After the war was over...

At Theatr Dwyfor last night a member of the audience came on stage just before the performance was due to begin, and asked the rest of us to observe a one minute silence with him in memory of the late actor and playwright Wil Sam.

At once I was transported back to the school classroom at Troedyrallt School. It was there that we held our very first one minute silence, because the war was over. The teacher told us this was a wonderful thing because now no more people would have to die. I remember feeling somewhat bewildered as well as glad. I'd been born during the war and it had not occurred to me that it would ever end. I was four.

A few days later Great Aunt Kate came in from shopping on Saturday morning to announce that a neighbour had just died.

'But she can't have died!' I cried. 'The war's over and nobody's going to die any more.'

And it had to be explained to me that people would still die of natural causes. The world would get too overcrowded otherwise, the grown-ups said. My mother said that after the 1st WW people danced in the streets to celebrate its end, but nowadays people had more consideration for those for whom the end came too late because they had already lost a loved one. Somehow, that rather took the shine off the end of the war for me.

Rationing still continued. We still needed those precious coupons before we could spend our pennies on sweets. A con-man played a nasty trick on the manager of Pwllheli Woolworths, selling him a great load of off-coupon sweets from somewhere. They were off-coupon because they contained no sugar, only saccharine; after only a few days they began to rot and had to be thrown out.

When I was five my mother came out of mourning. I can see her now, standing at the full-length wardrobe mirror in her new pale-grey suit, with grey court shoes, a lilac chiffon scarf, grey leather gloves, and a little grey pork-pie hat with a lilac feather in a lilac ribbon on it, perched at a jaunty angle on her black curls. Like all young women then she was made up with Pond's face powder held in place with Pond's vanishing cream, and bright red lipstick. But to me she looked much more beautiful than anyone else.

I think people suspected her of buying extra clothes coupons because she always dressed so smartly. But she was clever with her sewing machine, and quite often exchanged her old clothes for coupons too. Many people at that time were too poor to spend all their coupons so it made sense for them to trade their unused ones for good second hand clothes. One day a shabby looking woman trailing a boy a little younger than myself came to the door. She told me in a whisper that she had some clothes coupons to sell to my mother. But my mother told the woman no, she never bought coupons. She said the woman could have some clothes instead. The woman shook her head. She didn't need clothes, she needed money to pay the rent. Then my mother offered her some of my old clothes which were like new but too small for me. The woman said she had no girls, only this little boy, so they would be no use to her. Her husband spent his money on drink, she said. It had been all right when he was away in the war, she'd had the house-keeping money through the post from the army, but now she couldn't get it off him. The rent was due the next morning and she didn't know what to do. My mother said sorry, but she couldn't help.

Later I asked her why. She explained that she could go to prison for buying coupons, and she didn't know the woman at all. Maybe the police had set her up. But I still think the woman was genuine.