A Child's War (5 page)

The raids, with their noise and the constant danger, could indeed have dreadful effects on older people, but most children took them in their stride. In
The City That Wouldn’t Die
, Richard Collier relates the following story. It is the early hours of 11 May 1941, and London’s worst raid is at its height:

Near Millwall Outer Dock, Station Officer Bernard Belderson and a police sergeant met a small girl skipping unconcernedly along the road, eyes glistening with excitement, only a coat thrown over a thin night-dress. When she answered that she was just having a look around, Belderson expostulated: ‘But look, there’s a German aeroplane up there.’

‘Huh,’ she grunted. ‘That’s all right. That square-headed bastard couldn’t hit a haystack.’

David George was in Ealing: ‘Once a stick of bombs landed in the road next to us. When my mum came to wake me up I was lying on the floor next to my bed – the impact of the bombs must have tumbled me out of my bed – but I’d slept through it all!’

In 1943 one woman air-raid warden wrote:

the vast majority [of children] did not seem to be much affected. I have seen some children who would stand shivering and sweating in a shelter, and no amount of coaxing would induce them to utter a word. But most of them slept soundly, and only showed a healthy excitement. Every morning one was besieged by crowds of small boys and girls: ‘Got any shrapnel, Miss? Billy got a shell cap yesterday – give me one, Miss.’ Collecting shrapnel and bits of bombs was more the rage than the vanished cigarette card had been.

Charles Harris recalls the craze: ‘I used to collect shrapnel – my best piece fell down in the road beside me when I was running to the shelter – it was red hot. I also had a lump of parachute cord off a land mine, it was about an inch thick, made of green silk.’ George Parks of Deptford also remembers collecting shrapnel: ‘After a raid the kids’d all pour out and come back with loads of shrapnel. My old man’d say: “What you effing got there? Get rid of it.” But I always kept the best bits!’

It could be dangerous – in
Children of the Blitz
, Robert Westall tells of one 14-year-old civil defence messenger who kept an unexploded incendiary as a souvenir:

One day I took it to school in the saddlebag of my bike and showed it to my friends there. It passed from hand to hand and during assembly one of the ‘wags’ had to test it by dropping it on the floor. The bomb detonated and in the chaos that resulted the hall filled with smoke and the boys evacuated it in record time to reassemble in the courtyard. . . . It was eventually put out, but left a crater in the parquet flooring and damaged the honours list.

The bombing tended to happen in phases; after the Battle of Britain it was mainly, but not solely, at night, and the targets changed. Sometimes the Luftwaffe bombed cities, sometimes ports and factory towns; there might be a massive force of bombers, but sometimes only a few came over, or even just one. Towns all over England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were attacked; particularly badly hit were London, Manchester, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Coventry, Birmingham, Hull, Clydeside and Bristol. Iris Smith:

Bristol got a lot of bombing, near us they were after the railway; about ten or twelve houses along, three houses were destroyed, and another one over the back of us. You never knew what you were going to find when you came out of the shelter in the morning. We were often without water, as the bombs burst the mains, then we went and queued up outside the nearest house that still had water, and carried home buckets full of water. Even hot water was short then, you could only have 6 inches in the bath, and we all took it in turns to use the same water. Later I became a fire-watcher, it wasn’t nice coming home in the morning at six o’clock – I never knew if I was going to see my family or my house again.

The damage was not just from high-explosive bombs. On 29 December 1940 the City of London was attacked with incendiaries: over 1,500 fires were started in what came to be called ‘the Second Great Fire of London’. June Fidler from Peckham: ‘A stick of incendiaries fell down our road. We were in the Anderson at the time. One came through our roof, it burnt my bed and all my toys – I’ll always remember that terrible smell of burning. Mum couldn’t get a new bed, we had to borrow one from a woman whose daughter was evacuated. You just couldn’t replace toys – you
never
lost your Ludo board!’.

Dover and the other coastal towns nearby were regularly shelled by long-distance guns on the French coast, and from June 1944 Britain came under attack from the V-weapons.

‘V’ in this case stood for
Vergeltungswaffen
, German for ‘reprisal weapon’. First came the V1, which had many nicknames: flying bomb, flybomb, doodlebug and buzzbomb were the most common. It was a pilotless aircraft, powered by a pulse-jet motor and containing an explosive warhead in its nose-cone. Cheaply built, the V1s were launched from sites in France and flew until their engines cut out, whereupon they went into a dive and exploded on impact. Their greatest advantage was that they could be launched day or night, in any weather; their biggest disadvantage, that they flew in a straight line, which made them fairly easy to shoot down, either with anti-aircraft fire, or by fighter aircraft. Later the fighters learned how to tip the V1s over so that they exploded harmlessly in the fields. Most were shot down, but the air-raid sirens gave warning of those that got through. People soon learned that you were safe as long as you could hear their engine, a very distinctive sound. Vivien Hatton: ‘I remember watching the doodlebugs being shot down at Addington. The engines made an awful noise, but it was when they stopped you had to worry, that’s when they’d come down with a whooosh. We had a French teacher, Miss Pike, who, when they came over, used to say “You can go out into the corridor, if you like”, but we didn’t want to appear afraid so we’d stay where we were.’ And people learned other tricks; Christine Pilgrim: ‘With the V1s you started counting the moment the engine cut out. You didn’t always hear the blast, but you knew if you got to twenty you were all right.’

From the time the first V1 landed on Bethnal Green on 15 June 1944, up to 100 a day were sent over, almost up to the end of the war.

Sylvie Stevenson remembers:

When the doodlebugs started coming over, we used to do practices in school – if you couldn’t get to the shelter quick enough you had to throw yourself down on the ground. All the corridor windows were bricked up. Once a doodlebug came down near the school; I was off sick that day, when we heard it we all ran into the street. The women were outside saying, ‘Where did it land’, then someone said, ‘The school!’ – they all just ran there, but luckily it was OK. The next day all the kids were replaying what happened, ‘We threw ourselves on the floor like this!’ they kept telling me, and then showed me!

The V2 was a real rocket. Carrying about 1 ton of explosives, it was launched straight up into the upper atmosphere; then, turning, it came straight down, faster than the speed of sound. It was a truly awful weapon, very accurate, and so fast that it could be neither seen nor heard – the explosion was the first anyone knew of it. The first two landed in Chiswick and Epping on 8 September 1944, and they continued to come until 27 March 1945, just a few weeks before Germany surrendered. Unlike the V1, the V2 had few nicknames; perhaps it was just too frightful.

During the war almost 8,000 British children were killed, and a similar number seriously wounded, as a result of enemy action.

One last story of the bombing from David George tells more about the survival of pre-war manners than anything else:

I remember one air raid vividly – I was in the garden of my home, and I had a bag of plums, probably from my nan’s garden. Suddenly the sirens went and the German planes came over – you could see the bombers in the sky. My mother told me to get inside, she said: ‘Mister Hitler is after your plums!’ I ran inside so fast I slipped on the lino and crashed against a door frame, splitting my forehead open – I still have the scar today!

In the midst of the bombing ‘he’ is still referred to as ‘Mister’ Hitler!

Then as now, many children kept pets, and for them the Blitz created particular problems. Most animals hate loud bangs and flashes. Each year on 5 November, Bonfire Night, pet owners are reminded to keep dogs, cats and so on safe indoors – imagine what it was like for animals in the Blitz! The problem was even worse because horses were widely used to pull delivery vehicles, or on farms – it was estimated that there were almost 1.25 million working horses in Great Britain at the time.

Pets were not allowed in public shelters, so owners were advised to take them into their own gas-proof rooms or shelters; those who did not have their own shelter were told to try to send their pets to friends in the country, or, failing that, to have them put down. Christine Pilgrim remembers her pet dog: ‘We had a cocker spaniel, it was dreadfully upset because it wasn’t allowed to come down in the shelter with the rest of us.’

Gas masks were produced for horses, but were expensive at about £2 each. In the First World War, some message-carrying dogs had been fitted with masks, but they had to be specially trained to wear them; in the Second, there were no gas masks for cats or dogs. Although gas-proof boxes and kennels were available, the RSPCA did not recommend them as air had to be pumped in and, should its owner be injured, the animal would suffocate or die of starvation. The RSPCA recommended the following: ‘If gas is used put your dog or cat in their sleeping basket (the sleeping basket could be covered with another of similar size inverted over it), take both into your shelter and put over the animal an ordinary woollen blanket that has been soaked in plain water or a solution of permanganate of potash. Only do this when the rattle warning for gas attack has been given.’ Similarly, birds’s cages should be covered with ‘a blanket soaked in water or bicarbonate of soda solution’.

The government set up a wartime organisation, the National ARP for Animals Committee (NARPAC), which included groups such as the RSPCA and the PDSA. NARPAC street animal guards, all of whom worked voluntarily, kept registers of all animals in their area. A numbered disc was supplied to each animal on the register, enabling the owners of lost or injured animals to be traced. In 1942, the Greenwich deputy ARP controller said: ‘After a raid 7,000 animals were rescued or found homeless, over half that number had to be put to sleep because they had no NARPAC discs.’

Air raids were not the only wartime problem for pet owners; food for pets was in extremely short supply. Alternatives were suggested: dog biscuits and gravy, boiled rice and gravy, brown bread crisped in the oven, horsemeat, parts of cow/sheep not eaten by humans. One complete meal recipe for dogs was: ‘5–6 ounces of stale bread, toasted. Mix with 3–4 ounces of chopped cabbage, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, turnip or other green leaves, mashed and boiled for about 15 or 20 minutes. Moisten the mixture with soup or gravy made from bones or scraps from the table.’ There were even calls in Parliament for a small milk ration for cats.

For pet birds, a suggested diet was stale bread crusts, brown or white, toasted and thoroughly dried, along with grated carrots and then mixed into a crumbly state by adding milk. For green food, lettuce and dandelion were recommended. For bird tables there were many suggestions, including: ‘Soft bacon rind free from fat (which is too useful for cooking purposes to be fed to birds) may be minced finely, this will be appreciated by blackbirds and thrushes.’

A further problem was the black-out; road deaths for dogs and cats, as well as humans, soared.

At the outbreak of war all schools were closed for one week. In Evacuation areas, the children who had stayed put presented a special problem. For them no organised schools were open and although efforts of various kinds were made the problem remained. Most teachers had been evacuated with their schools – for instance, only 300 teachers remained in the whole of London.

However, the school buildings had not been left unused. Families who were ‘bombed out’ had to be rehoused, but this could take several weeks, so short-term rest centres and feeding centres were set up, and school buildings, being very suitable for the task, were often used. Other schools were converted into auxiliary fire stations, emergency ambulance stations, rescue party depots and so on. D.J. Ryall of New Cross had been evacuated from Brockley Central School: ‘over the following six months many of the children came back to London. The school had ceased to function so those that returned had to find others which were set up like Coll’s Road, Peckham.’

In December 1939, London schools began to reopen, but not enough of them – of the 900 elementary schools, only 120 opened their doors again to pupils, although by early 1940 over half the schoolchildren of London were back. Of these, 34,000 were taught in shifts in the remaining schools, but 100,000 had to be tutored at home: groups of children would assemble at a given place, usually one of their homes, and the teacher would come to them, normally twice a week. At first, groups were to be no bigger than six because of the danger of bombing, but later the number grew to twelve, and then to twenty. Charles Harris from Chingford had home tuition:

We had about four hours a week of education, but not in school. About six of us used to go round to Roy Kay’s house, his mother had the teacher there for about two hours, we did the same at the Hintons’.

Later on I went to the secondary school – when the sirens went you could only leave school if somebody came for you. Roy lived near the school and Mrs Kay came for him, she said to me: ‘You can come as well if you like.’ We were cutting across the field when we saw a German bomber coming over, ever so low – we could see the pilot – we all dived into the hedge!

Iris Smith from Bristol remembers: ‘My little sister didn’t go to school. Twice a week the teacher used to go round to No. 35 and my sister and some other children would go there. My sister was younger than the other children so she didn’t do very well.’