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The Day War Broke Out… I


t was Sunday, a beautiful and blue-domed Sunday morning in Brands Hill Avenue, High Wycombe. It was the Sunday of September 3rd 1939, a date we would never forget. Margaret and I were doing much the same as the rest of Britain – dodging going to church on the pretext that there was too much to do, in our case in our new home. It was new to us, a modern four-bedroomed, detached house looking out, beyond its eighth of an acre rear garden, over the lovely Hughenden valley and beyond. We had rented it when we were married, properly and in church, on May 20th of that year.


There was another and better excuse for missing church that morning. Like millions of others we were waiting to hear the outcome of the British ultimatum to Hitler’s Germany which had demanded his withdrawal from Poland, and we were glued to the radio to await the news which the BBC’s most solemn tones had earlier promised we should hear from the lips of the Prime Minister himself. I had been one of those in the London crowds which had welcomed Mr Chamberlain’s return from Munich in the previous year, and had seen him wave the piece of paper Hitler had signed, declaring that it would indeed be peace in our time. When he came on the air the Prime Minister addressed the nation in tones even more solemn than those we had heard earlier. They matched his stiff collar and his long, stiff and solemn face, but Mr Chamberlain did it quite well – perhaps the only thing he did well from then on, as history was soon to show.


Neither of us can recall the inner feelings we had in those minutes that the Prime Minister took to tell us that our little lives were to be changed, in our case dramatically and for years to come. It was the sort of news that takes a little time to sink in, even though we and the whole country had been expecting the worst for long enough. It was, however, the very immediate consequence which was to remain with us and give us visible evidence of the effect of the declaration of war on at least one member of the family. We were rather pleased with our new home which rejoiced in the name of Windward. After a search of the whole district around Gerrard’s Cross and High Wycombe we had rented it from its builder, a Mr Standage, who had speculatively built the whole of Brands Hill Avenue and who lived just along the avenue in the biggest and best of its houses. Our rent was £80 a year, which included rates, and that was about the usual level for someone on a salary of £430 a year (and a free car and other expenses) at a period when it was about right to apply a quarter of your income to rent. Margaret had been obliged, by the rules of those days, to give up her teaching job at Lydney Grammar School as soon as she married, so we had to live on my pay as a United Steel Companies Limited representative. Married teachers thus dismissed did not count as ‘unemployed’. No dole for them in those days!


7


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