|
 | |  | |
Don McDouall was evacuated from London during World War II when he was five years old. He was sent to the small country village of East Hanney to live with Grans and Grampy at a house called Tamarisk. He now lives in Australia.
I think Miss Smith, the London school teacher who taught at the school in East Hanney, was my very first love. I never knew Miss Smiths christian name but I had quite a few fights over her, with other boys. Then later on I went through a love-sick stage of being obsessed with the film star Diana Durbin. She was the leading lady in a film with of all people, the idiot Arthur Askey.
It was one of the very few films I saw during the war. The film was screened in the Hut and I remember Heather paid the nine pence for me to go in. This beautiful film star sent me crazy for quite sometime and I had nightmares about Athur Askey! I spent hours just thinking of this lady film star.
The most vivid of these puppy love crushes that I experienced took place about 1941. Alongside Dandridges mill just on the other side of a laneway leading to Cotterels meadow were two semi-detached brick houses set back off the road. A London evacuee lived in one of these cottages. The evacuee was a girl of perhaps thirteen years of age when I would have been seven or eight years old.
The girls name was Goldie. To me Goldie was absolutely the most beautiful girl I had ever seen! For starters her hair was very long and wavy. It was also my favourite colour, the colour of marigolds.I always remember her best wearing a shiny green dress.
That young girl never knew just what she meant to me. I would follow her to school, at a discreet distance of course, and then after school was over I would follow her back home again. This took place every school day. I spent hour upon hour as near to her house as possible, waiting to catch just a glimpse of her.
I would cry with rage when he saw her talking to another boy. One such boy that gave me many such hours of anguish was a lad a lot older than myself. This boy was probably fourteen years old at the time and was the son of the people Goldie lodged with or was billeted with.
All the other village kids called the lad Snowy! That was because his hair was snow white. His eyes were pink like a white rabbit and he also had very pink skin. Snowy in fact was an albino. Snowy wore very thick bi-focal glasses. These spectacles had lenses that were so thick you couldn't see his eyes behind them. Which probably lead to the rumor amongst young naive kids that he took his eyes out to go to bed!
At about this time I also went through a stage of caring for small animals. Living with Grans meant I could have no pets at all. I loved cats, and kittens were very easy to obtain. So I would get a stray or someone would give me a kitten and I would keep it in Grampy's allotment shed.
The allotment shed was always locked but that was no problem as a cat could easily get in and out from under the door. So it was common for me to be looking after some scrawny kitten, taking it what food I could scrounge. I got it milk from school by draining all the empty milk bottles into a jam jar after everyone else had gone home, often ending up with a jar full of milk.
Gramps of course knew about these tiny strays but never let on to his wife, turning a blind eye when he opened his shed. Sometimes saying 'Wonder whose kitten this is?'
| |  | |  |
To add a comment you must first login or join for free, up in the top left corner.
|
|
