Mum's 90th Birthday

With the kids

Mum on her wedding day, 1946.

My mother turned 90 on October 13^th.  What a milestone!  I hope she has shared the gene for her good health and longevity with as many of us as possible!  We all flew up to spend the day in Gosford with her, and did lunch and birthday cake and stuff.  Much of what we did, of course, was talk…and Steve had sensibly organised to buy a new mini video camera (do they still call them video cameras, or are they DVD cameras now???). Anyway, we took heaps of footage of Mum talking about her life. For Irralee, Bryn, Merrin and Matt,  it provided many insights into the distant past that their grandmother inhabited; for Steve, it was a marvellous reminder of the bravery and struggles of our parents’ generation; for me, it was a trip down memory-lane as I relived the stories that have shaped my view of the world.

Mum grew up in London, youngest daughter of a butcher. Her tales of life in the butcher’s shop reveal a way of living long past: Her father, making his own black puddings, with his arms plunged to the elbows in a vat of warm ox blood; the preparation and cooking of ‘faggots’ and ‘pease pudding’ which were highly sought after on set days of the week; the big gas jets hidden under the wooden counter that were revealed at the end of the day to cook the dinners for the customers, who also brought their Sunday roasting pans, ready with the vegetables, to go in the big ovens. Amazing to think of homes without adequate cooking facilities!

And the war!  Mum’s tales of life in London during the Blitz are riveting. Her dressmaking apprenticeship set aside, she worked as an engineer making bombs for much of the war. Somewhere in there was a stint in which she was employed to sew snow-suits for the Russians. 

Mum told of life with the routine of nightly air-raid sirens as darkness fell, and the rush to the air-raid shelter in the garden where the family slept each night. One night my mother was a little late home from work, and entered the house to find the family ready and waiting to go down to the shelter. “Come on”, said my grandmother, “just leave your coat and let’s get down to the shelter, quick!”  My aunt Hilda was the last into the shelter, and as she attempted to pull the wooden door closed after her, it was ripped out of her hand by the force of a bomb blast making a direct hit on the family home. Everything gone. My mother has always regretted the loss of the family photos. Her father had died of TB before the war, and all she has to this day is one photograph of him as a young man. The part of this particular story that touched me most as a young child was the fate of the family dog, a Pekinese called Wendy Fou.  Wendy Fou always refused to go down to the shelter, preferring to hide under the legs of the kitchen stove whenever the bombs started to fall. Miraculously she survived the bomb hit: the stove was one of the few items left standing. Sadly, though, she did not survive emotionally. Thereafter, she trembled uncontrollably every night as soon as the sirens started. She could even hear the bombers approaching well before the sirens, so good was her hearing and so great was her fear. Of course, she had to be put down…

And the morning my mother encountered one of the first ‘buzz bombs’ in London: she was returning home after a night shift at the bomb factory – the only passenger on the early bus. Glancing out her window, she saw a fiery missile flying parallel with the bus. The conductor saw it too, and spent the next few minutes desperately trying to gain the driver’s attention in his cabin. Finally he succeeded, and the bus pulled over. Not far away, the buzz bomb wreaked its destruction.

There was also the tale of the hundreds of people who died at the end of my mother’s street, an area now called Bamford Hill. The basement of a block of shops was being used as an air-raid shelter, and while the shops had received a direct hit, the authorities believed the people to be quite safe due to the minimal damage to the upper stories, and so did not act immediately to rescue them. Sadly, the bomb had damaged the gas and water mains, and so the people succumbed to the gas and the rising water.  Local folklore told the tale of a well-known singer who was trapped there. With his child held high on his shoulders, he sang to calm the people until the water covered him and he could sing no more. The basement was later sealed up as a mausoleum; it was impossible to get the people out. The site is now a memorial gardens to the many hundreds who died there.

Through all the horrors, however, life went on. My mother’s humour remained intact, and we heard of the ‘parcel’ that my father sent her from Algiers where he was stationed as an air force radio operator.  All that my mother received from British Post was a piece of wooden box on which her name and address were written. It seemed that the ship had been sunk, and the addressed piece of wood salvaged from the wreckage. British Post always delivers!  Mum wrote to Dad to ask him what the parcel had been, and ages later received the information that it had been a box of lemons. During war time rationing, such a gift would have been greatly prized!

There were many other stories too: I saw Bryn’s eyes widen in amazement as Mum told of the house they lived in after their’s was bombed, and the uncle who haunted it. It seemed that he used to enter the bedroom each morning and sit in a wicker chair beside the bed for a while, before getting up and going out the door again! I always loved this story when I was a child, and Mum used to tell it with all the embellishments!  And my mother’s foray into the Jewish quarter to buy fabric for her wedding dress after the war ended…Rationing was still in force, and Mum did not have nearly enough coupons for fabric of any sort. Fortunately my grandmother was Jewish, although this was something she did not admit to during the war, for obvious reasons. My grandmother took Mum to the Jewish markets, and although Mum had no coupons, one look at my grandmother’s appearance was enough to have the market people offering Mum whatever she wished, no coupons required!

These are some of our family stories, the stories that define who we are, where we come from. But they are also stories to share, as they have much to teach us all about good times and bad.  Growing up in the post-war boom, I am fortunate to have no stories of hardship and struggle to pass on to future generations. May it remain so for our children too!

I hope that Mum enjoyed her 90^th birthday as much as we did!