(Born 1941)
An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More
Parents: Edward George & Vera Margaret
Father’s Parents: Ellen “Nanny Branscum”
Mother’s Parents: Eleanor “Nell” May
Siblings: Joan Margaret, Michael John, Ronald George
Husband: Ernest Paul
Children: Jennifer & Paula
TIME OF THE WAR
When were you born?
I was born in 1941 in London during the 2nd World War. I was the second child in the family, my sister having been born slightly less than a year before I was. We lived in a small brick house in a suburb at 39 Primula Street, W12.
We were in blackout wartime conditions at the time. I am told that my mother went rather suddenly into labor; we didn’t own a car or a telephone, as we were a working-class family. Because of this, my father put my mum into a child stroller (my mum was small) and rushed her to the hospital, which fortunately was a scant mile away. It became a famous burn center for RAF (Royal Air Force) pilots who had serious burn injuries during the war. It is now a famous research center and is still the hospital for burn casualties; it was being transformed at the time of my birth.
My dad apparently rushed my mum in, and the nursing staff assisted her to the delivery. My dad said that there was no waiting time. They took Mummy away, and then they came right back out with her clothes, which were still warm. They were saying, “It’s a girl!” (Laughs…) I rushed into the world, which is somehow very typical because I have been rushing ever since!
I was the second child, and because I had an older sister who was apparently precocious, I learned very quickly by always wanting to be the same as my “one-year-older-than-I” sister. Growing up, we were treated as twins because I was not lagging behind in size or manner. From the start, I was always dancing, making up odd movement phrases and gaits. (We laugh…)
My mum played the radio constantly; she loved music. There was always popular music on the radio. (We had no other access to music.) She sang. She sang everything. She had a very pretty voice, and she knew the words, which is why with any song that comes on the radio that’s of her vintage, I seem to know all the words. I have been asked there is any song I don’t know. Well, if there is any song from that era that I don’t know, it’s because my mum didn’t know it! I just remember her voice, and I remember all the words to the songs. It was during the American songbook era, and “we” don’t write songs like that anymore. It was Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, and all the greatest songwriters of the 40’s. Those were the songs that were being played because I was born in ’41, and I was growing up with my mum singing all the time.
That was significant because I was surrounded by music. It wasn’t classical music; it wasn’t performance per-se, but it was beautiful melodies from the great songbook enduring in beautiful words. Have you ever listened to them? Mm-hmm. You have to listen to them. Like in our ballet class—“I can’t help loving that man of mine!” Yes… you hear me sing it. (Laughs…) That’s Gershwin! **Sings**
Fish gonna swim; birds gonna fly,
I’m gonna love one man ‘til I die.
Can’t help lovin’ that man of mine…
And that’s only the opening little verse, but they are all… Ella Fitzgerald—do you know Ella Fitzgerald? Mm-hmm, and jazz and big band and all the musicals, like Oklahoma. Oklahoma came out then. Show Boat… Yes. Some of the songs in those early Broadway musical theatre productions are enduring today. They are just as beautiful. “Surry with the Fringe on Top”—do you know that one? Oh, yeah! From Oklahoma! From Oklahoma. And of course, the Oklahoma theme (starts singing). The lyrics are so very, very beautiful! We can’t hold a candle to them today.
Anyway, that was part of my up growing, as was poverty. We didn’t think of ourselves as poor; we didn’t know what it meant to be poor, so it was not a negative association for us at all. But we were poor. There were four children in the family eventually. My dad, who had his own little business before the war, lost his business during the war. He had been apprenticed as a carpenter in his early teens. His business was in repairing and making fine furniture. I think he was a master carpenter, but nobody was making and repairing fine furniture during the war. (Laughs…) We were lucky we could save a stick of furniture from the bombs!
So, his business went away. He did not serve in the army because he had a congenital heart murmur. He had had rheumatic fever as a small boy, and rheumatic fever, in those days, was often not diagnosed or treated. It frequently left its sufferers with a heart valve deficiency, so those people with a heart ‘murmur’ were always asked, “Did you have rheumatic fever?” In many cases, the patient did not know or remember.
My father did not pass his physical for war service, so he worked with the Civil Defense, getting people out of burning buildings and saving people from bomb devastation. My sister and I have determined that when I was two and a half (around the summer of 1943) and she was three and a half, something occurred that we remember as if it were yesterday.
She and I shared a bedroom in the upstairs of our very small railway house; it was a brick house that my parents rented from the Railway Company. (My dad didn’t work for them, but somehow, we lived in one of their houses.) We had a front garden—mostly grass and michaelmas daisies—and a very small back garden. About 25-30 feet up a steep embankment from that garden was a railway line. It was the Great Western Railway that traversed South England at its widest dimension from the West Country to the seashores of the East. Trains rattled by all the time as we were growing up. We didn’t notice them much, except during the war.
At that time, outside our back window (our bedroom faced the railway line)… First of all, they had huge barrage balloons hanging in the air. Have you ever seen a barrage balloon? It’s like a Good Year blimp that you would have floating over a ballgame, but these were all gray. They were like huge, gray elephants up there, and they were a screen, a barrier against an aircraft coming in to bomb us. So, we became accustomed to seeing these huge objects floating around in the sky, day and night.
Then, we had an Ak-Ak gun—an anti-aircraft gun on the railway (you could see it), as it would trundle back and forth. There was a siding that it would go into if a train was due, but it was constantly firing if there was some foreign object in the sky. They, of course, would be alerted to shoot it down. So, this was one of my very first memories. I also remember the milk trains carrying supplies coast and on to the frontlines across the Channel. The trains would come down that railway line shrouded in black whispering a muffled clack-clack, clack-clack—very quiet.
Everything was shrouded in black; we were not permitted to use lights in our houses. We had to have complete blackout conditions, so that the enemy would not have a target. All the time? Yes, because we were constantly being invaded from the air. Anyway, it was night, and we were up at the window because the Ak-Ak gun was just so noisy. We were up there looking, and as it fired, it would illuminate the sky. Then, all at once, we saw this black, rocket-shaped object with flames just flaring from its tail. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and it was terrifying for us. We both instantly started to scream loudly. We couldn’t interpret it. You don’t even wait; it was just a reaction.
My mum and dad hadn’t gone to bed, yet. My mum was knitting; my dad was reading the newspaper. I remember all the details of this, and they just scurried up the stairs. The stairs were like this narrow (shows me with her hands). Two people side-by-side could not run up the stairs. They were steep like little cottage stairs. So, they were falling and bumping each other, coming up the stairs, and they grabbed us. They didn’t know what we were screaming about. They grabbed us out of our beds, and just as they did, the whole house shook… This was the very first V1 rocket and had been fired in Germany with a time mechanism to come over London (just where we lived) and then cut out and drop and bomb. It gave us no warning, no whine.
There was a V2 rocket, which came later. They were both just devastatingly destructive to the city of London. But that bomb had dropped in the street next to ours. That’s why we saw it—because it was on its way down. If it had hit a structure along the way, it would have exploded, of course. My mum and dad had no idea what it was. It was all big news the next day.
Then, as a result of that, we—the children of London—were evacuated out of the city of London and maybe some of the other cities, too. (You might know this story.) The people of the countryside and the smaller towns in England opened their homes to take the children of London in and keep them safe during the war. I remember very well. We went to two places; we were miserably unhappy in both of them. Many things that I won’t go into happened in these various homes that are not good memories of that time. Eventually, my mum who came to visit (I think on Saturdays only) decided, “Enough of this. We’re going back to London. We will take the risk.” It was a very calculated decision on her part because there was bombardment danger in London, but she could see that we were not being well cared for and that we were very unhappy.
So, we spent that time between when she came for us and the end of the war in London. We would retreat to an air raid shelter. Whenever it was possible to do so, the yard of each individual house in England was excavated, and an air raid shelter was built underground. It was damp and cold. We would go down there and spend the night because the bombing usually happened at night. Every night? Every night. It seemed the wail of the sirens were always sounding. I’ll never forget that sound and the instant fear that followed. Toward the end of the war, though, my mum and dad stopped going down there because we would all wake up in the morning with puffy eyes because of the dampness. We would all be coughing. My mum said, “You know, it was a choice.” It was always a choice. Either go down there and be safe if you got a direct hit, or go up into your house and not have all these physical reactions.
We had a big, big, huge oak trestle table, so it had great bulges of oak legs and then a single, connecting, strong board underneath. It was very heavy and very thick and wide enough that we could make beds under it. We slept on one side or the other of this trestle. Bombs would be landing; we would hear them. The house would shake. My dad would say, “If this house takes a bomb, this is probably the safest place.” We also had a cupboard under the stairs, and that was another alternative place. For wartime experiences, there are many in detail, but those are the ones that stand out in my mind.
During the war and after the war, food was scarce. We had ration books, so each family could only buy a certain number or amount of anything. Everything wasn’t always available anyway, so we eeked out a pretty narrow diet of essentials. But the government was very wise about trying to maintain the health of the children. At clinics that were dispersed throughout London in every borough (district), essential foods were available and free, such as cod liver oil, which I loved. My mum would go and get a bottle as often as possible. Again, it was rationed and depended on the number of children you had. At that time, my mum had my sister and me.
We had a teaspoon of cod liver oil every day, and we had evaporated milk or sometimes even condensed milk. Have you ever had evaporated milk? It’s sort of like Carnation in a can that has been boiled, and it’s got a slightly different taste from milk. It’s very nourishing. We also had dried egg powder. We didn’t have eggs because all the eggs were being supply-lined to the troops, so we had egg powder, and we had to reconstitute it. I remember so well those three and orange juice. My mum would get a small bottle of concentrated orange juice. I am certain that the reason we came through the war in decently good health as children (with all the deprivation that there was) was that the government provided these essential nutrients through their clinics that were everywhere.
However, we couldn’t get just anything we wanted until about ten years after the war. It took the country an incredibly long time. Maybe not ten, maybe six years. That’s a long time. It took ever so long for the farmers and the crops and the population that it took to run the farms and the factories in the cities—the whole infrastucture. We were just so devastated after the war.
I think having lived through that with my sister, it is easy to see why people who are not bombarded, like people in America, have no concept of what it is like to live through the terror of that warfare with Germany. Of course, it was our second war of the twentieth century against that terrible foe, and the country was on its knees at the end of that war—financially bankrupt. The citizens and all the buildings in London had been bombarded. It was such a difficult thing to build back from, and we could not have done it without the help of America—not only America coming into the war and helping to win it, but also helping us to recover from after-the-war. We were all very well aware of that and have never stopped being thankful.
Our school was a walking distance away from the house, and I remember in some of those very first years when we went to school, we would occasionally be called to the nurse’s office. On this occasion, everyone was filed into there, and we were given something like Ovaltine or hot chocolate powder. It was sweet, and it would be leftover supplies from the war that had been provided by the United States.
To prepare us, the school would send home a note: “Please bring some paper bags.” In those days, we saved every paper bag. We saved everything and anything that was useful and could be saved. Candy, which in England was called “sweets,” was displayed loose in bins or behind glass, then weighed, and poured into a paper bag not much bigger than a French Fry bag. We would take the paper bags into the school, and they would fill them with “this” chocolate powder. I will never forget the taste of this divine chocolate powder because we just didn’t have such luxuries. In fact, I have been searching for that particular flavor for the rest of my life. “Oh, can I taste that chocolate powder? Is that from America?” I wanted to find that fabulous nectar that I remembered from the war! (Laughs…) I never did find it. Anyway, these are funny little things that stay with you through your life.
(To be continued in following sections…)
I was fortunate to have visited America in 1961 at the invitation of my Aunt Joan (my mother’s sister) to tutor her teenage son and daughter (my cousins) and other teens in their neighborhood. They lived in Bloomfield Hills, Detroit—the Motor City. With wide-eyed disbelief, I attended the “coming-out” of the new model automobiles that summoned. I was unprepared for the Hollywood scale of these unveilings, and the Broadway style entertainment that accompanied them. My Uncle Walter had distinguished himself in WWII by reverse-engineering the VI flying bomb—the very same model that had flown past my bedroom window during the Blitz. He later immigrated to America to design assembly line machinery in the Armor meatpacking industry and made his future.
Life Legacies 