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Guli, Jack, Sheila and Robin in the garden at 2 Durdham Park
Our life in England was to be so different from that we had left behind in India. For one thing the whole country was bruised, grey, exhausted, and impoverished. Troops were swarming everywhere all trying to find their way back home, though demobilisation was to take many, many years. Remember, six million men went to war and they all had to demobilised gradually, over a period of about four or five years back into their civilian jobs. Robin gives me to understand that he had never thought we should settle in England, and that he had assumed that after a short time we would return to Australia, to what he regarded as our normal life, and indeed I think if our father had had his way he would have gone back also to somewhere more remote – he didn’t like the idea of urban life at all. His one object had always been to have a farm, and when we were in Australia he was constantly bombarding my mother with suggestions that we should go and live in the outback, safe from enemy attack, and start a smallholding.
This of course was not to be, and we ended up at the end of the war back in Durbancock, in the middle of Bristol in the house [ at 2 Durdham Park] which was part of the legacy my great-aunts had left to my mother.
Helen Sturge died in early 1945, and in a letter dated 16 July 1945 the other beneficiaries of her will agreed that the house would be given to Guli as her share of the inheritance.
This meant that we all had to go back to school, that is with the exception of Barbara who had already done part of her clerical training, but she went back to clerks college for a refresher course in shorthand and typing, whereas I went to Duncan House school, a day school on the promenade in Bristol, where there were about thirty students, and there I met my lifelong friend Patricia Hayes, and Lynette Holman, later to become Sheely, both of whom I have retained firm friendships with over the years. Robin on the other hand had to try and get the 11-plus to get into Bristol Grammar School, and as he had done none of the right subjects such as algebra, geometry and latin, he was unable to pass. But fortunately Uncle Herbert [Milliken] got him a place at Clifton College prep school and subsequently he went on to the main school, so that his future was assured [he went on to study at St Edmunds Hall Oxford].
The blue plaque at Durdham Park
Meanwhile our daily life was one of utter frugality. Rationing was still very strict. After the war things that had never been rationed before, like coal and bread, were added to it, and the house became freezing, particularly in the winter of 1947 when as I recall one of our guests got out of bed in the middle of the night and put the hearth rug on top of her blankets because she was so cold. All meat, butter, cheese, tins, jams, bread, etc were all rationed very strictly, and I think our mother had an awful struggle to find enough food to fill our tummies three times a day, particularly as we took in paying lodgers as well to help meet the bills. At one time we seemed to have a never ending stream of guests who wanted to come and see us after the war. Relations of all sorts all brought their ration books of course, but the meagre amount it contributed to the daily food allocation did not help much. My mother and her sisters seemed to enjoy endless conversations in which they caught up on all the things that had happened to them during the war. They also played a great deal of bridge.
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