CROSSING THE THAMES

My first little sister Sandie

One fateful day Mum and Audrey had an argument; there were about three such arguments during their life-long friendship. As always, I didn’t know what it was about, but it culminated in Audrey going off in a huff to live somewhere else in South London, and us packing our belongings and moving, once more, this time to North London.
Oakfield Road, Stroud Green, wasn’t really ready for us. The road was very long and tree lined, filled with large, Victorian houses that had seen aristocratic days. Mostly elderly, retired, business people now inhabited the houses, and there were few children to be seen.
How well I remember the day we moved in. It was a hot summery day in 1942 and our house was right on top of the hill. We looked along the length of the road and it seemed so quiet and peaceful. The hot sun shone through the green leaves and, as we walked up from the bottom of the hill, we crossed over a railway bridge and heard a train puffing along. This was nothing like the noisy, dusty, treeless street we’d just left behind and I felt that this would be a good place to live. I was almost eleven years old.
The reason that we’d come to North London was because of my mother’s widowed Aunt Minnie. She had rented this rambling old Victorian house and lived there with her three single daughters and an infant son, a war widowed daughter (Ruby) and her son Peter, and her married daughter Gwen. Minnie’s small son Wally was about two years old, next eldest was Rita, who was the same age as me. After Rita came Sylvia who had just left school, Edna who was about sixteen, and Ruby. Aunty Minnie said that, provided we were all prepared to’ muck in together’, we were very welcome to stay.
I enrolled in the top class of the local junior school and, and Douglas went into the infant school which was in the same building. Billy was still only about two years old, and Sandie was soon to come upon the scene.
All the children slept in the large back bedroom, the boys in one bed, and all the girls in another. There was lots of fun to be had reading under he bedclothes, playing jokes on each other and frightening the more timid members of the family with ghost stories.
On one occasion, a very elaborate midnight feats was planned. Sandwiches, biscuits and cake were saved from our meal times and surreptitiously hidden. We older ones ‘borrowed’ things from the larder to embellish our feast. We weren’t really hungry but it was very exciting and seemed like a daring thing to do, I was at the time heavily into ‘The Girls Crystal’ and boarding school stories, so it was probably all my idea!
After a short period of time, Mum and Dad and their growing family (which now included my first new baby sister Sandie) moved into the flat upstairs.
Then the raids started again. Now Germany had invented a new type of bomb: the buzz bomb or doodlebug. These bombs were, in effect, pilot-less aeroplanes, self-powered by petrol and compressed air. They were steered by gyroscope and designed to stall when they ran out of fuel, exploding on impact. The buzz bombs often fell in the daytime, and on busy streets. The sound of them droning overhead was very scary, to say the least. When the engine cut out, and the deathly silence followed, I was really terrified. I though my heart would stop beating and held my breath until the big bang told me that this time, we weren’t all going to be blown up.
In the daytime when the warning sounded, we all rushed down into the cellar and sat on the stairs, huddling together. The very young children didn’t really know what was going on, so they were quite happy with events. Mummy tried to be brave for the sakes of all the children, but I was old enough to know the danger that we were all in, and not old enough to put on a brave face. I would occasionally whimper or say Mummy’s name over and over again, but the way that Auntie Minnie behaved was almost as frightening as the air raids themselves.
She would sit on the lower cellar steps, with her arms clasped around her knees, her feet jumping up and down making a noise on the stone floor like machine guns firing. Crying over and over again, Oh, God! Oh, God! She looked like someone about to go into a seizure, and it frightened me a great deal. More than sixty years on, the memory of buzz bombs and Aunty Minnie still go hand-in-hand.