大象传媒

MY TEENAGE WAR YEARS:Evacuee Early Years by AllenBowtell.

In June 1939 I became a teenager, at that time war clouds were gathering over Europe, but to a thirteen year old this did not mean a great deal to me. Most of the boys of my age were still wearing short trousers and did not go into long ones until the magical age of fourteen. When the school that I was attending at the time, John Harvard Senior Boys School in Southwark, London, broke up for the Summer holiday I was looking forward to spending two weeks away at the seaside. The early part of the school holiday period was spent playing with my friends in and around the area we lived.

My two brothers and I lived with our parents in a three-storey house in Great Suffolk Street, Southwark, London. The house was within walking distance of Blackfriars, Southwark and London bridges. and the City of London. lay on the other side of the river. On the ground floor of our house was a newsagent shop with a room behind which served as a place to eat when the shop was open and a work room for carrying out the tasks required to run the shop. My father was the newsagent and my mother helped in the shop in addition to running the home. The first floor consisted of our lounge or 'front room' as we called it and the room behind was a living / dining room. Between the two rooms there was a double door that we opened when we had a party to make one large room. On the top floor there were two bedrooms, my parents used the front room and my brothers and I occupied the back room. In addition to these rooms there were two rooms below ground level, the basement we called it. One corner of the back basement room was occupied by a brick built solid fuel boiler or 'copper.' The floor in both rooms were made of cement paving slabs. There were two main purposes for the back room, a place for my mother to do the clothes washing and our bathroom. The clothes washing had to be done by hand in a tub using a scrubbing board and boiling in the copper. In those days there were no washing machines in general use as there are now. With regard to the days when a bath was required, this had its own ritual. First the water had to be heated in the copper, then ladled out into a galvanized iron bath that measured about 4.5 ft [1.37 m] long. When we had finished our bath we had to step out on to a towel which covered the cold floor. The only consolation was the fire burning under the copper which took the chill off the room. Normally when not in use the bath hung on a nail hammered into the wall. In the front basement room my father kept this as a store room for the items to be sold in the shop. The front part of the room was used as a coal store, which was filled through a hole in the pavement in front of the shop. On the ground level at the back of the house was a yard measuring about 25 ft [7.75m] x 20 ft [6m] surrounded by brick walls. In the corner of the yard was our only toilet, this was a very cold place to be in the Winter.

On the 3 September 1939 the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced on the wireless or radio, that the Country was at war with Germany, my father and I were on holiday at Weston super Mare in Somerset. At this time my mother was looking after my two brothers and the shop in London. Because my father thought it would be too dangerous to take me back to London with him, he arranged for me to stay with a family in Worlebury, Weston super Mare. This was to be my first day as an evacuee. Meanwhile my two brothers, Raymond aged 9 years and Derek 6 years, were evacuated with the rest of their school, Charles Dickens Junior, to Hove in Sussex. This unhappy situation caused our family to be split up for a period of time with many miles between us.

The man and his wife who were to be my foster parents lived in a semi-bungalow. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and the bedroom I was to use had a window overlooking the bay where I had been staying during my holiday. In addition to my foster mother and father, the family consisted of three sons who were serving in the Army as regular soldiers and three daughters, a school teacher, a nurse, and the third one was working for a family who lived close by. One of the first things my foster parents had to do was to find a suitable school for me to attend, because my London school had been evacuated to another part of the country. The school which they decided would suit my needs was in the centre of the town, it was called Walliscote Road School. To get there I had to travel by bus, a journey of 4 to 5 miles from where I was living. It was strange at first as all my classmates were local children and most of them spoke with a Somerset accent, this I found a little difficult to understand at times. Before long I soon lost some of my London way of speaking and began using the local dialect like them.

During my stay in Weston I joined the local Scout group and as the Scout Leader had a large garden he encouraged me to attempt to pass the gardening badge. This was something I would have had great difficulty in doing in my London group as the largest garden anyone had in that area was a window box. In addition to belonging to the scouts I joined the St. John Ambulance Brigade cadets. As there was always a chance that an air raid could occur and people injured, we were taught first aid especially for those injuries most likely to be caused by bombing. On one occasion a full scale air raid exercise was carried out with the cadets acting as casualties. Labels were pinned to our clothing indicating the type of injuries we were supposed to have. These mock injuries were attended to by the adult members of the St. Johns or the Civil Defence workers. We then had the experience of being taken at great speed to the hospital in a 'utility' ambulance. These ambulances had been built as an addition to the normal ones, for use when the need arose in times of emergency. They were about the size of a large car but had a canvas covered back and fitted out to carry four stretchers inside. Being a casualty on the top stretcher was like sailing in a small boat on a choppy sea and we were very glad when we reached the hospital with only our mock injuries. On our arrival the doctors and nursing staff were waiting to check the handiwork of the people who had attended to the injuries mentioned on the labels.

Another way in which the war affected the people, was the introduction of food rationing in January 1940. After school and on Saturdays I used to help at the General Store at the end of the road. One of my jobs was to make up the small quantities of butter, tea, sugar, etc., then deliver the groceries on a bicycle made for this type of work. The bicycle had a large box on the front with a small wheel underneath and a normal size wheel at the back. It was a little difficult to ride at first until I got used to it. The front wheel seemed to have a mind of its own when the box was loaded. The wheel wobbled from side to side like a mad thing and made it hard to steer. This job provided me with some pocket money that I saved to buy my first bicycle, a second hand one, of which I was very proud. It cost me ten shillings that is fifty pence in present day money.

You will remember my bedroom overlooked a bay, this was called Sand Bay. On the far side of the bay there was a strip of land jutting out into the sea, the tip of this piece of land was called Sand Point. In peace time people were allowed to walk on this headland which was a favourite spot for bird watchers. Now it was a restricted area because the Royal Air Force was using it as a firing range for machine gun practice. The aircraft they used at that time was the Gloucester Gladiator fighter. These aeroplanes were very slow compared with todays aircraft. However, it was quite an experience to see them dive down at full throttle, with their machine guns chattering away at the targets on the ground.

During the first year of the war there was very little enemy air activity over London or the rest of the country, as a result of this unexpected period of quiet it has often been called the 'phoney war'. Many people had been lulled into a false sense of security during this period, this included my parents. They decided when the Summer holidays in 1940 came along it would be safe for me to return to my home in London for the holiday. We did not realize that this hot and sunny Summer was going to be the start of what is now called the 'The Battle of Britain' and of course 'The Blitz'.

In the month of June I reached the age of 14 years and like most boys of that age and younger I used to wear short trousers. After the holiday I was due to return to Exeter in Devon because I was going to join a school from my part of London called the Borough Polytechnic. This meant having a new school uniform which included my first pair of long trousers. All these clothes were neatly folded and put on the lounge table ready to go into my case when I was due to set off for Exeter. Unfortunately it was not going to be as simple as that, because the German Air Force had other ideas.

At the early part of August 1940 the Luftwaffe started bombing our aerodromes, to make them unserviceable as a prelude to an invasion of England. This was the start of the Battle of Britain. As these attacks on the R.A.F. bases were not having the desired effect they left those targets and on the 7 September the 'Blitz' on London started. On this day the sirens sounded and shortly after I could hear the drone of a large number of aircraft. From the outside of my house I was able to see wave upon wave of German bombers heading for the East End of London. On reaching their target they dropped hundreds of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the docks and buildings around the dock area. When the raid ended great pillars of smoke could be seen and the sky a bright red caused by the raging fires. The air was filled with a strong sickly smell which gave a clammy feeling of evil in the atmosphere. At first when the sirens sounded my parents and I went downstairs to our basement and used it as a makeshift shelter. After the first night our next door neighbours persuaded us to use the shelter across the road which was in the basement of a block of flats called Queens Buildings. It was just as well that we did because on the night of the 9/10 September there was a terrific crash from a bomb that exploded in the vicinity of the building in which we were sheltering. The noise awoke me and I found that the other people and I were lying amongst a great deal of broken glass that came from a window above the door. Luckily I was not cut from the glass, but a greater shock awaited my parents and I when we left the shelter in the morning. Instead of our home and shop, all that remained was a pile of rubble made up of bricks, mortar and the contents of our home. When my father tried to get near to the scene of destruction to salvage anything of our belongings, the Air Raid Wardens prevented him saying, 'there was an unexploded bomb [UXB] buried in the rubble'. My mother was heartbroken when she saw the devastation and to make matters worse she could see a teddy bear belonging to one of my brothers sticking out of the wreckage, but she was not allowed to get it.

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