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15 October 2014
WW2 - People's War

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Childhood Memories of War in London

by csvdevon

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Archive List > Childhood and Evacuation

Contributed by听
csvdevon
People in story:听
Anthony Hassall
Location of story:听
Ealing, London
Background to story:听
Civilian
Article ID:听
A7562711
Contributed on:听
06 December 2005

1939-45 Wartime.
The tense atmosphere in the flat when we listened to that reedy voice on the radio announcing that a state of war existed between Great Britain and Nazi Germany is unforgettable. It seemed almost immediately afterwards that the first air raid warning siren sounded - a sound i shall never again hear without a small shiver.
Then lots of things happened in a hsort space of time - the builders and their railway disappeared and the red vehicles in the small AFS depot opposite were repainted grey. (Later on the name changed to NFS). Some of the men in the flats organsied a nightly rota of fire watchers on the roof(this was a mansard design with a flat top, on which i was allowed only once). An air-raid shelter had already been built at the back of the flats, so i guess that preparations for war had been ongoing quietly for some time. Our red buses and trolleys were also changed to grey and various blackout measures appeared, including curtaining material and sticky brown paper for the windows, additional hoods and masks for torches and vehicle headlights. There weren't many cars about generally, so the roads were mainly used by petrol-engined buses, and electric trolleybuses, together with the usual horse-drawn milk floats, coal wagons etc.. In Ealing Broadway a local furniture store/removal firm (Lamertons) had a team of brown and white ponies to pull their van.
One of the tenants in teh block, being a doctor, was able to use his SS Jaqguar on occasions - a car that i greatly admired - but otherwise there were very few cars to be seen. It was safe to cross any road without hurrying - just as well when there were piles of horse-dung to avoid!

The 'blitz' started suddenly one night and seemed to last forever. I was put to bed under the dining room table, which was wheeled out each night into the main corridor of the flat - away from windows - and despite having my fingers in my ears, generally didn't sleep until the nightly raid had finished. Most of the noise was caused by a combination of the unsynchronised bomber engines, whistling and exploding bombs. The whistling was unnerving, although rumour had it that you never heard the one that hit you!
After some weekd the noise level practically doubled. This was comforting in a way, as the new 'bangs' were due to additional AA guns, bought in from other parts of the country. A static unit of three guns was based in the adjacent grounds and a Bofors gun was towed up and down the road outside. At least we knew then that our side was 'hitting back'. My grandmother, however, claimed that she had been more frightened by the Zeppelins in the previous War!

We only used the shelter once - it was almost impossible to sleep due to excitement and other people talking. On the way to the shelter, i was disappointed to be dragged away from watching what appeared to be a grand fireworks display with the addition of searchlights, not realising that the shrapnel i used to collect each morning would cause damage if it hit me!

The sky at night would often be bright res due to the fires in the city and east end, and my mother and grandfather, who both worked in the city, talked of continually stepping over hoses and seeing buildings on firs. One evening, a stick of incendiary bombs landed nearby and some started a fire in the stack of scaffold poles outside. Those were removed very soon after. The nearest bombs landed about a hundred yards away. These had delayed action fuses. One partly demolished a nursing home down an adjacent road before exploding and another made a crater in the pavement. One of the flat owners was an ARP warden. Walking down the road that night after the raid, he had difficulty in getting his torch to work, but succeeded just in time, finding himself on the lip of a bomb crater and seeing the fin of the bomb at the bottom of it!i think he came back rather more quickly than he went! There were demonstrations of how to deal with incendiary bombs, the main props being a bucket and a stirrup pump.

Not everyything changed, though. Every month or so the 'Hoover man' called with a supply of new bags and possibly cleaned or serviced the vacuum cleaner. We lived close enough to the hoover factory (on western avenue) for me to be able to see it from the top of a very tall pine tree near the old school. I believe the factory is now listed and is a shopping centre.
I used to walk to school, just off the Uxbridge Road, on fine days, or catch a 65 or 97 bus when it was wet. I loathed milk, so refused those 1/3 pint bottles available each day. For lunch i went to a british restaurant. There i believe the main course was 11d and a sweet (usually a syrup or fruit pudding made in a long cylindrical tin) was another 4d. The first winter (1940)was very cold. I had a replica leather flying helmut to protect my ears and remember icicles hanging from beams in a bombed building (Lamertons) where the water used to put out the fire had been frozen. In those days the 'bus conductors had clips of different coloured tickets and the fare stages were named, so each route must have had a dedicated set of tickets. later on, the fare stages were just numbered, presumably to baffle German agents or troops in the same way that direction signs were removed from roads.

One day, i remember going inside the tail gun turret of one of our bombers and also seeing a downed ME.109 fighter displayed on Ealing Common. It looked very small without its undercarriage. It was sometimes possible early on in the war to see vapour trails and hear faint machine gun fire from 'dog fightd' in what became known as the 'Battle of Britain'. After that, things quietened down, although there were infrequent daylight raids - only once or twice did we have to use the shelter in teh school playground.
Two things stand out as being with me throughout the war. One was the smell - possibly of gas polluted clay soil that seemed everywhere - and the other was a plant, one i now know to be rose-bay willow herb, that seemed to thrive on every bomb-site as well as in the ruins of the old school. Oh yes, and there is another - there were many more butterflies!

I remember my mother drawing lines on the backs of her legs after having stained them to simulate stockings. Sometimes we had a food parcel from a farmers wife in Droitwich - this was in exchange for clothes i had outgrown. Otherwise, food was pretty dull, enlivened twice by parcels from the USA, that included some very unusual candies. My favourites from those parcels were the salty-tasting chocolate 'iron rations' blocks.

I longed for fancy biscuits - i can still remember the last ones we had before the war, not realising they would be the last!Snoek and whale meat (disgusting) were tried as supplements to the normal rations but were far from popular and didn't last long. Ration books, including BU's (bread units) and clothing coupons were part of our lives for a long time, some rationing lasted long after the end of the war.

After the 'Blitz' came the V1 'Doodle-bugs'. These had distinctive shapes and sounds - both unpleasant. I used to go into the hall cupboard when i heard one and hoped that it would pass over. If it stopped, it was time to put my fingers in my ears and to start counting - after a number of seconds there would be a very loud explosion. These flying bombs could destroy two or three houses at a time. Luckily, the RAF had the upper hand at the time and could often intercept the bombs and physically tip them over to land away from built up areas, generally in the Thames estuary.

My mother feared the V2 rockets most of all, as they were more accuratley aimed at central London and there was no warning of their arrival. Fortunately, the war ended before very many could be deployed as they were extremely deadly weapons.

Two other distinct memories remain. One day, amusing myself outside, i heard a low rumble that increased to a great roaring of aircraft and the whole sky beacme filled with planes towing gliders. No mention of this event was made at the time and only some time after did i realise that i had seen the start of the attack on Arnhem. The second of those final war memories was that of hearing a low rumble of gunfire associated with the D-Day landings - at least 80 miles away!

Towards the end of the war, movement became easier, and i was often allowed to visit the main line railway stations to collect train numbers, whereas i had been restricted previously to watching the GWR main line. At night trains could be heard from my bedroom, and the two parcel diesel rail cars used had a distinctive four note horn copied years later as the signature tune of the radio programme 'Take It From Here'. The locomotives were black then, and the carriages dirty brown.

One day, i was taken to Angmering-on-sea in Sussex by the elder brother of an old swiss schoolfriend, his school haveing been evacuated there. I was amazed to see what must have been expensive large houses on the sea front with their ground floors ripped out and turned into gun emplacements. That was my very first car journey - in an old Buick - and i was sick when i got home! I think we in London were unaware of the wholesale clearance of people from coastal area. I wonder now how they were compensated.
VE day was celebrated by various parades and shows. I remember particularly the huge Scots Canadian bandsmen wearing bearskins, kilts and spats who mingled with the spectators after leading one such parade.
In retrospect, whilst the war was a period to be endured, it was perhaps easier for children who had only themselves to worry about and could exist in their own small worlds, than it was for parents who had a greater understanding of the surrounding dangers and who often gave up some of their meagre in order to satisfy the needs of growing offspring.

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