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A Childs Memories Of The Times During WW2.
I was six at the outbreak of war & lived near Addlestone in Surrey.& I have quite numerous recollections of my life during the war. My first memory was in daylight , seeing two German planes flying low over the roof tops & firing their guns. There were pieces of metal falling in the street & I recall my father getting angry with me for not coming indoors immediately.
My father was an ex WW1 soldier & had come to Surrey to work in a horticultural nursery but changed his employment at the beginning of the war & worked at the Airscrew factory, Which made laminated mahogany aircraft propellers.
He joined the Local Defence Volunteers & I remember him saying that they had to share old rifles.
Although we lived close to London evacuees were sent to our Village & my mother tried to look after four brothers & sisters who came from Stepney but they found it difficult & after a while they returned home. I remember that for a period of time my infants school at Addlestone could only accommodate us local children for half of each day & the evacuees for the other half.
Slightly later in the war the night bombing started & on occasions one of our neighbours who owned a car would take us to his factory air raid shelter for the night,.
Barrage balloons were a common sight as were searchlights during the night raids.

Sometime around 1941 we moved to the village of Ardleigh near Colchester in Essex.
Our village school had an air raid shelter which we had to go in whenever the siren sounded , but during one morning break we saw a dog fight high up in a blue sky & saw two of our fighters shoot down a German fighter. After this we were quickly sent into the shelter.
At about this time I obtained a copy of the Penguin Aircraft Recognition book. This was a favourite with most boys ,we studied it & could recognise most of the planes in it ,both our own & enemy ones.
We had what we now know were radar pylons in a village near us but nobody knew what their purpose was.
Huge trenches were made particularly near the main railway line close to us which were antitank trenches.
My father joined the local Home Guard & eventually achieved the rank of 2nd Lieutenant I suppose he was more familiar with soldiering than most because he had stayed in the army after WW1 & served in India & Aden. There were stores of bullets & a Sten gun in our house along with Thunder flashes which were like very powerful explosive fireworks used on exercises.
My friends fathers were either in the Home Guard or in the Royal Observer Corps & other men were ARP wardens who among other things strictly enforced the black out so that no lights could be seen by enemy aircraft. There were Land Girls working on the farms around us & later on in the war Italian prisoners also came & worked there.
Everyone had identity cards & gas masks which we were advised to carry. All sorts of leaflets were circulated on such subjects as getting the most out of your garden, this one being called ‘Dig For Victory’. We listened to our Pye radio which was powered by an accumulator, to such people as the Radio Doctor & to comedy programmes like Itma, to Workers Playtime which would come from a factory somewhere in Britain in their lunch time. Children’s Hour at tea time would have stories, one being Larry the Lamb. Uncle Mack. being a presenter.
The local community hall held numerous social events e.g.. dances which were often visited by American airman from the local airbase who used to cycle around the countryside when off duty. Film shows were also popular along with whist drives & pies & peas suppers.
My parents & I saw a very popular film which was about the North Africa campaign called Desert Victory at the Hippodrome cinema in Colchester. I think it must have been produced mainly to boost morale. The cinema was so crowded that we could only get tickets for what they called the Gallery[or the Gods] & cost 7 old pence each. We would go to the Colchester Regal or Playhouse cinemas on a Saturday morning to children’s film clubs which were very popular & noisy affairs. If we were too badly behaved the manager would stop the performance & come on the stage & threaten to stop the films altogether.
At a fete in the village there was an army demonstration of unarmed combat ,some boxing matches & among the other events was an auction where gifts were sold in aid of charity. One lot was a fresh pineapple, where it came from I cant imagine. I don’t think I had ever seen one before. Another lot was a small wrapped parcel & it was described as being worth at least a guinea. The person who bought it for quite a lot of money got a surprise when it turned out to be a box Beechams pills[which used to state on the box’ worth a guinea a box’]
On one occasion I think it was around Christmas all of us school children were taken by a Canadian regiment to a hall somewhere in the Colchester garrison & given a brilliant party with a present to take home, My present was a field gun that fired caps & match sticks.
Pocket money was spent on such things as a bag of chips for an old penny from the local fish and chip shop or we would buy a loaf of bread from the village baker & share it between us. I seem to recall that a large loaf was four & a half old pence & a small loaf was three pence & three farthings. Sweets were on ration & there was very little else to buy.
Close to our school in the centre of the village near the chip shop was the blacksmiths , where we would watch him shoeing the farm horses, which were still very common on farms along with tractors, mainly Fordsons.
There were no combined harvesters in those days. Corn was stacked in the fields & a threshing machine driven by a steam engine processed the corn. Many rats would run out as the stack was reduced in height down to ground level so that they had nowhere else to hide. Rabbits were numerous in the fields & were a very common source of meat for most people, rabbit pie being a favourite.
Children played in the fields & some had to do work particularly if their families ran smallholdings as was the case in our village where they would feed animals collect eggs and so on. We had a goat which we used to get milk from & chickens for eggs.
In the autumn the schools would ask people to collect hips & haws. These were rose hips & the berries from the hawthorn , these were used for making rose hip syrup, which was rich in vitamin C. In our school there was a small store which held stocks of cod liver oil & concentrated orange juice which tasted awful & was given to young children. Every school child had a small bottle of milk each morning. It was a third of a pint & was free. Households were issued with a quantity of a very hard biscuit that looked like a dog biscuit. They were like rocks & tasted like them & I think that they were meant to be kept in case there was an invasion & then used as iron rations.
My father joined a pig club, which meant that when the pig was slaughtered we would have a share in the meat, some of which we cured at home , making bacon .By doing this we had to forego our bacon ration for a long time. The father of my friend kept bees & had extra sugar rations to give to the bees providing a certain amount of the honey went to the submariners.
To save fuel buses would pull a small trailer behind them which produced some kind of gas which the engine ran on but they had difficulty climbing hills. The few people who owned cars put them in storage unless they had an official reason to use them, when they would get a petrol ration for the purpose.
On the occasions when I went on the train to London the two things I remember most was the devastation of the East End on the way to Liverpool Street station & the black soot ,grime & smoke everywhere.
The whole country side was alive with troops on the move right throughout the war. I remember seeing in Colchester at some time during ,or possibly just after the war ended ,an Indian regiment complete with elephants marching through the town. Numerous members of the armed forces could be seen around town in blue trousers which indicated that they were having hospital treatment.
Some of the local boys managed to acquire the auxiliary fuel tanks which were jettisoned when empty, from some American fighter planes & by cutting a hole in the top they could sit inside & use them as canoes on the local pond.
The first time I remember being really frightened was one very bright moonlight night, so light that you could imagine that you could almost see planes in the sky & we could hear enemy planes which started to circle around our area & then we heard the eerie sound of a dive bomber probably a Junkers 88 making the characteristic howling sound as it dives & releases its bombs. It repeated this several times & we could tell it was very close. The next morning we found that it had been bombing houses about a 1/4 mile from us.It was thought the reason it bombed these houses was that they were close to a very straight road known as Dedham Long road, which in turn was fairly close to the runways of the American airfield at Boxted & the German pilot mistook them for airfield buildings.
At one stage before we had a shelter we would wake up a neighbour if they had not heard the siren & the two families would sit in a ditch under the shelter of an old oak tree rather than stay in the house. On reflection it was probably no safer. After this we were issued with an Anderson shelter which we buried at the bottom of our garden & used for the rest of the war. Some of my friends had the alternative Morrison table shelter.
Strips of tin foil were found in the fields which were dropped from German planes.They were used to confuse our defences. I think it was possibly some sort of anti radar device.
A British bomber, I think it was a Lancaster was going on a leaflet raid when it crashed one night into an apple orchard close to where we lived. all of the crew were killed. After the wreckage had been removed, my father who was the farm foreman & other workers cleared the area & from the fragments of uniforms etc. it was obvious that they were an international crew of several nationalities.
Towards the end of the war theV1 missiles known by us as Doodlebugs which were unmanned planes full of explosives were used .We seemed to be on one the flight paths probably from Holland & one night during a raid one came over , its engine cut out immediately overhead but it carried on for about another 11/2miles & crashed destroying a pair of cottages & killing some people. These flying bombs had a very characteristic sound which you could not mistake. It was a harsh rattling noise.
Towards the end of the war a V1 was on show to the public in Colchester. I am not sure how it had been preserved complete but I can recall that it was made up with all sorts of pieces of metal welded together.

One night we could hear a massive number of planes overhead which carried on during the day & we could see a lot were towing gliders. At breakfast time on this morning an American Thunderbolt crash landed by the side of a house & demolished a greenhouse about 200 yards from where we lived . The pilot was unhurt but was furious , saying something like’ Damn it I have missed it’. We then realised that it was D Day that he was referring to & the invasion was under way.
The V2 rockets made everybody nervous as there was no warning and no defence against them but luckily the war ended before they caused too much damage. I seem to recollect seeing the vapour trail of one of these in the sky. These rockets only took about 2 minutes to get from Holland to the point where they exploded & they carried a huge explosive charge.
I cannot remember much about VE [victory in Europe] day but I can recall VJ [victory over Japan] day as we were on our first holiday . It was on the Isle of Wight at my aunt & uncles house when this occured. On the ferry from Portsmouth to Ryde we could see the Sunderland flying boats & all the Royal naval ships at anchor.

Rationing went on for a long while after the war ended & I must have been 14 or 15 before sweets finally came off the ration.
Looking back I can see that we were left to our own devices much more than children are today. We either went to school on the bus or walked, the distance being just over a mile. We would play in the woods , go swimming in the river & once we managed to own a bicycle, generally roam around the countryside. Nobody bothered us unless we got into some mischief when the fear of the village policeman would generally keep us on the rails.
Unfortunately accidents were all too common i.e. falling from trees & farm accidents. On isolated occasions a child was drowned in the local river & boys had accidents whilst playing around with explosive devices .
In retrospect I think that fear for a child of my age was transient occurring mainly during air raids. For the rest of the time I think that us children did much the same things as children have always done.

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