Growing up in wartime Britain

Dulcie was born as a result of lives changed radically by WW1. Her mother (Dorothy) was born into a very large family of early out-back settlers in Queensland, Australia. She met Dulcie’s father (Cyril) when he fell off a horse near her station after the war when visiting relatives. Dorothy helped nurse him back to health and they fell in love (and I assume my grandmother might have been keen to escape female outback life a century ago). The pair took an incredible leap of faith and, after he returned to the UK, they were married (‘half-way between’) in Durban, South Africa, as promised months earlier.

My mother (like her sister, Rosemary, aged 85, a wartime evacuee) was clever, and who knows where accessible higher education and less gender bias might have taken them both; but they were set to leave school early. Dulcie left school at 14 and took a clerical job at the local electricity board where she may well have stayed if Britain had not declared war on Nazi Germany. 

Dulcie (or Denny as she was more generally known) would describe her childhood in Woodford, London, as “unconventional”. Her parents positioned a large stuffed alligator to greet visitors in the hallway, which was adorned with engraved glass panels (some salvaged from pubs!). It was a grand Edwardian house that I adored as a child. It had long, winding hallways, gas lamps, vast tiled floors and a tiered rear bedroom overlooking a well that existed when the land was part of William Morris’s estate.

6 Chelmsford Road would provide refuse throughout WWII for extended family, displaced loved-ones and overseas relatives in the UK to join the combat. They would hide in the basement or between the thick inner hall walls as the air raid warnings sounded. The closest bomb fell on Stanley Road, which was meters from Chelmsford Road and killed several civilians.

One story that struck me most was Dulcie’s account of an overseas cousin who was staying while on allied military service. Mother had a teenage crush on him and was thrilled when he took her to the cinema one evening. On the way home, an air raid warning precipitated a black out and a scramble for shelter. She fell and shattered her front teeth and her dashing young cousin spent the night comforting her. Shortly afterwards, he was shot down by German aircraft and died.