nazi Germany on September 3, 1939, it was taken for granted all the countries of the Commonwealth would also declare war, and so it was.  Before the end of the year there were hundreds of young Canadians training in facilities near Frensham, and we saw many of them roaming our town during their leisure time.  It seemed natural our young women would be attracted to these soldiers from so far away, and my Eileen was no exception.

         She had been working for several years, and by the time war came along she was also serving as a volunteer in one of the Canadian canteens near Aldershot, on the weekends.   I wasn’t surprised when she announced she had met someone and was going to spend some time keeping him company, since he was lonely, like most of them.  When she brought him home after a few outings I could tell she was in love, and he seemed to be as well. 

I learned it was just he and his mother at home in Montreal, and that she had emigrated from Scotland at the beginning of the century.  Young Len took an instant dislike to Allan.  He went about shouting what all our young English men were saying.  “Them Canadians – over paid, over sexed, and bloody over here!”

            Meanwhile, by 1940 the war began to get serious.  After conquering Begium, Holland, Denmark and France, Hitler turned his attention on us in Britain. Although over three million people (mostly children and their caregivers) had been evacuated from the London area, it still seemed the Lutwaffe wanted everyone in the big cities dead.  Our ponds, Big Pond and Little Pond, were drained, since their reflection pointed the way directly to London. 

         My attention was only half on the war though, for at the end of June my Eileen married her Allan in a quiet wedding, in the church where she had been christened.  I had many private misgivings, but I was young enough to remember how the urgency of wartime makes young couples seize the day, for who know how long they have.  I did not tell Eileen what to expect, for in those days one didn’t, but nevertheless she glowed with happiness as she sent her husband back to war after their weekend honeymoon spent in her upstairs bedroom.  Then we settled in to deal with the war.

Darkening Days

         The years leading up to World War II were not all dark, I must say – my neighbours often gathered in Dougie Dadson’s shop and listened to the wireless news on the BBC.  We heard all about the doings of the Prince of Wales as he was sent around the Empire to show the flag.  He was very popular and handsome, so different from his parents, the dignified, unsmiling king and queen.  We also heard news of the Duke and Duchess of York, who also toured for the crown.  In the Illustrated London News photos the duke was a shy-looking pale reflection of his prince charming brother, but his beautiful and poised wife and little daughters made them a happy looking foursome. 

         I will never forget how shocked we were when the King abdicated so soon after his father died.   That was when we learned how he wanted to marry an American divorcee.  It seemed like such a desertion of his country then, and still does, I suppose.  However, we would not have had the bravery of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to lead us through the war, nor the experience of having their daughter as our Queen.

         I don’t believe anyone in our county made such use of the newspapers as the people in our lane did.  We waited for the day-old paper brought home by Mrs. Ames, who charred for the town council offices, then passed it down the line.  I always asked for it last, so I could use it to line my canary’s cage after reading.  (“Dickie” was given to me by Len in a burst of generosity when we were first married, and since then I have always had a canary with me, for company.)

         The newspaper became my way of finding out what was happening in the world.  The Spanish Civil War was just the start.  Once Hitler had begun his occupations and annexing of this and that it began to become clear it wasn’t going to be easy to stop him and his Nazis.  Looking back at it all though, I think we were not told very much about what went on behind the headlines – the frustrated negotiations by various politicians were things we only had vague notions of in our little village.  I began to worry about my boy, wayward though he was.  He was just becoming old enough to go to war.  I should have worried about my daughter instead!

The next few years were hard but we managed.  I grew most of our food, made most of our clothes, and the precious money I made from sewing kept us in shoes and other necessities.  My parents took the children with them to Southsea every summer for holidays, and they came back brown and happy from their seaside trips.  I never told them about Len’s infidelities, only that he was working in London and came home when he could.

         Leonard did come home every once in a while, to see Eileen and little Len.  One year he won the award for his sales, and sent home a huge hamper, just in time for Christmas.  We feasted on ham, fruit, cheese and a huge goose that year, and had our neighbours in for a festive dinner.  My husband was not with us, and although nobody mentioned his absence, the children especially made it clear they missed their Dad.

         As Len got older he became a handful.  Perhaps if he had a normal home life he would have turned out differently, but by the time he was ten he started missing school and hanging around with some wild older boys.  They nicked sweets and cigarettes from the shops, got into fights and threw rocks at windows. 

         Eileen, bless her heart, was my angel.  She kept me company, cleaned the cottage for me when I was busy sewing, and tried to set an example to her brother, although he never listened to her.  When she was fourteen she left school to go into service for one of the families who had a villa outside of Farnham. When she was done for the day she would bicycle home, and I would walk down the lane to meet her.  She only ever kept a few shillings for herself, and I must say her salary helped us out tremendously.  Sometimes she would come home with a handful of flowers for me that she bought at a stand on her way home.  She knew I loved growing beautiful flowers but hated picking them, only to watch them die. 

         The years went by, quietly in our village, but in Britain and Europe things were changing, and not for the better.  In fact, the skies were becoming very dark indeed.

On My Own

         I don’t know how many times I was told in confidence by one seeming friend after another about Len’s affairs with local women, but always he would deny and then admit his so-called weakness.  He would beg forgiveness and swear he loved only me and the children, and I would forgive him, fool that I was.  We would be fine for a few months, then it would start again.  Finally one night he didn’t come home, and a note was placed in the mailbox.  Gone to London to seek work, he said, having got the sack as Commons Keeper.  Later I found out the husband of one of his lady friends had discovered the pair together and threatened to kill Len, after going to the Town Council to insist he be fired.

         The children and I were left with no means of support, and so I put it about that I was once more in the seamstress business.  At first a few friends came to me out of pity, but soon I developed a reputation for skilled work of excellent quality.  It was enough to keep us.

         Eventually I received a letter from Len, full of remorse, but containing some money.  He was working as a Hoover salesman in London, and he would send us money as he could.  He wasn’t all bad, but he was weak,