Recalling mum’s wartime spirit

MY mum Iris came up with a revelation the other day. No, it wasn’t that she was going to give up eating Carte D’OR ice cream straight from the tub. Impossible to wean her off that habit.

It came about when I asked her if the current Covid-19 pandemic was worse than living through the war. Her answer? Yes, it is.

This is the woman, now 91, who slept in her school uniform so she was ready to rush out of bed to the air raid shelter when the Nazis targeted inner-city Nottingham on night-time bombing missions.

In the early part of the war, before they had their own Andersen shelter, she and her mum would dash across the road in Basford to the house converted into a fish and chip shop. It had a cellar, so several families huddled together listening for the bombs while just a few yards above them was ten gallons of hot beef dripping. The family still has a laugh at that story.

Her dad was an air raid patrol warden and spent his nights shouting “turn that light out” to all and sundry. Mum got a job at Raleigh when she was 14 in 1943 and tells me about the many Nottingham cyclists who were killed in road accidents because they had no lights. The drivers just couldn’t see them.

Between the horrors of wartime bombing and sweet rationing, life went on as normal.

Funds would not allow many visits to a café or a restaurant. The biggest treat for her and her mum were trips to the cinema. There was a choice of three within walking distance of where they lived. They sat in the one and nines (1 shilling 9 pence was the cost of a ticket) to enjoy a main feature, a cartoon, plus the newsreel. That was their escape from the reality of wartime Britain.

And everywhere, people shopped freely, mingled together, hugged and shook hands.

Mum calls coronavirus the invisible enemy. Her sympathies lie with everyone enduring it all and struggling through.

But take a leaf out of her book. She got through that awful war and slowly things got better. The wartime years made her resilient and made her appreciate what she had.

Amid all the jubilations in Old Market Square on D-day 1945 she lifted up her head – and was hit by a firework. Don’t worry, she was OK, it just burned her coat. She was looking skywards to the good years ahead. Four years later she was married to EX-RAF man Ron and they set up home. They were together for 69 years.

Stay quietly hopeful and we’ll get of this mess, just like my mum did.