Post War Developments

The war ended in 1945 and Dad was demobbed.  Mum and I must have already moved back to our own house in Russell Road by then, as I do recall the VE celebration party in our street.  Tables were brought out or improvised and covered in white cloths, some bunting or streamers were tied to lampposts and everyone contributed food, although we still had quite severe rationing of basics like butter, sugar and flour, but we were all used to eking out in those days and many people grew food in their gardens or on allotments.
I was seven years old and had a little baby sister.  This was a great novelty, and Mum let me push the pram down the road to the shops.  ‘Be careful now’ she’d say. The first time she let me do this, (maybe the only time) I left the pram outside one shop where I had to buy something, then crossed the road to another shop for something else, and preoccupied by my own thoughts, strolled home without the pram!  I don’t remember whether I actually got home without Diane, or realised what I’d forgotten half-way there and rushed back in a panic to push her pram back up the hill.

By then I was getting into serious reading.  Books may have been an easy option for Xmas and Birthday presents but I had no complaints on that score. Among favourites I’ve managed to keep from my childhood; a wartime publication of Peter Pan on low grade paper, with tinted monochrome illustrations by Mabel Lucie Atwell, a Golden Treasury of Stories, an album of the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, beautifully illustrated by Edmund Dulac, and my favourite; Little Grey men by the naturalist BB. I was given an eight volume set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedias for my 7th birthday, which I proceeded to devour, especially sections on history and mythology, which have fascinated me ever since.  I only parted with them reluctantly in recent years, and now frequently see identical sets in car boot sales as others of my age decide to unload their old possessions.
These particular memories of the war years were most exciting to an innocent who didn’t know any better, but thought war was as heroic as tales of Paris and Achilles, the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, Crusaders and Saracens, Raleigh and Nelson as portrayed in story books.

I’ve mentioned the RAF Airfields where Dad was stationed and where we stayed close by, but he was stationed at other places as well, such as RAF Kinloss, right next to the New Age community of Findhorn that sprang up after the war.
Dad came home from the war and resumed his work as a clerk at Hamilton Woods Foundry in Salford, entering figures in ledgers in much the same copperplate handwriting as did Bob Cratchett in 'Scrooge’.  Working hours were still almost Dickensian so along with most men, he would go to work early in the morning and come home in the evening, with the result that I didn’t see much of him at all during the week.
It seemed to me that he was now a different man to the happy Dad I remembered.  He would shout if I didn’t get things right, especially if he was ‘helping’ me with arithmetic homework, which I found hard to grasp, and this probably compounded my fear of numbers.  Whenever he shouted for any reason, I would ‘freeze up’ and try to be inconspicuous.
I believe his experiences in the war had sapped the joy out of life and soured his feelings.  He actually had little or no combat duty, and as far as I know he never took part in a bombing raid over occupied France or Germany. It may have been the realisation on returning home that so many of his friends and contemporaries had not returned and that by some quirk of fate he’d escaped going down with his two aircrews, that somehow gave him a guilt complex that often came out in frustrated anger.
After the war nothing was the same, as people began to get back to normal life.  The war had been dangerous, exciting and terrifying.  The nervous energy that had seemed to motivate the whole country now fizzled out in the mundane toil of everyday living, with food rationing to go on for a few more years as the country struggled to recover.  Bomb sites were cleared, but left gaping wounds in the city centres.  In Manchester I saw dirty children in ragged clothes, barefoot in the streets and everything seemed grey and dusty.
Our family were the lucky ones.  We had no casualties and everyone was in work.  We had a roof over our heads and didn’t go hungry.  Mum settled down to being wife and mother again in her own home and I was back at Lancaster Road School.  But there was an unsettled feeling that this wasn’t good enough.  Maybe people wanted to feel better for all the hardships they’d been through and were fed up with the post-war austerities.

In 1947, when I was nine and Diane still two, we left Salford and moved to Southport. This was another great adventure, as my parents took over a large detached Guest house at the beginning of the season and the tenor of our lives changed yet again. My mother enthusiastically launched herself into the role of chief cook, laundress and housekeeper without realising quite what she was taking on.

For the moment my traveling days were over, but during the angst of my teenage years I would wander the sand-hills of the coast imagining the clouds were the tops of mountains, and on clear days would notice on the far horizon the hills of North Wales, though I didn't realise this at the time and had no idea that I would make my home there so much later.