Betty, May and Zillah at 4 Tyne Court, Sutton Coldfield,
The final recording chronologically (NOTE: the numbers of the original cassettes don’t correspond with the numbering of the MP3 audio files and these notes).
I ask May if she remembers her wedding day. We refer to a black and white cinema film of it which had re-emerged recently. Betty was the first to marry after a two-year engagement. She had to leave her job at Lewis’s department store. The reception was at Anchorage Road. They had caterers in. A crate of champagne was ‘lost’. We talk about courtship, and weddings then and now: how the bride then didn’t stay for the speeches. She and Fred went off on honeymoon by train to the Isle of Wight. After that she walked into a fully furnished house.
The boyfriends and fiancés who used to gather at Anchorage Road got on well together. Betty: “Mother was crying as she helped me to get ready on my wedding day”.
May married in June 1940 when they were in St. Bernard’s Road. She remembers barbed wire on the beach at Bournemouth and Australian soldiers around. They talk about Jack who was in Malta, which was bombed. How later he had a breakdown and went to a home belonging to Lord Cholmondeley, which was a treatment centre for those suffering from PTSD.
HMS Wolfspite (?) is mentioned.
There are other wartime memories. Zillah admits enjoying the war years, whereas Betty says she felt rather cut off in Whitley Bay near Newcastle. May was working in the town clerk’s office in Leicester. It was in 1942 that she received the famous telegram about her husband Ray. She describes Ray’s injury. Connie’s husband, Ted Tarplett, somehow made his way to see Ray (presumably across the Egyptian or Libyan desert); Jack also contrived somehow to meet Ray and Ted. During his convalescence Ray grew geraniums in the desert, but, says May, he was bored out of his mind. Apparently, the wound he received affected him for years afterwards. I asked what life was like for the wives who were left at home. May says “we were super optimists, even when the Germans got to Jersey”. Regarding the GIs who were as the saying goes ‘overpaid oversexed and over here’, Betty says that Sutton park was “strewn with you-know-what”. Once there was a drunken soldier on their parents’ doorstep and they protected him from the military police. May mentions a German POW camp near them. Betty remembers that when war was declared they were in Clacton, and that they had booked to go to the circus that night. May was at Ray’s parents’ home. The announcement came over the radio and there was an air raid siren straight away afterwards, almost inducing panic. Zillah went straight up to her mother’s. It was a Sunday and they had to put blackout over the windows. She remembers a time when they had a very thick fog during the blackout. Kath got lost. There were no street lights, no light from any of the houses, so in the end Kath had to knock on someone’s door to find out where she was. Memories of air raid wardens knocking on the door. Betty seeing a bomb coming down on a parachute. Fred was in the fire brigade. Betty’s children were not evacuated. She admits there was a lot of propaganda. Pop was still working at the power station during the war. He died in 1949. Jack obviously suffered a lot mentally from his war experience. He didn’t talk about it much but he did say that the hole in their ship was the size of a house and that some men completely lost their nerve. Then there were memories of VE-Day. After which we talk about the nuclear threat and the post-Cold War world. Then I say, “I must look what time my train to Brighton is”. Which confirms that this was indeed the last of the Deasington tapes. There is some more conversation, off topic, about her granddaughter Rebecca’s last year at university and about my attempts to learn Turkish. Zillah says, “Are you going to let them hear a little of what you’ve recorded?”
And that, more or less, is the end.