Growing up through the War

The day war broke out.

So there we were. It was 11 o'clock on Sunday the 3rd of September 1939 and the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had just spoken on the wireless telling us all that we were now at war with Germany.
A few minutes later the air-raid sirens sounded and everyone rushed out to their front gate to see what was happening. Suddenly round the corner came a couple on a tandem, already wearing their tin hats and shouting at us all to “get inside.” It turned out that the Authorities had decided to test the sirens, and the couple on the tandem were testing their new status as A.R.P wardens. So that was our introduction to six years of war.

That September I was going into the commercial class at school to learn shorthand, typing and bookkeeping, and my first few of these lessons were spent outside in the open because a ruling had come from “on high” stating that only a certain number of pupils could be inside the school at any one time. So some of us had to have our first lessons outside. Luckily it was a lovely warm September, I seem to remember and anyway that ruling was soon dropped.

Dunkirk

I remember the whole school being assembled in the hall one day in May 1940 and our headmistress telling us what was happening to our forces over in France, and what dangers we were all facing. I remember it was a lovely sunny day and thinking to myself, surely nothing really awful could happen to us, could it?

Then the rumours came that German troops could shortly be dropping from the skies over Britain dressed as nuns. My older brother and I were excited at the thought and ran home to tell our mum. She looked as I had never seen her look before, and she said, so seriously, “you don’t know what you’re saying”. She had lost her dad, our granddad, in the 1st world war - he was killed on the Somme — so she knew what tragedies we might all be facing, but to Bas and me everything at that time seemed exciting.

The Battle of Britain.

I remember mum at the front door talking to a neighbour, and suddenly noticing swirling black dots in the sky over towards Croydon and beyond, with what looked like puffs of smoke coming from them. She called to me to come and look and we realised after a few minutes that they were planes firing at each other — our first sight of a “dog fight” - The Battle of Britain had begun. From then on it seemed we had to dodge between home and school in between raids, because the sirens would go at any time during the day and there would be another “dog fight” going on quite near, and sometimes practically overhead. Of course all the boys thought it was great fun picking up the spent cartridge cases that were lying around after each raid. Often we were all sitting in the school shelters long after it was time to go home. I remember we had sing songs and some of us knitted while we were down there. I remember one afternoon we boys and girls sitting on the fence behind our houses, and suddenly becoming aware of a plane coming towards us flying quite low and making a flapping noise. It was a Spitfire with a damaged wing and it came very low over the top of us. We believe it crash-landed on the common not far away. (The all clear must have already sounded; otherwise I don’t think we would have been sitting on the fence!)

The Blitz Begins

Saturday 7th September 1940
It was towards teatime and dad and I were in the kitchen. The air raid sirens had sounded and, as we looked out of the back door towards London we saw huge plumes of smoke rising in the distance. My stomach turned over and I thought, “What is going to happen next?” The enemy planes were over in their hundreds and were bombing the London docks. They came back again after dark.
Sunday the 15th September, the paper mills somewhere in South London were bombed, and the sky was dark with flakes of paper falling everywhere.

We lived just outside London, in Mitcham, and immediately outside the ring of barrage balloons that encircled London. I loved seeing them rising into the air and always thought of them as friends. Sometimes

one would break free from its moorings and go soaring away over the rooftops.

Evacuation

It must have been about the beginning of October 1940 that my brother Terry and I were evacuated with the school. I remember our mum standing at the school gates with the other mums, all crying their eyes out, and me trying not to cry because I had my little brother with me and he wasn’t crying, and I was the big sister at 14! We were only allowed to take one very small case each, so we were all wearing 2 or 3 jumpers or jerseys and probably 2 pairs of knickers and 2 vests. So we were off, with our gas-masks slung over our shoulders and our one little case each.

The next thing I remember is being on the train, going we knew not where, until whispers started going around that we were approaching Bristol, but Bristol had been badly bombed the night before, so there were long delays before we were able to pass through the station.

My next memory is of being in a church or school hall and people were coming in and choosing two girls or two boys, and my little brother and I being about the last two left there. Then a nice lady came in and said to whoever was in charge, “why are those two children left?”, and being told it was because we were boy and girl, but this kind lady said
“I’ll take them.” I think our teachers, some of whom had come with us to see us settled in, were getting quite anxious about us.

This kind lady looked after us and nursed us both through the measles. She had a son of about 13, a daughter in her late teens, her husband and an elderly gentleman evacuee, all to look after as well. The old gent came from Battle near Dover, so maybe he had been bombed out from there.

You know it wasn’t only London school children who were evacuated at that time. We were from the suburbs, living in a house with a bathroom and an inside toilet, and we went to a house where the tin bath was brought in from the yard once a week and filled with water heated in the kitchen copper. My brother was bathed first, then I bathed, and then the rest of the family. I don’t know whether they all bathed in the same water or whether it was changed halfway through!
Our mum came down to see us a couple of times. She used to have to get a form from the town hall and send it to our lady to sign and send it

back to mum so that she would get some help with the train fare. No one was very well-off in those days.

On my way to school each day I passed a newspaper stand, and the headlines were always “London heavily bombed again last night.” I used to feel anxious for Mum and Dad and Bas and our little brother Roy, who was just 4 years old.

Then one night when there was a “bomber’s moon” the enemy came over and bombed us in our evacuation town. It was apparently quite a heavy raid because people were running onto the beach to get away from the bombs. Fortunately, our end of the town was only lightly hit, but overall there were a lot of casualties, including some evacuees from our school.

About a year ago I found a letter from our Dad saying we had been evacuated to keep us safe from the air-raids, and now look what had happened! Anyway, soon after that we came home to the air-raids, but not every night now. We had an indoor shelter called a Morrison shelter, which seemed to take up more than half the dining room. I was back at my old school finishing my commercial course and Terry was back at his infant school, and we children were given leave to get to school late in the morning after a raid the previous night. I seem to remember we all stayed at school the whole day that time, but I can’t remember whether meals were put on for us or whether we took sandwiches.

My youngest brother Ken was born in August 1941, just as I had left school, and I remember my mum having a little weep when she was presented with his “gas mask,” which was like a large box into which he had to be laid. We were given instructions on how to use it, but it frightened me so much I have forgotten completely how we would have had to handle it. We all prayed that there would never be a gas attack.

Out in the world of work

So time went on and the air-raids were still disrupting our sleep and our lives. The schoolboys picked up shrapnel on the way to school and had contests as to who had found the biggest piece that morning, and our dad had to go off to fire watch 2 or 3 times a week - he worked for

a large department store. He used to go on his bike and would be cycling home in the early hours of the morning. He said he was often stopped and asked what he had got in his saddlebag. Whether it was a policeman or an air-raid warden who stopped him I don’t know but dad found it quite amusing. Did they think he was a “Fifth Columnist?”

Several landmines were dropped on our town. These were much more destructive than “ordinary” bombs. They came down on parachutes and would wipe out a whole street of houses. One night one came down and became entangled in the telephone wires in a road quite near us, but we were just out of the danger zone, thank goodness. We were asked to take in a family for the night until the bomb disposal squad had made the landmine safe. This they did, fortunately. What an awful job those men had, and how brave they were.

From about September 1942 I was fortunate enough to work for a very large company making transmitter/receivers for tanks, and for the R.A.F, and equipment for the Navy. As it was such a large company we were entertained every so often in our lunch breaks with wonderful dance bands such as Geraldo and his orchestra and the Sky Rockets, (the R.A.F dance band) and well known comedians. We also had a visit one day from one our most famous stars of the silver screen, Margaret Lockwood. And I mustn’t forget Music While
You Work, which was broadcast every morning from 10:30 to 11 o’clock. The ladies working on the factory floor, actually assembling the sets, used to sing-along and it was a cheery half-hour. Being just a lowly shorthand-typist in the Production Department I was sometimes given the task of taking the necessary paperwork down to the Inspection and Despatch Departments, and really enjoyed walking through the factory when Music While you Work was on.

As I was working for a Company that was on War Work I was not called up into the Women’s Forces when I reached my 18th birthday, but I had joined the Girls’ Training Corps at 16, and enjoyed learning to drill and marching, and also learning Morse Code and Semaphore. We used to march to church on a Sunday morning with the Sea Cadets or the Army Cadets and sometimes the A.T.C. (The Air Training Corps.)

So the War went on, with us all trying to live our lives as normally as possible. Then came “D Day” June 6th 1944. We were all at work that day and there was an air of anxiety around because of all the husband, fiancés, sons and brothers who might be in the first assault, but also great excitement. It was round about this time that the doodlebugs appeared in the skies over London. They came over at all

times of the day so were very disruptive, and we would sometimes stand and watch them once they had gone over and we knew we were safe from that particular one, but then the motor would cut out and it would drop like a stone and we knew it had caused devastation somewhere. After a few months and while we were still dodging doodlebugs, the enemy started sending over the rocket, which we named the V2. This one came over silently and the first you knew of it was the sound of a large explosion. These rockets caused even more damage than the doodlebugs. Looking back at my 1945 diary I noticed that we had to endure this disruption of our lives until at least the end of February 1945.

At last, on the 8th May 1945 came VE Day. The war in Europe was over and we celebrated with street parties. There were quite a few of these on different evenings, and we sometimes didn’t get to bed until about 3’o clock in the morning. Our company put on a victory ball at Wimbledon Town Hall about a month later, and my friend Vera and I cycled there and back with our dance dresses in carrier bags on our handlebars. Cycling had become almost a way of life with us all through the war. Because, although public transport was very good, even during the Blitz, the last buses left at around 10’o clock which was usually too early for us youngsters.

A couple of snatched memories.- One of my brother Terry and I, during our evacuation, taking a brisk walk along the promenade on a Saturday morning in Weston-Super-Mare, and seeing the Tiger Moths, which were used for training RAF pilots, flying out over the bay.

Another is a memory of going down to the tube station after a Saturday afternoon trip to the cinema in London, having to carefully step over the feet of the people already down there with their blankets and pillows and all the paraphernalia needed for the night. This would be their nightly routine, even if the sirens had not sounded. This would have been later on in the war long after the blitz of 1940/41, but the
people felt safer down in the tube, and the sirens did often go around 6 o’clock in the evening, although the raids were sporadic by then. At that time the terror of the doodlebugs and the V2 rockets was yet to come.

Did I dream this or were the tops of the letterboxes painted yellow so that if a gas attack occurred the paint would turn bright green?

I am grateful for having been given the opportunity to recall my memories of that momentous time.

Along with a lot of other people I have always felt that we would not have won the 2nd World War without the leadership of Sir Winston Churchill.

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