Norwich was a pretty typical New England rural town when I grew up. Although World War II was a huge event in our country and had many repercussions on everyone at home and abroad, I didn’t feel it as anything extraordinary. Certainly I didn’t notice any privations. I was, after all, only a year old when the US entered the war – so wartime life was simply life to me. My parents, on the other hand, may have been quite affected.

We had enormous gardens. Mother canned almost everything she could including all manner of vegetables which they grew, local fruits and berries which they gathered or picked, the deer and small game which Daddy successfully hunted, and the chickens which they raised. Other meats when available were obtained at the Parkers’ Meat Market, “down at the end of our street,” a small building next to the big red brick house about a half mile up Main Street on the left from what is now Dan and Whit’s General Store.

My father had been too young to go to war in the First World War and too old to enlist in the Second. He served in the Norwich unit of the Vermont State Guard which was, I think, a precursor to the Vermont National Guard.

He and many other men in Norwich wore uniforms, trained in military maneuvers, and stood guard as look-outs for enemy air planes that might enter from Canada. The look-out in Norwich was up beyond Meeting House Hill in a cabin called Clapps Cabin. To get there, the men would drive up out of Norwich on Union Village Road just to the height of land, park there and hike up a path where Old Coach Road is today.

My memory is that my father stood guard only at night.

I remember distinctly that when my father put on his uniform, I thought he was “going off to war,” of course, not knowing at all what “war” was. It was just something I had heard and associated with his leaving the house in the evening in his fatigue uniform. I was enormously proud of him. It seemed like such a brave and daring thing to do. He looked so handsome in his uniform and he carried a gun (in my memory if not in fact). In later years, when I told him how I had felt, he was bemused and reminded me that he simply had hiked up to Clapps Cabin and stared at the sky. Hmmm. I guess he didn’t think it was such a big deal at all.

There was food rationing throughout the country and everyone, including children, were issued ration books with stamps in them. When sugar or meat or coffee was available, a family could purchase only the amount allowed by the number of ration stamps that it had. In the later years of the war, I can remember going with my mother or grandmother to Merrills’ General Store (where Dan and Whit’s is now) with my ration book in hand, giving it to the store clerk and watching him take the stamps out of my book. I can’t bring up a memory of what the clerk did with those stamps, however. I do remember that we always got our maximum allowance of sugar whenever it was available, and that often times, we had several bags of it stored away in the Den “stairway closet” – with the door locked, of course. What fantasies my brother and I had of dipping into bowls of sugar, eating all the sugar we could ever want — “sweet tooths” both of us!

Probably we didn’t buy butter at the store although it too was rationed. Our milk, delivered to our back porch in glass bottles a couple days a week, was not homogenized, probably not pasteurized either. The cream rose to the top, and Mother poured it off into a canning jar. She would leave it on the window sill for the rest of the day, maybe until the next day. Then she, and sometimes my brother and I, would shake it and shake it and shake it. After what seemed like a terrific effort, a ball would form and grow until almost half of the liquid had solidified into a soft loaf sitting in the middle of liquid. Voilà, we had butter (and butter milk for baking).

More about World War II in Norwich later.

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