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WITHAM STREET

Sunday 27 August 1944.

It was a blustery day although the sun was stretching over the fenlands to Lincoln where we were celebrating our street entering the war. We had finally been given the chance to do our bit. The Yanks Were Coming — Over Here. Well, they were already over here really. In fact, they were swarming over the whole of Lincolnshire, but we hadn’t had much to do with them up till then. They weren’t an active part of our lives. Now they would be on our doorstep as our guests.

We had a whopping big banner hanging between two lampposts: ‘Witham Street Welcomes You’. The officer who had come to inspect the housing offered by the volunteer families had told everyone it was our rightful duty to offer hospitality to war-battered servicemen. They were on a rest and recuperate scheme and needed to sample real home comfort. Witham Street area had been promised three men, but in the end only two were assigned to us and only one was a Yank. The other was one of our own — it was a real disappointment.

Now the big day was here with everyone anxious to look the men over. All the women and a handful of embarrassed looking chaps were waiting to applaud loud and long. As the hour drew near, the sun finally climbed over the cathedral hill and smiled in good cheer. A faint chorus of ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ gathered momentum until it became a call of triumph.

“And we’re going to do them proud,” Mum acclaimed in an ardent but trembling voice, wiping my nose with a starched hanky for the fourth time.

The way our street was decked out would have done King George VI, or even Winston Churchill himself, proud. Bunting criss-crossed the road from one bedroom window to another in sagging lines. Flags were everywhere. We children had tiny hand-held ones made of paper, which fluttered in the breeze. Tea-towel size ones were tacked in front windows or pinned to doors. Tablecloth size Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes, side by side, were fluttering in harmony from wooden flagpoles made out of props normally used for holding up washing lines. They had been hoisted to roof guttering height. There was even a ‘God Bless the Men Who Fight’ banner emblazoned across the baffle wall.

Almost all the women from the street were out there, hoping by this single act to make up for having passed almost all of the five years of the war so far in relative ease. The Browns were out in force. Tilly Brown was standing beside Mum, her arms folded, resolute and challenging. She would have pleased the most exacting sergeant major if his troops had stood like that in their landing craft before reaching the beaches of Dunkirk. She had her black dress on, which had white frills down the front. Being the size of Tessie O’Shea, but without the charisma, she l