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Memories of the London Bitz

My name is Bill and I was born in Shoreditch in the East End of London which is now a part of Hackney and was seven years old when the war started. My sister Ethel who was three years older and I were evacuated to Attleboro in Norfolk with our school. I enjoyed the country and the people there were very kind, but Ethel and I were split up and sent to separate lodgings and I was unhappy in mine. I was then transferred to a farm which I enjoyed, but I had to walk three miles to school every day in all weathers. Being a mischievous lad and away from my sister’s influence, I got into all sorts of mischief and was seen smoking one of my schoolmates fags.
This upset my parents and as London was not being attacked by ‘Gerry’ at this time, they decided to bring us home again. This was a problem as far as schooling was concerned because nearly all the local schools in our area had also evacuated and were closed. However I was found a place in London Fields School which wasn’t too far away although I didn’t like it much.
When the bombing started, they were mainly daylight raids and the schools had to close during the alert which pleased me no end as I was on holiday again and I was able to indulge in my new hobby of collecting shrapnel. I used to go around after the ‘all clear’ and bring home any pieces of shrapnel that I could find. Shrapnel was pieces of steel that fell to earth from the exploding anti aircraft shells.
One day during an alert, I was riding a friend’s bike around the block, when a Junkers 88 flew low overhead (I became an expert at aircraft recognition as did most kids in my neighbourhood then.) and the anti aircraft guns were blasting away at it. I think that it was probably crippled by gunfire. I dived off of the bike and was pulled into a surface air raid shelter by some men who were already there. When I returned to the bike, there at the side of it was a red hot piece of shrapnel which would have made a nasty hole in my head if it had hit me. That became a prized piece in my collection.
Sometimes we could watch as the RAF had dogfights with the ‘Gerries’ over Kent. We could see the trails as the Spitfires and Hurricanes wheeled and turned and see the sun flashing on their wings. We used to cheer to see how they were fighting, though of course they couldn’t hear us, but we could hear them. Sometimes we heard the rattle of their machine guns.
Then the night time raids started and we used to watch the searchlights and the anti aircraft fire and hope that they would hit the bombers, but we never saw any plane hit. My dad wouldn’t let us go outside to watch but we used to peep between my mum and dad to watch the show. Sometimes a stick of bombs used to come in our direction and it was terrifying to hear the bombs screaming down and, boom, boom, BOOM, one after the other and you would wonder if the next one would be for you. We came to dread the sound of the brum, brum, brum of the bombers. It was a very distinctive sound. Mum would herd us into a corner of our passage under the stairs and try and shield us with her body. She used to be frantic with worry about us.
One night dad told us to come and have a look at this. When we did, we could see the whole of the horizon alight with flames. We guessed correctly that the London Docks had been targeted and were a mass of fire. The fire brigades had a terrible job trying to put the fires out before the raids for the following night came. We wondered if we would be targeted next because we lived next to the Grand Union Canal locks and this was a vital link with Birmingham and lots of goods were transported along it in those days.
The blackout was something I’ll never forget. Everyone had to carry a torch if you went anywhere at night and the torch had to have a cover over the lens with a slit in and if the Air Raid Warden saw you he would say ’Put that light out!’ The Air Raid Warden was a kind of watchman whose job it was to make sure that the black out was kept black and no light was showing. He wore a steel helmet with a ‘W’ on it. Most of the kerbs were painted white and cars and lorries had slits on their lights and went with no lights most of the time. Everyone had to fit black out curtains so that not a chink of light escaped. It had its good side too; I had never seen so many stars before and used to look in wonder at the Milky Way and the Great Bear.
Then one day they came around and cut off all the railings from the front of the houses which divided each front of the house from the road. This was done so that they could use the iron for munitions. I like to think that one of our front railings may have shot a German plane down. The net result was that we kids had a much improved play area and we had a whale of a time running up and down the street. We also put a rope on the nearest lamppost and had a lovely swing with lots of room around it.
The raids became so persistent and lasted all night so we used to go and sleep in the surface shelter every night as we were too far away from the Underground to use that as a shelter. These were special buildings that were constructed in the streets and were supposed to be extra strong. Most of them were about 25 feet long by ten feet high and ten feet wide and had sand bags outside. They were equipped with rows of two tier bunk beds and we used to take our own mattresses there. I doubt that these shelters would have been much more protection than our own homes, but mum wanted us to go there. I hated them as they always smelled of urine because many people used them as toilets on the way home from the pubs and the ventilation was bad.
One night we watched as the guns were shooting at ‘Gerry’ and suddenly a barrage of rockets went up as a block. The sound was terrifying. This was a new weapon that they tried out, but it seemed just as ineffective as the guns. We heard next day that it had caused a panic on the stairs at Bethnal Green Underground and many people were trampled to death we were told
Eventually, the night raids petered out, but one night there was an alert and we heard a strange plane approaching. It was making a strange popping sound from it’s engine. Then we saw it had flames coming out of the back. We cheered. Thinking that one of the enemy had at last been hit. But then the flame went out and after thirty seconds or so there was a tremendous explosion. That was our first ‘Doodlebug’ the V1.
We learned later that this was a new kind of flying bomb and had crashed in Bethnal Green killing many people.
We soon became very familiar with Doodlebugs and learned that on different days they behaved very differently. Some days they would come across and just dive straight in at full power. Other days, they would cut out first and dive in vertically and then the suspense of waiting for the explosion was terrible. Other days they would come over, getting lower and lower under power until it hit a building. They were the worst, because the blast of the explosion would spread over a larger area after hitting a top of a building. The effect would be devastating.
One day I was fishing in the canal and the alert had sounded. By then we were a bit blasé about them, so I carried on fishing, but then I saw a Doodlebug a long way away and when it cut out, it glided for several miles before crashing and I thought that this was a bit unusual to glide as far. However, that night the alert had gone as usual and we were inside one of the surface shelters. I heard a ‘Bug’ a long way off. Then I heard the engine cut and waited for the inevitable explosion, but after a long silence I heard a rushing noise of the thing gliding. It got louder and louder. I thought then that this one was for us and had never been so frightened before or since. I was terrified. Then there was the loudest explosion I have ever heard as it hit a small block of flats in Goldsmiths Row which was about three hundred yards from our home. Every window in our house was shattered and the kitchen door had snapped in half. Our dog who was nursing a litter of puppies was going frantic in the middle of our kitchen and her puppies were buried under a pile of books, but unhurt. We were not allowed to take our pets with us to the shelters. They said that the bombs would make them go mad! But I never heard of any doing so. Our dog always knew when the air raid alert was going to sound long before we did and would hide in her corner trembling with fear.
Eventually, the Doodlebugs stopped, but then we had the other menace, the V2’s. They were deadly, but inaccurate and were not so terrifying because by the time you realised that a bomb had hit, it was all over. You had no idea when they were coming.
One Saturday morning, I was woken up by a huge explosion and a roar and the ceiling of the bedroom came crashing on the bed. Mum came in and said that a V2 had hit a gasholder in the gas works across the canal and had set her hair alight! She was at the front door chatting with my aunt who lived next door when the thing hit. The gas works was about five hundred yards away. Fortunately, nearly all the blast went upwards or else they would have been killed.
Another day I was in the playground of my new school at Lauriston Road Hackney when we heard a loud explosion in the sky followed by a roar. (The roar, I believe, is the sound of it through the air which comes after the impact, being supersonic.) It had exploded harmlessly in the air. As I looked up, I saw an object flying through the air and I threw myself to the ground. There was no further bang however and we later were told that a part of the V2 had fallen in the next street. I don’t know why the thing exploded in the air, it may have been faulty or perhaps sabotaged by one of the forced workers in Nazi Germany, but if it hadn’t I probably wouldn’t be telling this tale as it appeared to be coming straight for our school.
So all our family made it through the Blitz, but although it made a mess of London, it brought all the people of our street together and everyone wouldn’t hesitate if someone needed help. They were hard times with the rationing and all, but we were lucky that our home was only bomb damaged and had nobody killed. Eventually London was rebuilt from the ruins and has become richer and more cosmopolitan since. I ended the war with a huge collection of rusty shrapnel and eventually I dumped all of it. Sometimes I wish I had saved the piece that fell next to my bicycle.
When VE day came we all went mad and had parties, but the most memorable thing for me was when all the street lights went on again and we could read a newspaper outside in the street! I had got so used to living in the darkness.

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