War Left-overs

When we were born in 1957, the Today50 Generation arrived on the scene only 12 years from the end of WWII (and to put it in context, the Falklands War was 25 years ago). Peacetime conscription to National Service was still running until 1960. The end of all rationing did not happen until 1954. Small wonder then that there were still strong influences from the war-time years. My parents had lived through some pretty severe privations, and frugality became a habit. They were careful never to waste anything: my mother had a tin in our walk-in pantry, with rubber bands stored around it, plastic bags in it and carefully folded paper bags underneath. String was re-used, and wrapping paper usually salvaged. My father's workshop had boxes and jars of rusty nails and screws, extracted and straightened so they could be used again. They could easily have afforded new, it was just habit.

Our house had real leaded windows, which meant small individual panes were joined with lead strips. This gave the window a degree of flexibility. In the 1940's a V1 flying bomb had missed London and landed near the village with a massive explosion. The rush of air into the space created by the blast is actually stronger at a distance than the blast itself, which meant our windows all bowed outwards slightly. When we went to Chelmsford shopping, we did not need to look for a car park. There were plenty of vacant lots as a result of the bombing, which had been flattened and left ready for re-building. We just casually referred to these spaces as bomb sites.

The old village school had a large concrete air-raid shelter in the yard. One day a crane came with a huge steel ball to demolish it. We all went to watch but it took them hours just to make a few dents. There was a lot of work still going on to remove wartime structures and rebuild damaged buildings.

There had been plenty of aerial dog-fights over Essex, and when 'planes fire guns, the spent cartridge cases fall to the ground. These could often be found buried in the earth, I still have a few of various sizes.