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Growing up in the 1940s

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Berwick Coates


I don't remember the 1930s much.  The 1930s to me, looking back, were summers, quiet streets, games in the garden, men wearing baggy grey trousers, green fourpenny bus tickets (which could take you for miles), Brunswick gramophone records, and picnics with cucumber sandwiches.

I quite enjoyed most of that.  I quite enjoyed my first primary school too.  So far so good.

I even enjoyed the outbreak of war, because they came to build some air raid shelters in the playground; that meant extending the summer holidays by another three weeks.  That was fine by me.

Then it began to get a mite difficult.  For a start, my father joined the Army, although as a married man in his thirties – with a family – he was not obliged to.  So my mother was on her own.

Then there was the small matter of the Blitz.  Each morning my mother sent me off to school, not knowing whether a maverick German bomber would be coming over on his way back home, anxious to jettison his bombs to make the plane lighter.  At night, for several months, we trooped down to the air raid shelter in the garden.  I don't remember being frightened, but then we were not bombed out.  Our side made much more noise than the German bombs, because the anti-aircraft guns on the local common kicked up such a racket.

What interested me was the collection I was able to make of jagged bits of shrapnel lying in the gutters after the air raids.  My prize piece was a complete bomb cap.  I kept it all in a shoe box in my mother`s wardrobe, until she got fed up with all the rust and threw it out.

Nevertheless, the Blitz was having an effect.  Kids started leaving my school, until, out of a class of thirty, numbers were down to ten.  It was then that my mother decided that I would have to go too.  I fetched up in North Devon.

Ask any survivor of evacuation about arriving in his new ‘home’, and you will be told not about the things that were there, but about the things that were not there.

What did you not have?  No Mum, no Dad, no brothers or sisters (families were often broken up).  No relations, no school friends, no neighbours.  No garden, no shed, no pets, no den, no secret places.  Nothing.   You arrived with what you carried round inside yourself.

I was unhappy.  My mother took me away, and I went somewhere else, admittedly better.  I came home in the middle of the war.  By the time I was eight, I had been to five different primary schools.

My salvation was the eleven plus, a place in a grammar school.  My life opened up.  I could cope with the rest of the 1940s – austerity, continued rationing, bomb damage, and my parents separating.  Thanks to grammar school (and an exceptional mother), I was on my way.


Starkeye & Co


Berwick Coates is the author of Starkeye & Co and attended Kingston Grammar School and read History at Cambridge. Since then he has been an army officer, author, artist, lecturer, careers adviser, games coach, and teacher of History, English, Latin and Swahili.  He has also published two historical novels (The Last Conquest and The Last Viking, both with Simon and Schuster), and nine other works of non-fiction.


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