Our life during the war

Much of my life during primary school was in wartime.  The Second World War started after I had spent one year at school, and it finished towards the end of my last year at primary school.

 

The first thing you would notice about life in wartime would be the blackout. Streetlights were very dim, and half of them were out completely. No-one was allowed to show any lights from their house. Every window had to have blackout curtains that did not allow any light to be seen from the outside, and there were Air-Raid Wardens to check the houses regularly.

 



Catalina flying-boats were regularly out on patrol in New Zealand waters later in the war

My parents were asleep one night when the warden knocked on the door. A light could be seen from the front bedroom window many miles away in the city. Mum and Dad had opened the blackout curtains after they put the lights out, but the full moon was shining on their bedroom mirror and being reflected all that way!

 

At the same time there were always searchlights playing on the clouds at night as part of the defences of the city.

  
 
 

The second thing you would notice would be how few cars there were on the roads. Petrol was rationed. Small cars, like the one we had from around 1941, an Austin Seven, were allowed one gallon (4.5 litres) per month, which allowed us to travel about 50kms. So Dad had to be very careful about how far and how often we used the car.

 

Petrol wasn’t the only thing rationed. Food and clothing were also strictly controlled. So people were very careful about keeping their clothes carefully. Among common foods, butter, sugar, tea and meat were subject to rationing. People had to save their butter and sugar coupons at Christmas to make their Christmas cakes. All this was so that the food saved could be shipped to the UK to feed the people there.

 

And apart from the rationing, some foods were just not available at all. For instance we never saw bananas or oranges during the worst days of the war – in fact for several years; bananas were a real novelty when they became available again after the war ended. Cream was very hard to get. But there was enough other food so we never went hungry. Most food rationing continued until 1948; petrol coupons did not go out of use till 1950.

 

At school, we had special drills about what to do in an air-raid. We had corks around our necks which we had to bite if we had to go into the shelters, and we practised this several times a month. The shelters were just long trenches dug in the playing fields, enough to accommodate all the children in the school if there was an air-raid.

We lined up in the playground in front of the school each morning for the raising of the flag and then marched into school to the sounds of "Colonel Bogey" march.

We were encouraged to learn to knit, and I struggled through creating a scarf for a soldier somewhere, though it turned me off knitting for the rest of my life!

 

Dad built a shelter for air-raids in the empty section next to our house, with a corrugated iron roof and earth steps leading down into it. Most people had one in their back yard.

 

Many parks had shelters or gun emplacements built in them. Along the roads in some places there were tank traps: concrete structures which could be filled with timber or metal beams in an emergency to block the passage of vehicles like tanks or armoured cars. Especially where there was only one road through an area, such as at the isthmuses at Avondale and Otahuhu, such traps were built, and it meant only one lane of traffic could go in each direction at any time.

 

The fact that many men of military age were overseas, meant that women were working in jobs normally done only by men – like crewing trams and buses, or working in shops, or farming, and so on and on. Some little children had never known their fathers, and others, unfortunately, never would. The papers were sometimes filled with long lists of the names of casualties from the latest battle in North Africa or Europe. One of my second cousins flew out on a mission and never returned; the sad feeling in the family I remember clearly.

Dad had a big map of Europe on the wall of the kitchen, so when a new battle was fought we could see where it was, places like Stalingrad, Tobruk and Monte Cassino. 

Families regularly sent food parcels to their members serving overseas, and this practice was extended to the UK; in fact it continued throughout the austerity days after 1945.

 

At school we had a few children who had been “evacuated” from Britain. There was one in my class, a boy my age, and we competed for the position of first in the class every time there were exams. In the last year, the war ended and he went back to the UK so that left the field clear to me!

 

Later in the war, the American forces stationed thousands of servicemen in New Zealand, either in training or rest and recreation, and it became common to see them all over the place.

 

Some of these wartime conditions persisted for months or even years after the war had ended, until the economy returned to something like normal peacetime conditions, but in general the effects of the war wore off pretty quickly for everyday life