| Wartime memories
Memories of the
Home Front from people with Stibbington connections
Joan Simmons, Stibbington
After leaving Stibbington school I went into service, and worked
for, among others, Captain Vipan of Stibbington Hall, Rev Gregoire, and the
owners of Stibbington House. Being a servant was hard work: I only had one day
off in a fortnight.
When the evacuees began to arrive in 1939 I was living-in at
Stibbington House, so my grandmother, Mrs Stokes, with whom I had lived, was
able to take in two evacuees. I married in 1940, but my husband was called up
for National Service on the very day of the wedding. (He did not go to the Front
but became a ‘Bevan Boy’, working in the coal mines in Nottinghamshire.)
Throughout the war I was the Postlady, covering, on my bicycle,
an area from Wansford North through Thornhaugh and as far as Bonemills and
Crossleys. I often got a lift through the Bedford Purlieus in a jeep belonging
to the American forces who were stationed there. The Americans were very
generous and gave several parties for the schoolchildren. They also dumped all
kinds of barely used household goods at ‘The Pits’ (off the Elton Road south of
Wansford); many of these items were gratefully retrieved by the local people!
Farther out along the road at Sibson there was a prisoner-of-war camp – complete
with a cinema.
Wansford in those days was a fairly self-sufficient village.
Wingrove’s butchers was next door to Moles’ grocery; there was a tailor, a
saddler and a shoemaker, and a bakery which not only supplied fresh bread but
would cook the Sunday joint or bake a cake for anyone who didn’t have an oven.
Only a very few of the wealthier folk had any of the household
appliances that we take for granted now. Washday really did take up most of a
day: fetching the water from the pump, building the fire under the copper,
boiling the clothes, stirring with the dolly, rinsing, starching, putting them
through the mangle (without getting your fingers caught) and finally pegging
them out to dry and hoping it wouldn’t rain. Some days later would come the
back-breaking task of ironing with the two flat irons heated on the fire; or, if
you could afford it, one of the new electric irons which plugged into the light
socket. (Electricity had reached this area in 1937.) Perhaps the old song
“Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron” in which a full week elapses between
washing and wearing, wasn’t too far from the truth after all!
Personal hygiene was a matter of a daily wash and a weekly bath
in a metal tub in front of the fire. Those few people lucky (or wealthy) enough
to have a bathroom in their house would sometimes allow their friends to have a
bath there. Larger towns like Peterborough had public bath-houses (known as the
Slipper Baths) where, for a small charge, you could have a proper bath. Many
homes still had no flush toilet. The privy was a small shed with a bucket,
which had to be emptied into a pit in the garden once a week, or which might
have been collected for use as fertiliser. The collector at that time was a Mr
Death.
While the people of
rural areas like Stibbibgton and Wansford might have lagged behind the larger
towns in the provision of household amenities, they were spared many of the
hardships which the town dwellers had to endure. We weren’t greatly affected
by food rationing because we kept pigs and grew vegetables, and we pickled eggs
in water-glass. Petrol rationing meant that there were very few cars about,
and the children could play safely in the street. The evacuees mixed in well and
the village people were very kind to them. We didn’t have any air raids like
they did in the towns and cities. Altogether, my experience of wartime was not
as bad as it might have been.
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