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As the days wore on towards Christmas 1939 the streets were more populated, as people drifted back from their evacuation and I heard that my school was open again. It was not to be the same as it provided for boys from all the local schools. But many of the ‘old’ staff was there. The acting headmaster was our former geography master Mr. Martin, known as Bob, after the famous dog conditioning powders. When my father visited the school some time later, he discovered that ‘Bob’ had taught him in his youth. My new form master was a bearded chess fanatic, so we had to have a chess set on our desk and had an hour of the fiendish game every day. More if there was the smallest excuse
Just before Christmas my parents decided quite suddenly, we were to move house. My father had hoped to buy a new house in the autumn, but all building was stopped on the outbreak of war. The main reason for the move was that with the blackout and so many people away, trams and buses stopped running in London before 10pm and my Father, after an evenings work in the City, several times had to walk the last two miles home through the empty pitch black streets. The house selected for our new home was a large semi-detached house in Streatham Hill, high on the top of the South rim of the London basin and more importantly near the tram depot where the late night journeys were terminated. So 48 Kirkstall Road came into my life. It had four main rooms on each floor, two of them over 20 feet square, a rather grand oak staircase and unusually much of the flooring was polished oak or parquet. There was a nice garden, mostly lawn, with a beautiful Plane tree at one corner at the bottom of the garden, this was to save the lives of my mother and I and our dog later. But I must not get ahead of myself. The house stood high off the road, there was a flight of red tile steps up to the porch. It was a cold house. No, it was a very cold house. And probably still is.
The Nation bumbled on through Christmas into the New Year, the war was beginning to show in everyday life, there was less and less in the shops and things were getting dearer. People seemed to be getting greyer and were definitely less smart in their appearance, ladies took to wearing slacks, and these have to be he most unflattering garment ever devised for the female form. As far as I was concerned school was not very educating and the War news was depressing.
I had a visit from my old choirmaster Cyril Barnes. He was now organist of St. Anselms Church near where we used to live. There I was to meet the girl who would become my wife.The vicar was a lovely person, which is more than anyone ever said about his wife. If he had a fault it was that he had been a priest for a long time and made do with 52 sermons. He was an ingenious man, once fixing a small motor onto his bicycle so as to be able to tour the parish more easily. There being no petrol for such frivolity he ran it on paraffin and zoomed around the roads with flames jetting out of the tiny exhaust until the police warned him off the roads.
Just after Easter my Father came home late one morning after his nights work in the City and said ‘You want to be an Architect don’t you?’ I said ‘Yes Dad’. ‘Well then you must know about building, I have arranged for you to go to The School of Building in Brixton’. So in a few days I found myself in this unique school that was hidden away behind the shops in Brixton up against the main railway line. Anything that one needed to know about building was taught there, a truly wonderful place, naturally it doesn’t exist now.
The last part of May brought the worst news of the war. The Belgians and the Dutch surrendered in the face of a huge onslaught from the Germans and we had been betrayed by the French as they failed to use the defences that they had constructed and surrendered meekly to the light tanks of Guderian. Our troops fought their way to the open coast between Calais and Dunkirk and there was the incredible rescue of thousands of men by hundreds of small boats. In England we of course knew little of what was really happening at the time. Vividly in my memory still is being in a classroom of the school which was right against the main railway lines. Suddenly carriages appeared on the track nearest to the school, their compartments were full of dishevelled soldiers, some leaning out of the windows and waving, then another train full of more men pulled into the next track. They were obviously being parked as the stations were full. Eerily we could not hear them or speak to them because of the fixed double glazing of the classroom windows. We went up to a first floor room to get a better view. There was the most amazing sight of aproned women from the houses on the other side of the tracks climbing over their garden walls and running across the tracks carrying jugs of tea and cups for the men in the trains. We held our breath, there are about eight train tracks, all with live third rails!
The country reeled at the double blow of being driven out of France and the obvious incompetence of our military command that had not learned the lesson of how the Germans operated from the way that they invaded Poland. We tried not to think about our open beaches and disorganised Army. I still find it difficult to understand why Hitler decided not to invade, after all the South coast beaches are lovely in June. An interesting view of the situation of the German Army Command is given in the foreword by German General Walther Nehring to ‘Blitzkrieg’ by Len Deighton, in it he says that it was Hitler’s notorious ‘order to halt’ and not proceed beyond a line drawn between Lens and Gravelines on the coast near Dunkirk, that allowed the Allies to evacuate their troops and from them to build the invasion army of 1944. Well as I later learnt in the Army, generals don’t do anything wrong.
So there we were alone with just the Commonwealth. America was prepared to sell us old second hand weapons if we paid for them and went and fetched them. Their Ambassador in London told their President that we were finished. We expected intense air attacks, this lead to a second round of evacuation which was more permanent than the first. My first year class at school was reduced to nine and stayed at that number for the remainder of the three years. This time the expectation was real and the Battle of Britain began.
We soon took little notice of the warning sirens, we couldn’t spend all day as well as all night in the shelters. A solitary aircraft could bring a huge part of the country to a halt if the rules were obeyed. There were no school holidays in London that year. This was so that as far as possible all students could be accounted for during the daytime. The School of Building offered all kinds of occupations for us. We had a free run of its marvellous workshops. I also learnt about photography in the darkroom and how to play snooker. In between our activities we went up onto the roof which offered a wide view to the North right over London to Hampstead. Seeing hundreds of Barrage Balloons ascending all over the capital a minute or two before the sirens wailed is something firmly engraved in my memory.
The Battle of Britain was fought over our heads during August and September. The Germans threw hundreds of bombers into the task of bringing us to our knees. Great waves of them destroyed much of the London docks and the surrounding houses, more arrived during the night to drop their bombs into the flaming ruins, thousands of people died. We lived from day to day and night to night. The German air force fighter aircraft were repulsed, which reduced the day bombing. But we knew that defeating the night bombers would be more difficult, particularly as the destruction of so much of our shipping by U boats made the means of fighting the war, fuel, materials, food, more and more in short supply. The failure of Southern Ireland to join us, made the unprotected lengths of our supply routes longer and thousands of lives were lost because of this. The autumn droned on, literally and we got into a routine of finishing our day before 7pm and then collecting our bedding and books and valuables and of course the dog, then making our way to our air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden as the undulating howl of the air raid warning siren filled the air. Years later if I heard the noise in a radio or television programme my stomach would chill, just as it did in 1940. We only emerged from the fug of the shelter into the cold fresh air about 6am, when we heard the all clear siren the next morning.
I must describe the air raid shelter, without which no home was complete. If you had a garden you were supplied with an Anderson Shelter to house all of the persons in your house. Anderson being the name of the Home Secretary at the time it was first issued. It was made of corrugated steel sheet. The body of the shelter was formed with a number of `J' shaped sheets arranged upside down and bolted at the top so as to form an arched tunnel about six feet long. A team of Irish labourers came and dug a hole about three feet deep and erected the sheeting into steel channels and then concreted the bottom and sides up to ground level. The ends of the tunnel were closed with flat sheets. At one end a hole was left so you could get in and at the other the centre sheet was fixed inside the others so that by loosening two nuts with a large spanner, which was thoughtfully provided, the sheet could be pulled inwards to provide a means of escape if the other end became blocked. All of the earth from the excavation was then piled over and around the steelwork. This provided just about the most uninviting place to crawl into as I could imagine. Dad and I set a about making steps so that we could get into the shelter quickly, and a bed on each side, then it was furnished with blankets and cushions. We built a thick blast wall of earth in front of the entrance and hung a curtain over the actual opening. We could not close it with a door, because it was the only way for air to come in. As a final touch we sowed grass seed on the earth covering to make it secure. Everything was in place for us to spend our nights in a damp fuggy atmosphere in the dim light of our little oil lamp.
The year 1940 contained several significant events affecting my life. I met the girl who I would marry, I started my education in my future profession, I began a lifelong obsession with photography, three major events should be enough for one year but there was another. The Fourth event arrived the evening of the second of October, which at the start was like any other. Dad went off to work all night in Faraday House which was one of the major telecommunication centres of the country. It is situated between S.Pauls Cathedral and the river Thames, standing up over the other buildings. It can still be recognised today by its green mansard roof. How it survived I cannot imagine, every other building in the street was bombed flat. The Wren Church of S. Andrew is next door. It was hit by a shower of incendiaries. My Father watched it burn from a window, helpless to do anything, he said that the lead covered dome caved in at its centre looking like a huge raspberry. This area and the docks immediately to its East were major bombing targets. And they were easy targets at that, any pilot just had to find the Thames estuary and follow the silver reflection of the moonlight in the river. We used to breathe a sigh of relief when we heard Dad's key in the door early in the morning.
My Mother and I went into the shelter as usual with Dusty our dog and settled down to read. About 9pm I went to sleep. I woke up to find myself lying on wet earth, Dusty was on top of me licking my face. I could hear my mother asking was I all right. The air raid was banging on outside. It was pitch dark in the shelter, I tried feeling around, incredibly, as I felt along the back wall, I put my hand on my torch. It worked. Our neat shelter looked as if it had been squashed by a giant hand and tipped up at the same time. We had obviously been blown up to the roof as the same time as the earth of the blast wall had been projected through the entrance. I had landed on the soil, but my Mother had fallen back onto the point of the bed boards. We couldn’t get out of the entrance, but as I started to undo the back sheet we heard voices. It was the Air Raid Wardens looking for us. How they found us so quickly I do not know. The night was completely moonless. They dug us out and told us that a bomb had fallen in the garden, but the house was still there and we should go back into it. I scrambled out with the dog, he lead me along the fence down the garden and the Wardens brought my mother in. We could see little in the house and could not put on any lights because the blackout curtains had been blown in. We settled down in a pair of the lounge chairs for the night. It was l0pm. We slept little, loose doors and windows were banging all night. The air raid slowed down after midnight. It was a miserable cold night, it seemed an eternity before dawn and the all clear siren came. At first light I set out to look around the house. It was quite incredible, the main part of the house was not damaged except for one small broken window. All of the walls were untouched except for one crack, the rear ground floor windows of the lounge had been moved from their proper places, hence all the banging of the windows, as they did not fit their openings any more.
The night before and every previous night, before we went into the shelter my Mother had taken all of the china from the big Dutch dresser in the kitchen and stacked it on the floor of our walk-in larder. The bomb blast had blown its door off its hinges, and jumped all of the jars, containing a seasons jam making, off the larder shelves onto the crockery below. Neatly nestling in the mixture of jam and broken china and glass was our wireless. I picked it up and plugged it in and it worked away merrily and continued to do so for the next 7 years. I went upstairs along the corridor to my room at the back of the house and opened the door. There should have been two large sash windows in the wall opposite, there was only one. The other was placed neatly on my bed, all of the glass intact, with its head on my pillow. I looked out of the hole in the wall. What I saw was unbelievable. The bomb had hit the ground half way down the garden, probably about the line of the side fence to our neighbours, there was a deep crater occupying the whole length of the garden and the width of both gardens, that is about 90 feet in diameter. Great boulders of London clay had fallen back into the hole, some over ten feet long. Our shelter and any sign of our flowers and vegetables could hardly be seen. Coming out of the shelter I had been lead by our dog along the other fence. If I had tried to walk where the path had been I would have gone straight down the hole, which was over twenty feet deep.
During the morning we had a stream of visitors, doctor, damage repairs, people to arrange replacement of household essentials, crockery yes, jam no, and a bomb expert. He said you were very lucky that we had a wet September so that the 250 Kg bomb went down a long way. He found and gave me, for a souvenir, as if I needed one, the bomb detonating rod. Then he stood back and looked at our plane tree, which was looking a little sad. "That tree saved your life" he said. "See the path of the bomb though the tree in those broken branches, before it bounced clear it was heading straight for your shelter". Then I went to school. We were bombed last night. Oh really, you're all right then. We didn't get trauma councillors then, not that we would have known what to do with one. We just got on with our lives, grateful indeed that we were still living. Months later another group of Irish labourers came and filled the hole in and put up a new fence. If you didn't know that the garden should really be two feet lower you wouldn't notice any difference.
My Fifteenth birthday came and went, the only thing that I can remember about it was that I had a tyre puncture on my bicycle on the way home from school at mid-day. I leant my bike up against a lump of clay at the side of the crater, patched the inner tube, had my dinner and went back to school.
Two eventful years for a young boy but it was only 1940, there was a lot more to come.

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