The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  We knew about Hitler. He had a funny moustache and only one ball and we sang that rude song about him. Adults and kids were forever pretending to be Hitler, putting one finger along their upper lip and goose-stepping in a funny walk, making everyone laugh. We didn’t know about the concentration camps. Probably would not have believed it, even if we had been told.

  The Queen has recently been revealed in a home movie, when young during the war, making a Nazi salute – we all did. It was satirical, a cheap laugh. We adored the royal family, they could do no wrong; all children were brought up to respect and honour them, always standing for the national anthem. Boys as well as girls knew all about the Little Princess, had seen photographs of the corgis and that wonderful doll’s house they had. We were given glossy books about them as presents, bought cheaply through the Daily Express, but gold bound, which was very rare in wartime, and we had to wash our hands when turning over the pages.

  We were not quite sure where London was, or what the Blitz actually meant, but we knew our royal family had stayed in Buckingham Palace and not fled to the country or abroad, and the Queen was always smiling and waving her hand when she visited bombsites.

  I was always very proud, and still am, that I have lived through four royal reigns. I tell my children and my grandchildren this, as of course they have only ever known one monarch. I only just caught George V – he died on 20 January 1936, just thirteen days after I was born. Then Edward VIII didn’t last long – he abdicated after just 326 days. That same year, on 11 December 1936, George VI took over. So that was three different kings in one year, not that I was paying much attention. George VI then had a good run, till his death in 1952, and our dear Queen Elizabeth II succeeded him – going on to have the longest reign of any British monarch, ever. And I have been there all the time.

  The moment the war started, all citizens, of all ranks, had to have blackout curtains on all the windows. Wardens would come round and knock at your door and tell you off if a crack of light was shining through. Despite not being within range of any bombers, even the odd one that might have got lost, most people had an air-raid shelter. In Carlisle we had a metal one under the dining table, a Morrison shelter, made of steel and incredibly heavy. It was very cramped and you were always banging your head getting into it and out again. The other sort was an Anderson, which you had in your garden, semi-dug into the ground, with a roof of curved corrugated iron, on top of which you would put soil which soon turned to grass. I longed for one of those. What a great camp it would have made, playing there with your chums. I suppose it was considered that neither Carlisle nor Dumfries would be in the front line, so there was no need to excavate the gardens. The Morrison shelter was much cheaper and quicker to install.

  At school we all got fitted with gas masks, which were hellish to wear. You could hardly breathe and they smelled awful. We had practice days in case of an emergency when we had to put them on and rush out into the playground. We would all stand around, giggling, making faces, then be counted and sent back in. Now and again we would be marched in a crocodile through the streets and taken into a large communal air-raid shelter. The smell of urine was disgusting. We all hated going there.

  The gas masks came in a strong cardboard box complete with string to help you carry them. Later, some of them had an extra filter added to make them safer – in case arsenic smoke bombs were dropped, so we were told. The extra filter made them too big for the original cardboard boxes, so we were given a tall blue cylindrical tin. We were told to carry some cotton wool to put in our ears and a piece of rubber to place between our teeth, if ever we had to use our gas masks. This was to avoid damage to our ears and swallowing our tongues if we were knocked unconscious.

  Water tanks appeared in streets, and many houses were given stirrup pumps, the idea being that if we were bombed and houses set on fire, we would try to put the flames out on our own. People donated saucepans, pots and kettles to the war effort and iron railings disappeared from the fronts of the smarter houses and public buildings, all to be used to make guns and aircraft, though I never quite understood how. Concrete blocks appeared on bridges to delay traffic. Out in the country, road signs vanished. That would fool the Nassies, if they ever landed in Carlisle or Dumfries, har har, they would be totally lost. Weather forecasts were banned, as we didn’t want the enemy to know whether it was going to be sunny or cloudy, another fiendish ruse to confuse them.

  A survey during the war revealed that the biggest grumble among adults was the blackout, which surprises me. I would have expected that rationing was the greatest bugbear for all parents. From my perspective, as a child, the biggest grumble was the rationing of sweets.

  Food rationing began in January 1940 and from then on each person was allowed only a small amount of sugar, butter, bacon, ham each week. Our government had had the ration books printed and ready as early as 1938, which was smart. Sweet rationing started in July 1942. Eventually almost everything was rationed, from clothes to furniture, paper to petrol. And many items remained rationed for years, long after the war had finished, into the 1950s, finally finishing in July 1954 when you didn’t need a ration book any more for any form of meat or food.

  Vegetables, of the sort grown in Britain, were never rationed, nor fish, but huge queues appeared whenever there was a smell of fresh fish. Strangely enough, bread was not rationed during the war – that started after the war, in 1946. All the wartime bread seemed to be grey and horrible.

  My whole childhood, from the age of four to eighteen, was therefore lived under rationing and I could not remember a non-rationing time. You lived by counting points, recognising As and Bs and Cs and the different coloured coupons. When I used to run messages as a nipper in Dumfries I had to take with me a pile of ration books, along with the money and shopping lists. From memory, E and D were sweet coupons.

  You did hear in the papers and on the radio about the black market, about spivs and wide boys with thin moustaches selling dodgy items from the inside pocket of their raincoats. I don’t remember seeing any of them in Carlisle or Dumfries, but they were joke figures, really, cartoon characters, all of them cockneys. So we believed.

  So many factories were turned over to munitions work that lots of items manufactured prewar were no longer produced, or were in very short supply – such as pianos, bikes, lawnmowers, cutlery, fountain pens. You could only get utility furniture, which was like a joke form of furniture, similar to utility sweets, made of cardboard and tasting much the same. Priority for utility furniture was given to newlyweds or those who had lost their homes through bomb damage.

  The thing about rationing was that it affected all of us, rich and poor, middle and lower class, north and south, and we all accepted it and abided by the rules. We didn’t, of course, actually know any middle-class people, but we accepted that they did not break the rules or practise any fiddles. After all, we were told that even the King and his family had a ration book. My mother constantly informed us that the King himself took his bath in only five inches of water. I’ve stuck to that till fairly recently, thinking what the hell, I’m old now.

  Wartime and post-war Christmases were pretty dire, with no turkeys and no sweets, no fruits or other goodies – not that our family missed Christmas all that much. Being Scottish, our big celebrations were held on New Year’s Eve, Hogmanay, when we went first-footing. Someone in the family with black hair, i.e. me, would take a piece of coal to the neighbours and be invited in for a drink of homemade ginger wine.

  We did have a stocking each, which we hung up, and in the foot of it there might be an apple and perhaps some utility sweets tasting of cardboard. We always looked forward to getting a proper present at Christmas from our so-called wealthy relations in Cambuslang, such as Aunt Jean, the teacher, but all she ever seemed to send us was vests. Ugh, who needs them? Perhaps Liberty bodices for my sisters.

  The big excitement was the arrival of a parcel from our Canadian relatives – which was not allowed to be opened till
Christmas Day. One year, when torn open, it was found to contain not sweets or comics as we’d hoped – but paper curtains. Paper curtains! No one had ever heard of them here and certainly didn’t know what to do with them. You can’t eat paper curtains.

  I was always longing to see a real warplane. We did not get any actual bombing but there were often stories of enemy bombers being shot down or crashing in some local wood, on the way to Liverpool or Glasgow to do real damage. One of our own planes, a Lancaster bomber, came down in the fells not far from Carlisle and all the locals rushed to see it. Miraculously, the pilot climbed out of it.

  All small boys knew about Spitfires and Hurricanes, could tell the difference, and rather revered the Messerschmitt, however deadly it might be. In the primary playgrounds, we would rush round pretending to be a Spitfire in a dogfight, arms out, bending sideways and backwards, giving a loud hum, and then a rat tat tat tat, imitating the sound of a real Spitfire, so we thought.

  At the entrance to my father’s workplace at 14 MU, they had an old Spitfire inside the front gates, on a plinth, set in a lawn, surrounded by large cobbles which had to be constantly painted bright white. I liked to think it proved my dad really was involved in war work not just pushing pencils.

  The biggest contribution towards the war by remote towns like Carlisle was taking in evacuees. Next door when we were in Deer Park Road arrived a family of cockneys whose accent I could not understand. We didn’t have any evacuees staying with us. We were already considered overcrowded, with four children, but of course hundreds of thousands of families did.

  It is often forgotten that more children – 827,000 – were evacuated at the beginning of the war than the whole of our armed forces serving abroad. ‘It is an exodus bigger than that of Moses,’ said Walter Elliot, the health minister. ‘It is the movement of ten armies, each of which is as big as the whole Expeditionary Force.’ And like the servicemen, the children did not know where they were going or when they would return.

  Most of the ones who came to Carlisle were from the Northeast. Out in the country, in rural Cumberland, they got a higher class of evacuee. In Keswick, many of them were billeted in the railway station – now gone – and in the handsome railway hotel next door. Roedean was one of the schools that moved to Keswick, from miles away on the Sussex coast. When a whole school arrived in a new place, they often had to share premises with the existing schoolchildren, doubling up the size of the classes, sometimes doing shifts, one school starting early and the other taking over later.

  Children who grew up in London, or Glasgow or Liverpool, have much more dramatic memories of the war, with houses in their street being bombed, children missing from school the next day, loved ones being killed. On the other hand, they do have fond memories of playing in bombsites, going into the street after a heavy raid and picking up bits of shrapnel as souvenirs.

  As for the servicemen and women, later in life a lot of them admitted that it had been an exciting time, recalling the camaraderie, the normal constraints and social inequalities being for a time forgotten or ignored.

  There was an elderly lady called Joan who lived beside us in Loweswater in the Lake District, wife of the local vicar, a magistrate, pillar of the community, who had been a driver during the war. I happened to be in her house one day when an old friend was visiting from the South, who had served with Joan in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, later the Women’s Royal Army Corps). They were having hysterics about some incident in a pub in London’s West End during the war.

  They had picked up two Yankee officers, been taken with them to a smart bar, plied with endless gin and tonics which they scoffed down. After a couple of hours, when the Yanks were getting a bit too familiar, suggesting some hotel they might all go to, Joan and her chum excused themselves, saying they had to powder their noses. They then climbed through the toilet window, out into the back yard, on to the road and jumped on a passing bus. The bus, by chance, drove round the pub they had just left, slowly going past the front door, where they could see the two Americans standing, looking up and down the street, very puzzled – and quite miffed. One of them spotted Joan and her friend on the top deck. Joan immediately waved back.

  Joan and her chum made a habit of this, as presumably many young women did, allowing themselves to be chatted up by handsome Yanks, accepting the free drinks, perhaps some nylons, then giving nothing or little in return.

  Some of course did, which led to the German propaganda department dropping leaflets on our poor lonely Tommies in the front line, showing pictures of handsome Yanks back in Britain, taking advantage of half-naked English girls in their bedrooms, the wives and girlfriends of our soldiers. A fiendish trick to lower their morale and make them want to pack up and go home.

  What surprised me about the tricks of Joan and her friend was not that they did it, but that they never forgot it. ‘Oh, it was the best time in our lives, wasn’t it Joan?’

  ‘Such fun,’ Joan agreed. ‘Never had such fun since.’ And they would dissolve again into hysterics.

  However, I did eventually witness some real front-line action, for reasons that were never quite explained.

  One school holiday, when I was about eight or so, my mother put me on the bus to go and stay for a few weeks with our Cambuslang relations. Looking back, I assume now she must have been ill, her varicose veins playing up again – yet why did she send me all that way to such a dangerous place at the height of the bombing? My sisters got farmed out to neighbours. Perhaps no one had any room for me – or maybe I insisted on going to Cambuslang, which I always loved.

  The London Blitz was well known to everyone in England but the Glasgow Blitz never received as much publicity, at least outside Scotland. Yet on the nights of 13 and 14 March 1941 the Luftwaffe dropped hundreds of bombs on Glasgow, killing 528 people, injuring 617, destroying 4,000 homes and making 35,000 people homeless. In just two nights. They came straight over the North Sea from Germany, heading for the shipyards, such as John Brown’s, where the famous liners had been launched, and also the steelworks and the munitions factories.

  I was, in fact, sent to Cambuslang twice, while my mother was ill, but don’t know which years. But I do remember lying in bed watching the night sky through cracks in the blackout blinds, looking out for loud flashes and bangs and searchlights crisscrossing the darkness. Then the sirens would sound and I would be wrapped in a blanket and taken down to the shelter at the bottom of the garden where we stayed all night.

  Next day, or when that particular raid was over, we would venture out into the street, perhaps taking the tram to visit other relations. I was always totally amazed by the barrage balloons. You came across them suddenly, round a corner, corralled into odd open spaces, tied down securely with stout cables on a platform. They were enormous, out of all proportion to their surroundings, and totally unreal. It was like coming across an elephant in your bathroom. There was often an anti-aircraft position nearby, or as part of the same installation, with big mounted gun carriages that swivelled round.

  When Jerry planes were spotted, or expected, the balloon would be let loose, float high up in the air, but remain secured on its cables. The theory was that the Jerry planes would bang into them or their dive bombers would be dissuaded from coming too low. By 1944, there were 3,000 barrage balloons in all, a third of them in London, but also in Glasgow and other big industrial cities.

  The Germans devised a cutting device on the wings of their planes which could sever the cables and detach the balloons. Meanwhile, our boffins installed little explosives on the balloons, which would detonate if a German plane hit them. War does create ingenious solutions to new problems.

  I found it all incredibly exciting and stimulating. It was frightening yet awesome to see and hear aeroplanes fighting each other in the night skies, or the low-flying bombers humming on the horizon, making their deadly way, carrying instruments of mass destruction, then witnessing the pyrotechnics and noises and smells and explosions and lights o
f real warfare. I never thought of the danger, but then you don’t as a child. You accept you will always be safe, as you have always been so far.

  When it was all over, in 1945, we celebrated victory in Europe on 8 May, and then victory over Japan on 15 August – and yet I don’t remember either event. In London, a million people were out on the streets for VE Day, in Trafalgar Square and the Mall, and I assume there were endless photographs in the newspapers, but I don’t recall looking at them. There was, of course, no TV. I didn’t know, nor did anybody at the time, that the two royal princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, had sneaked out of Buckingham Palace to join the crowds, anonymously, as they danced and sang in the streets.

  The whole country, we are now told, had street parties, but not in Dumfries, or at least no one invited me or anyone in my family. Was it something we had said? And when we arrived in Carlisle two years later, no one seemed to have enjoyed street parties there either.

  But on 8 June 1946, I did get a letter from the King. ‘I send this personal message to you and other boys and girls at school. For you have shared in the hardships and dangers of a total war. I know you will always feel proud to belong to a country which was capable of such a supreme effort.’ It was on stiff coloured paper, with the royal coat arms in colour on the top, and a little ribbon so you could hang it up above your bed. It had a handwritten signature – George RI. I still have it, but now I look at it, I see it must have been duplicated. Drat it. And I thought it was just for me.

  The event that signalled the end of the war as far as I was concerned, and one which has stayed in my memory ever since, occurred one day when I was playing in Noblehill Park in Dumfries, not far from our house. I was in the middle of a game of football when I heard a cry go up from the other side of the park: ‘THE CO-OP’S GOT BANANAS!’ In Dumfries, we pronounced Co-op as ‘Cope’, as if it was just one word, which did make it easier to chant. We all stopped playing, listening carefully, checking to make sure we had heard the words correctly, then we took up the same refrain: ‘THE CO-OP’S GOT BANANAS!’