War Stories III (6 page)

London, England
15 September 1940

I was born in the East End of London. Everybody was poor in those days, so we weren't any poorer than other people, and my dad had a bad illness in 1934, so he never got a job again. But my mum went to work as a tent finisher. I had two brothers that worked and they used to give mum a pound a week, and she used to buy their clothes out of that. Dad died when he was sixty.

I won a scholarship, to go to high school—we got one pound and eight a month as a grant. I learned dressmaking at school, and I went to work in a factory making brassieres for a German man who was interned as soon as the war started. His factory was closed that morning—but that afternoon I went to work as a sewing machine operator in factory making army overcoats in the East End of London.

I was just nineteen when the war came, and was engaged to a nice boy but he was called up right away. Pretty soon, all our boyfriends left. Lots of them never came home. They died in France or North Africa or at sea.

We thought that was as bad as it could get, but then the Germans started the bombing here at home. At first it was far away—in Plymouth or Portsmouth, Bristol, Birmingham. But then they started coming after London.

Our factories were all bombed. Some days we headed off to work to find that the factory had been hit during the night. Once we were sent to Kent, to pick hops in the fields. It was a beautiful autumn day and then we heard the German bombers high overhead, heading for London. We couldn't see the planes—just the vapor trails they leave—hundreds of them. They told us to get in the ditches and from there, lying on our backs, we watched as our fighters climbed up to meet them.

The fight went on for a long time, right overhead and it was terrible, really terrible—but you couldn't stop watching overhead. I can still see the parachutes coming down—I don't know whether they were ours or theirs—but there were a lot of them.

Another time, in London, my sister had just had a baby, and we were at the market when the air raid warning went off. So, we ran home, went in the Anderson Underground station shelter, and stayed for hours. We were terrified. When we came out, the bombing was finished, but everything was ablaze. For miles along the docks, ships and everything was alight. And, of course, those who had lost their homes were milling about, trying to recover some belongings and get to a shelter.

Late in the fall, I guess it was the end of September, the Germans pretty much stopped coming in the daylight and started just bombing just at night. All of England was under a strict blackout—meaning no lights could show. If we had a night shift at the factory, we had to walk in the middle of the road and let the moonlight guide us. It was frightening, walking in the blackout. If it was a moonlight night, we knew the Germans would be coming to bomb. If it was a
rotten
night, they usually wouldn't come. But if it was a nice moonlight night, we thought, “Well, tonight's the night they'll come.”

The worst thing was when our own house got bombed. The air raid warning must have been late so as the siren went off we raced for the shelter and the sky was already full of planes. We could hear our Spitfires and
Hurricanes right over our neighborhood and then
bam, bam, bam,
the anti-aircraft guns were all going. We were all terrified.

When we came out the shelter, three houses were completely bombed, and there was a man, who had been standing on the step watching the air raid. He was a bit of a cripple, a tiny little man. And he was blown to smithereens. As we come out the shelter, you could see bits of him lying about. But the chap next door who had hid under the stairs, he was saved. Our house was badly blasted and we had to move to another place that the council found for us.

The people really pulled together. Everyone tried to help each other. If someone had a shop that got bombed, they would try to open up again right away. “It's business as usual,” we'd say, and even if everything was bombed, shops opened up to carry on. We were more worried about our fellows in the army.

We never thought the war would finish. Wherever you went, somebody was being killed. But somehow or other we seemed to take it all in our stride. And we got on with our work—
if
we had a place of work to go to the next morning. I mean, we lost everything, me and mum. I also lost a brother in the war. But we were defiant.

Outskirts of London
11 December 1939

When the war started I was nine and was told that we were all getting shot at, because we were British. People were expecting to be raided by the Luftwaffe. We had a choice of two sorts of shelters from the government
for our flat. One of them was called the “Militant Shelter.” It was a large steel box, which was erected inside the house. It had a very strong steel frame with steel mesh sides. You raised the sides of the mesh, put mattresses and the like inside, and the family slept there. If the house collapsed during a bombing raid, it would fall around you—but you'd eventually be dug out. And that kind of shelter did save a lot of people.

My family didn't go for one of those. We went for an “Anderson Shelter,” which was a corrugated steel arch delivered to your backyard. Then you dug a hole, placed the arch over the hole and poured concrete over the arch. It was sort of garden shed made of corrugated steel and concrete. Once set up, you'd put as much earth as you could on top of the thing and install a blast door on the front. After that you put bunks inside. We slept in that from the start of the air raids, until the spring of 1941. For the whole of the winter of 1940–41, we slept outside in the corrugated shed during the air raids.

The early daylight raids were pretty obvious. This air raid siren would sound and we were all supposed to take cover. Sometimes we just stood about outside the Anderson Shelter watching to see if anything would happen. Eventually, you'd see the Luftwaffe fly over us on their way to the London docks. And once they started bombing we had to take extra care—we lived close to the target, so we were in the line of fire all the time. And we got heavily bombed during the Battle of Britain. During the daylight raids, you'd see these large formations coming over. I don't know, they were up ten to fifteen thousand feet, I suppose. We could see the Spitfires going after the German fighters and the Hurricanes were mostly aiming at the bomber formations. And then we'd hear the gunfire: the machine guns and the heavier
thump
of the Me-109s' cannon.

And when our fighters were out of the way, there was a lot of anti-aircraft fire. That was the noisiest element of the whole performance, because we had anti-aircraft batteries all around us, and they made a tremendous racket. And at that point you more or less had to take cover because now there was shrapnel falling from the exploding anti-aircraft shells.

It was a popular activity for schoolboys like me at the time, after a raid, to go rushing around the streets looking for these little pieces of metal, putting them in a cardboard box and collecting the shrapnel.

There was a discussion between my mother and father about whether I should be evacuated safely out of the city. There were two evacuation options for British children. One was to evacuate to Canada. That was particularly attractive early in the summer of 1940, when a German invasion was a definite threat. A lot of people decided that they wanted their children safe overseas. The other choice was being evacuated to the English countryside where it was a lot less likely that the children would be killed in a bombing raid. Tens of thousands of young British children were relocated under this program but my parents finally decided they didn't want to do that to me because I would become somebody else's child. So, thankfully, I never left. I was there for the whole of the Battle of Britain and the “Blitz” afterward.

The sound of an air raid has stayed with me. Although, the funny thing is, I suppose nine-year-old boys are very resilient creatures. I don't remember being very terrified by any of this stuff. It was all a big adventure.

By the autumn of '40, the Luftwaffe commenced regular night raids—which meant that we were getting bombed twenty-four hours a day. During that period there was one particularly heavy night raid when we were all in the Anderson Shelter. It was the early hours of the morning—pitch-black night. There was a tremendous racket with all the anti-aircraft guns firing, but terribly ineffective. But the fact they were making a lot of noise made us feel better.

I could hear the droning of the German aircraft going overhead and the continuous screams of bombs, making sort of a whistling, rushing noise. And then, when they got very close, a tremendous whistling roar. There was this one load of bombs, four of them, that hit very close—and I could hear each bomb scream and then the explosion as each the bomb hit the ground.

Immediately after the first explosion I heard the second bomb—and another huge explosion, this one bigger. Then the Anderson Shelter
rocked when a third bomb went off. It felt like the Anderson Shelter was actually at sea. Finally there was a loud thump, but no explosion. And we sat there.

The raid went on and on and eventually petered out. Dawn came and we ventured out of the shelter to see what was going on—the shelter was just behind our house. In front of our house there was a large hole in the ground. A bomb had gone into this hole but hadn't gone off. It was just sitting there. The civil defense people were roaring about trying to clear the area. My father grabbed our family and said, “Get some bedding; we're off to Number 12 up the road.”

When I had a look at the street—a typical suburban 1930s street with the houses joined together in townhouse style—there were places where the three previous bombs had carved great holes in the street. There were two or three houses missing. We were still clutching the bedding and walking up the street. And now the daylight raids had just started. Sirens went off again. And we could see a big German formation coming over the top of us.

We were about five houses away, when there was this enormous explosion. And it felt like the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere. I whipped around in time to see the front of our house fall. The initial reaction was they must be bombing us again. But then I realized that that the bomb that had landed in front of our house had just gone off—it obviously had a delay fuse. It blew the front of our house away.

The RAF fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain were our heroes. When I was a boy, they were knights in shining armor. One of my heroes was Douglas Barter, the “legless ace.” Though he lost both legs, he still served as a fighter leader throughout the Battle of Britain.

All of this influenced my desire to become a Royal Air Force officer. I joined the Cadet Force as a schoolboy—the equivalent of the American Civil Air Patrol—and as soon as I turned eighteen, I joined the RAF and made a career of flying fighters for my country. I guess there were many of us who were patriots in those days.