Thursday update

I've been running around this morning.  I drop all my small change into a jar on the kitchen window sill and when it is full I take it to the bank.   I just love their automatic change counting thing (yeah I know, I should get a life) I tip it in and help it down the chute, and watch the total ratcheting up, which in this case came to nearly $100.   Have banks in England got round to gadgets like this, or do the tellers still weigh out the change?

I've no idea what an 'Ike' dollar is.

A bit later on I went to Communion then seven of us had lunch at the Bricktown Brewery, which was very nice.   I was first out of the car park. took what I thought was the most direct route there, and still arrived last, my friends had ordered my tea, and specified the 'boiling water' and the creamers.

 

I am still very into my books on the East End, and GI Brides.   I didn't know this, but they left for the States from Croydon Airport, which handled all aircraft to and from the States.   No wonder it was so heavily bombed.   The author talks a lot about always going around with her gas mask.   When I was a baby living with my aunties and grandparents on the edge of the airport, I first of all had a 'baby' gas mask which was something they had to put me into.  Then as I grew I got one that was supposed to look like Mickey Mouse,  it still looked  like a gas mask to me and in retrospect a very scary Mickey Mouse.

 

All children of school age had to be evacuated - with their schools and teachers - to a safe place, I've seen old news reels of them setting off on trains, clutching their gas masks (and not Mickey Mouse ones) and  I am really thankful I wasn't old enough for that, and instead I got to grow up with  people who loved me.  And young as I was, sirens and the air raid shelter at the bottom of Grandma's garden was normal life.   I had no awareness of the danger we lived under.

From books I have since read, I understand that when these children  got to their destinations they were all lined up in village halls, and one by one they were picked out, 'chosen' as it were, by the families taking them in.  Which is fine if you're one of the first to be picked, but how dreadfully mortifying if you were last.  I would have thought that did more psychological harm than any amount of bombing.

This was Thursday's 'update'  but as it is now Saturday morning I will hit 'publish'.    And thank you Ken and loved ones for your birthday wishes.   Now I'm 'really' pushing 80!