大象传媒

Part 2 of 3 parts

Continued from A8118777

Having returned home from evacuation and restarted at the junior school up the road, my memories are of having to carry our gas masks with us at all times. On at least one occasion, we had an air raid practice and had to go into the school shelters, which were large brick structures with concrete roofs built in the playground. If my memory serves me correctly we were given a packet of biscuits to take with us.

When I first moved up into the Junior School in late 1941 or early 1942, I can remember sitting in class, reciting the times tables, and having dinners in the school canteen which had been turned in to a National Canteen where anybody could go there and get a good cheap meal. Also we used to collect old newspapers which we took to school. The amount that each person took to school was recorded against his or her name and after a certain time, depending on the amount you had collected, you were rewarded with make-believe badges of Army Ranks. I managed to collect enough to earn my Sergeants stripes.

Every night when there were air raids you could hear the anti aircraft guns banging all around and you would hear the fragments of the shrapnel coming down on the ground and especially on the roof of the shelter. We children used to go round in the morning after and collect this shrapnel and used it to trade pieces amongst ourselves. The best bits were those which came from the detonator part which were threaded, and worth several of the ordinary pieces. We sometimes also found pieces of the Perspex windows from the planes and we use to cut and file these to make rings and pendants for necklaces. One of the things which people did not like were the small incendiary bombs, for in the noise of the guns they would fall through the slates of the roof without much noise and could hang in lofts for several days without exploding. Then they would suddenly decide to go up in flames.

In order to get metal for munitions etc., the authorities collected all iron that they could, and one day some men came and cut off the iron railings that ran along the top of the wall in our front garden. Also up the road from where I lived was a bombed site where a house had been hit and demolished. This had left an open space where the authorities set up a collection point for old aluminium such as saucepans, which was taken away and melted down to make aeroplanes.

Leftovers from meals such as potato peelings were also collected and these were placed in special Pig bins placed at intervals along the roadside and these were collected and taken away every week to make pig swill.

During the early days of the war, it was common for propaganda films to be shown in small halls etc. I can recall going to the local public library with my mother and sisters to be shown one such film called 鈥淭arget For Tonight鈥�, though why that should stick in my mind I do not know. This library was adjacent to the public swimming baths and all of the pools except had been drained and taken over for other uses, one of which I distinctly remember was full of mattresses for use in emergencies.

In certain of the public parks round where we lived, there were anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons and we used to go and see them, although you could not get really close to them.

I remember that at school there was a girl called Joy Marriot and when one day she did not come to school we found out that her house had been bombed and she had been killed. Even then, the horror of death still did not strike home to us as children.

Sometime, possibly around 1942, I think that the amount of bombing must have decreased considerably for we ceased sleeping in the shelter and returned to sleeping indoors, although of course there were occasions when we had to get up in the night to go to the shelter. Amongst vague memories of that time is seeing the Home Guard practising blocking the road under the Railway Bridge adjacent to our house. They always seemed to arrive in Bren gun carriers, the small tracked armoured vehicles, to carry out these practices on Sundays. You could hear the vehicles coming along the road so we used to go out and watch them. To block the road, they used to put pieces of bent railway lines into sockets in the road as a deterrent to prevent tanks passing through the opening.

During the war double summertime was in operation although at the time I was unaware of it or what it entailed. However I do recall that during the summer, it stayed light very late at night, long after my bedtime, and I can recall being up and about at eleven at night and it still being light.

Sometime in 1944, my father took me with him when he went to visit my Aunt and Uncle in Devon and on that journey, for some reason we went to Dartmouth and not Ivybridge. Although Dartmouth was known as the terminus, the actual Railway terminus was on the opposite side of the River at a place called Kingswear. The GWR station at Dartmouth was just a landing stage with a station building which the GWR owned and they also ran a small ferry boat backwards and forwards across the River from Kingswear to Dartmouth, (the fare for this ferry cost 1 penny in those days). On that visit we saw lots of what I now know to have been landing craft and I can only suppose that they were being assembled for the D-Day assault.

From the start of 1944 it seems that bombing resumed on a heavier scale for there were raids in which oil bombs and incendiaries seemed to have been the main types and we returned to sleeping in the shelter. During that period, I especially recall one night in March 1944, which is described in a book that I have. On that particular night there was a very bad raid in which many houses in the adjacent road to us were set alight by incendiary bombs, as was the church at a crossroads about a mile or so away which was virtually destroyed by the incendiary bombs. On the opposite corner to the church was a tall block of flats and sometime during the war a rumour went round our school that someone had been caught on the roof using a flashlight to signal the German planes.

When the V1 bombs started, my mother decided that we should not go to school any more due to the large amount of bombing that was going on and it was some six months before I went to school again. I distinctly remember when the first V1 (nicknamed the Flying Bomb, Buzz Bomb or DoodleBug) came over. I was asleep in the bedroom and it was dark. Suddenly we heard this strange unearthly noise and looking out of the bedroom window we saw what appeared to be a plane on fire going through the air. This first occurrence is recorded as being on 12/13th June 1944. The use of these Vengeance Weapons or V-Bombs accelerated and within the next few weeks we were to see many of them and as they descended with little or no warning, my parents chose to be safe, and we returned to sleeping in the shelter in the garden. Although I wasn't going to school, I was still playing with my friends up the road. All sorts of stories about these Flying Bombs were soon going around, the main one being that the plane had a long spike on the front of it which when it hit the ground pressed a trigger which exploded the bomb.

It would seem that at that time, my father had a charmed life for within the space of one week he missed almost certain death on two occasions. The first was on Friday 23 June 1944, when he was working as a booking clerk at the railway station at Forest Hill in South London. He had just left work to cycle home and was about half a mile up the road when a DoodleBug demolished the station building that he had just left.

Then exactly one week later, on Friday 30th June 1944, cycling home early in the afternoon after his early shift, he was about 400 yards from our house when to his horror he saw a doodlebug pass over in the opposite direction they normally came from. This one suddenly dived down and as far as my father could tell had apparently scored a direct hit on our house. Speaking many years afterwards, the only thing my father said he could remember of that arrival home was seeing the bomb drop, picking up his bike onto his shoulder and running over the rubble through all the dust. Thankfully to his relief he found that the bomb had in fact dropped away from the house and we had all been safe in the shelter. He could also remember a woman hanging out of a flat over a block of shops, which he passed, who was shouting for help.

What had happened so the story goes, was that this particular flying bomb had already gone over, and was slowly descending towards the hill at Crystal Palace when it changed direction so that it turned round and came back. This story had a ring of truth to it for my mother had gone indoors after 鈥渙ne had gone over鈥�, to see to the dinner and when she heard 鈥渁nother one coming鈥� she came back out to the shelter. She had just pulled shut the wooden door on the shelter but had not secured it, when the bomb exploded wrenching the door from her hand. What actually saved her life however, as I said earlier, were the sleepers which my father had erected to form a wall round the entrance to our shelter, which stopped the blast from severely injuring or possibly killing her. I have since found out that what actually happened was that the V1 appeared to have developed a fault in its gyroscopic system and instead of flying straight on had begun to circle.

When we all struggled out of the shelter, all I could do was keep saying, where are we going to sleep tonight, but of course my mother comforted us and I must have calmed down. The next impression was the awful smell of the dust, which was floating about everywhere. All the dust from the attics and suchlike has a strange odour all of its own and when inhaled like that, it is never forgotten. Then there was the sight of the damaged houses which with all the windows and doors blown out, looked like a lot of skulls with hollow staring eyes.

We were all standing at the bottom of the back garden when my father appeared from the house to find us all unscathed. Suddenly however the woman living next door came out from her house with her face covered in blood. She had one of the Morrison Table shelters, and although they were fine for protection against debris falling on the top, the mesh round the sides did not provide protection from flying glass of broken windows. The slivers of glass just went straight through the mesh and in her case had cut her pretty badly.

Having pulled ourselves together we soon found help to hand in the form of the Civil Defence Corps. Within a short time we had been taken to a Rest Shelter in a local church hall, where arrangements were made to take us to our grandparents house in Thornton Heath which is where we stayed for some weeks before being given a Requisitioned house to live in.

One thing my father did before we left however was to write in large letters in pencil on the wall by the front door that we were all alright and the address where we would be staying. Thus anyone would know where we were and post could be forwarded on. That address was still there when the house was repaired and we returned five years later, and in fact was still there 50 odd years later when the house was finally sold in the late 1990鈥檚

The Doodlebug had actually dropped on the other side of the railway embankment from our house and completely demolished a row of shops. For many years afterwards, right up until the early nineteen sixties when the area was redeveloped, the twisted metal shell of the doodlebug lay on the bombed site which it had caused, though I doubt if by then many people recognised it for what it was.

2190 words

End of part 2 of 3 parts

For part 3 see A8118821

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.