Neither of my parents had much of an education, both having left school at an early age.

My father started work when he was thirteen, taking over a milk delivery round from a man who had gone off to fight in World War I in 1914. My dad always joked that the horse that pulled the cart was smarter than he was.

My mother left school at a similar age and had just started work in a draper’s shop when that war ended in 1918.

Although lacking in formal education they were both literate and far from stupid, in fact my mother, who worked in a laundry for most of her life (it paid a shilling a week more than the drapers) ended up running the place, after she undertook to do the ‘book-keeping’ and other clerical work, even though she had never been trained to do so.

Now I have to say that although my formal education lasted until I was sixteen (and a half) I was not the greatest of scholars and my school reports always had lots of .. “must try harder” .. or .. “needs to pay more attention” .. comments when it came to such subjects as maths, science or Latin. However, I wasn’t too bad at ‘English Language’ and always enjoyed the ‘English Literature’ lessons: but how I hated that homework! … I would sit at the kitchen table struggling with logarithms and bloody theorems or trying to memorize “amo, amas, amat” and wondering why plurals didn’t end in ‘s’, and verbs had to go at the end of sentences.

My parents couldn’t help me with my homework, but they did more to educate me than they ever knew, when they forked out some of their hard earned cash for me to join a book club.  

Although I used to borrow books from the public library, the ones I got in the mail every few weeks were mine to treasure until this day. Reading them and re-reading them stimulated my interest in literature, and led to the eclectic collection of books which now weigh down my bookshelves.

The actor Michael Caine is famous for his … “Not a lot of people know that” … when divulging some little known fact, and when I sometimes do the same, and am asked … “How did you know that ?”… I simply reply …

…   “I must have read it in a book sometime.”   😉

Earlier today I discovered, by accident, a BBC website for children all about what it was like to be a kid in this country during World War II.

I must say that I felt very much at home visiting this website, firstly because I was a child during those troubled times and secondly because the content is aimed at 7 – 9 year olds.

The ‘Wartime Home’ section shows a house a lot like the one I lived in. I especially liked the illustration of the ‘scullery’ although the one in our house was more scruffy and lacked the gas water heater, and I wasn’t ‘posh’ enough to have a water jug and basin in my bedroom, although I did have another piece of ‘china’ under the bed.

We ‘lived’ in the kitchen as the sitting room (known as the front room) was only used for special occasions, that is until the night when Herr Hitler decided to bring down the ceiling and wreck the front of the house.

Some of the photographs brought back memories like …

I can’t relate too much to the section on evacuees as I only spent a short time in the country with my mother and an aunt, before returning to London just in time for the ‘Blitz’. I just can’t imagine today’s ‘little darlings’ being labelled and shipped off to some unknown destination, not knowing if they would ever return.

My best friend’s big sister was named Vera, so it was nice to meet up with her again after all these years, and she even managed to rustle up my favourite potato pancakes. (I would have eaten anything in those days).

I don’t know what today’s children would make of the information given on this site. It must be hard for them to imagine a world without … pizzas … television … ice cream … central heating … frozen food … bananas … and … supermarkets; but I do like the idea of kids learning about how another generation of children lived in the days of shared bathwater, blackout curtains and ration books.

The only thing that is missing from the virtual tour of the house (‘an exact copy of a real family’s wartime home’) is the ‘loo’. Now this could have been shown inside or outside the house with a ‘hot link’ highlighting the cut up newspaper hanging from a nail in the wall … I wonder …

…  how Vera would have explained that ?   😉