Roger Atkinson - Blackout, Austerity and Pride

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Wartime London bus A fine picture, probably taken at Bromley North station, with several wartime features to note: The white-painted front mudguards, the masked headlights, the tiny aperture on the side lights. Black paint across the top and bottom of the destination indicator glass, limiting the points displayed, thus economising in the cloth needed for the destination blind. Anti-splinter gauze firmly glued on the inside of the windows, with diamond-shaped holes to look out through. Also the opened bus windows on a sunny day and the patient queues. The two eyes on the front of the bus, advertising the magazine Picture Post, were another familiar feature of the period. Inside the bus there may well have been a London Transport poster showing a passenger trying to lift a corner of the window gauze, being admonished by Billy Brown of London Town: “I trust you’ll pardon my correction; that stuff is there for your protection” Billy Brown on London bus ticket
27 A black sheep in green uniform I answered the doorbell and found a formidable lady in a dark green WVS uniform. “You will not know me; I am your Aunt Edna”, she said. “Do not worry, I have brought my own lunch” and she held up a brown paper bag containing a plaice. She rapidly assessed the dire state of our house. An example of how grim it had become even before my father’s death can be cited. My mother was becoming so disabled with her advancing multiple sclerosis, that she could not get herself out of the bath; my father, with his wounds from the Great War never ceasing to trouble him, was too disabled to lift her. Our house at 89 Clarendon Road, Leeds had a peculiar feature. Whilst an attic extended over most of the bathroom, the space above the bath itself went right up to the roof. Thus the attic room ended in a fairly low wall at that point; it did not extend into the eaves. In this wall there was a vent, perhaps to extract the steam from the bath. My father, being an engineer, constructed a system of pulleys in the attic and lowered a rope through the vent and on the end of the rope created a sling or loop that my mother could put round herself, under her shoulders. She could get into the bath unaided, but when she was in it, he lowered the sling to her. She called out when she was ready to come out of the bath. My father worked the device. But he soon decided that, at the age of 12, I might be as strong and physically capable as he was, so he called me to the attic to see whether he had devised the pulleys well enough for me to work them. Neither of us could see my mother, of course; use of the pulleys was activated by gentle shouting. This Heath Robinson-style contraption actually worked extraordinarily well. But I admit that when Aunt Edna found that this was the sort of state in which my mother and I had been ‘keeping calm and carrying on’, she was more than a little shocked. My father had died on the night of 15/16 August 1940, after we had heard that evening, on the 9 o’clock news, that waves of Ger-
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Page 10 and 11: 20 Introduction Acknowledgements
Page 12 and 13: 22 Introduction United Kingdom c
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Page 34 and 35: 118 3 — Early history 1939 - 1945
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Page 42 and 43: 206 ing hung out and the street fur
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Roger Atkinson - Blackout, Austerity and Pride

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