Friday 2nd April 1943.......

Hello again. Today is Friday 2nd April 1943. I'm still six but my seventh birthday is next Wednesday. Yippee! My sister, Sheila, will be sixteen this year. My brother, Graham, is in the Army, as you know. He's a long, long way away, over the sea. He's twenty at the moment. He was nineteen when he was called up, last summer. So they are both a lot older than me. When he was at home Graham used to call me the cuckoo in the nest. I have no idea why.

This is the three of us. Sheila is looking after me. I'm the cuckoo, I suppose. Doesn't she look proud?  It was my very first summer, in July or August 1936.  I was only four or five months old.  Doesn't look as though I'm enjoying it much. It's probably just before we go on holiday to Devon. We're all on the swing which Dad built for my brother and sister. I still use it now and it's great fun. You can see Russell lupins everywhere. Dad loves them. So do I.  They are so pretty. The colours take your breath away. And behind us are fields and then Thornhill Road and Sutton Park in the distance.

There's nothing much happening here today on the Chester Road in Streetly. We had to say "Rabbits" yesterday morning, before anything else. And that's about it. Of course in Russia and North Africa and the Pacific, there are all sorts of things happening every day. In Ukraine, the Germans have captured Kharkov. In Tunisia the Germans are still fighting and making it very difficult for us and the Yanks. Every night the RAF sets off for the Ruhr with its Lancasters and Halifaxes and Stirlings and Wellingtons. And early in the morning, some of them don't come back. At sea we have had to stop the dreadful Arctic convoys which take guns and aeroplanes and other stuff to Russia because the Germans have too many ships in Norway. But here in Streetly, everything is quiet.  Just aircraft up in the sky, especially all the Harvards droning around, nearly every day, while the pilots are practising. I wonder where they come from.  I should like to see their aerodrome. They make ever such a funny sound when they climb or dive. Mum isn't worried about them because she knows what they are and so I can hang out of the window and watch them if I want to.  Or play in the garden when they are up there. 

So, as there's not much happening here, I think I'll just tell you a bit about my big sister.................

I think I love Sheila. Well, Mum tells me I ought to. And I suppose I do, really. She has always looked after me, reading to me and telling me stuff and things like that. I think she loves me.  In her own way.

She came to our new house in Streetly in August 1931 when all the family moved here. That was Mum and Dad and Graham and her. She was younger then than I am now. They didn't have me then, of course. I think she went straight to Sandwell School in Blackwood Road, Streetly when she was old enough. She's still there now, and I am as well, as you know. This is a picture of her in her school uniform in the winter of 1931 or 1932, probably just after she had started there. She looks quite fierce. Although she isn't, now. Or not usually, anyway. 

She is nine years older than me and VERY clever. She knows lots of things and when I haven't been annoying her she can be very kind and will tell me what she knows.

It's a long time ago that she told me that the earth is round. Like an orange, she said. (It's lucky I can still remember what an orange looks like!) And when we went to Blackpool I looked out to sea and I could actually see the curve and this proved she was right.

 Peacetime, which she knows all about, interests me a lot. I asked her the other day whether in peacetime they still have news on the wireless: "Oh, yes, when ships sink and things like that". And she tells me something I can hardly believe. Sometimes the wireless will tell you what the weather is going to be like TOMORROW! How can this be possible? But she is my big sister and knows everything and so she must be right.

Here she is, standing outside our front door, probably not long after they had moved in. She was about five then.

 

When I appeared, in 1936, I think she was very interested in me and liked to help Mum look after me. The picture we started off with shows that, doesn't it? Here she is in August that year, holding me. She looks quite proud. Not so sure how I'm feeling, though.

You're probably guessing that the picture wasn't taken in Streetly. It wasn't. It shows the front of the farmhouse where we were staying in South Devon. The family went there nearly every year before the war and we would like to be doing it now. But of course we can't, although we did get there, somehow or other, the summer before last. Just the three of us, Mum, Sheila and me. Dad and Graham turned up for a few days and then went off again, back to work and their Home Guard job. I bet they didn't want to go back. (There were evacuees at the farm then.  Three boys from Ladywood which is in Birmingham.  I'll tell you about them some time). The picture shows the first time they had taken me there, in August 1936. It's a long, long car journey from Streetly and takes all day. I can only remember bits of it from prewar. Streetly to Kingstanding to the middle of Birmingham to the Bristol Road and then on and on and on, through the middle of every town on the way. Dad says the Germans are building roads called autobahns which are like the huge roads you see in parts of Birmingham with trams running down the middle where the grass is. But the autobahns are different. They don't have trams and they run for miles and miles and people can drive very fast on them and they don't go through the middle of towns. I expect it's mainly tanks and army lorries and things of that sort which use them now. We don't have anything like that.  Just the A38.

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Talking of roads and journeys, that brings me to CARS.  I'm interested in cars, as you know. Here's my sister (right) sitting on the back of the car which has brought us for our fortnight's holiday to the seaside. It's a Morris Major. I travelled in it as well but of course I can't remember it because I was only a baby. It had changed to a Ford V8 before I started to notice things. My brother said that the Morris always smelt of bad eggs. I don't know why.

But it wasn't the car which Dad had when they all moved to Streetly. That was something called a Morris Cowley and he took a picture of it, not long before they moved (left). My sister is standing there outside the house they lived in then, in Croydon Road, Erdington. So that was the car which was parked for a while in the drive of their new house in Chester Road. Did you ever notice it?

I'm really  interested in cars as I've told you before (especially big American ones). I watch them passing by from time to time on the Chester Road, in between the lorries and the motorbikes and the Bren Gun Carriers and all the other Army and RAF and Navy vehicles.  I've even got a car of my own. That's a joke. Here I am in it (right). 

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But now I must get back to my sister and tell you more about her and how she and I get on.

First, though, come to think of it, I have a picture of her in her own car, as well (right). She looks as though she's concentrating. That was in Rhyl in 1930. She's not really interested in cars, though. Girls are funny things, aren't they?

So, now, really back to Sheila.

Here's a nice picture of her, on the same sunny day as the one on the swing and in the same pink dress. She was nine then.

As I look these pictures, it reminds me that, yes, I DO love my sister. Ever so much. Or most of the time, anyway. When I was little, she let me share her bedroom. That's when I got kicked out of Mum and Dad's room and the yellow cot I had then. I can still remember bouncing around in that, talking to Mum and Dad who were still in bed. I expect they must have got fed up with me. I bet there was an argument when they told Sheila that I was going to move in with her. But it worked out OK. Most of the time.

 I have Graham's room now, on the front of the house looking out onto the Chester Road. And all the interesting traffic. I've been there since he went away, last June. I bet my sister's relieved.

Of course, she's nearly grown up. Dad took this picture of us last July (right)  when we went to see Graham at his Army camp at Church Stretton. You can just see me.  Mucking about, as usual. She's even taller now. Miles bigger than me. I'll never catch up.

Dad used some of his petrol ration for this trip.  We don't often have a day out like that.  I'm not even sure he really should have been using the car for something like this. But it was a lovely sunny day and we had a super time. Dad took some pictures of us and especially of Graham. He had got a bit of colour film.  He'd probably saved it from pre-war. 

During the same weekend he took another picture of Sheila and me (left), this time in the garden at home.  She had changed into her Girl Guide uniform. It's not a very good photograph but it shows one of those times when we are getting on really well. Bags more lupins. You can see they are all still growing, even though there's a war on.

The only trouble with Sheila is that she sometimes thinks she is my mum, especially when we are both at school and that's what causes a lot of the rows. She's still at Sandwell School in Blackwood Road, just like me, but is now one of the oldest girls there. The whole school has an assembly every morning. That's in a room at the back of the building where you can look out into the garden. There's a lawn there where we can go at playtime if it's not raining. (The air raid shelter is there as well. We haven't had to use that yet but I can remember Dad and some other parents helping to dig it on one hot weekend in 1940). We line up, sitting down in three rows facing the fireplace. I'm in the front row. My sister is with the other big girls, right at the back. With her friends, like Heather Craik and Marguerite Norton and Beth Davies and Joyce Nind.

This is a picture of the whole school taken four or five years ago. In 1938 or 1939.  So it's not now and it's in the open air, not in the classroom.  But it gives you an idea of what morning assembly is like.  The bigger girls at the back. Sheila's there, second from the right. Small boys at the front. Not me, though, I wasn't there. I was only two or three then and so I hadn't started.

You really have to behave at assembly. No talking or mucking about. If you're naughty, dreadful things can happen. One winter's day one of my friends was playing with a Dinky Toy. The teacher noticed and threw it onto the roaring fire right in front of us. I watched this precious, lovely thing melt and turn into a silvery stream of metal. It was awful. The world seemed a horrible place at that moment. I got over it, though, eventually.

It was on a morning like that when my sister got all agitated and tried to attract my attention when we were supposed to be keeping quiet. I don't really know what she was so excited about. But I think she felt she wanted to give me some guidance. Like girls do, as you know. She'd seen something she didn't like and felt it was her duty to put it right. I was probably picking my nose or something like that. Nothing very dreadful. And anyway, sometimes these things have to be done, don't they? I bet she does it herself when nobody is looking. But whatever it was that I was doing wrong, the teacher, either Miss Cook or Mrs. Fairey, didn't notice it. All they saw was Sheila making a kerfuffle in the back row. And she got a right telling-off. With the final words: "Sheila, I expected better of you".

Sometimes you have to allow a victory to come your way, don't you? Even if it's not really quite fair, and you know it. You just sit back and enjoy it, while it lasts. Best not to rub it in afterwards though.

But, as I say, she is so clever and knows so much and if there's an argument over anything I usually lose it. I think in this picture I have just lost another one. She certainly looks pretty satisfied. Mum is as cheerful as ever. I don't remember Dad ticking me off for trying to spoil his happy picture of the three of us. So perhaps he was feeling a bit of sympathy with me. Us blokes have to stick together. This picture was taken at the same time as the one of us by the car I showed you a few days ago. And I look pretty miserable in both.

But despite all that, I probably still love her, even at that moment....

And anyway, perhaps it was nothing to do with her.  It might have been just a bad blazer day. I do wish I could remember.

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P.S. It's my birthday next Wednesday and I'm getting a treat. That'll cheer me up no end. And something important is going to happen to my brother on Tuesday. I'll tell you about all that next time.

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