大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Norfolk Adult Education鈥檚 reminiscence team on behalf of Eric Maloney and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

We always used to go for a weeks holiday to Jay Wick near Clacton, but in 1939 we were going to have two weeks. We went for one in June and were going to have another in September but on 3rd September the world changed irrevocably. I remember standing in a queue at the fish and chip shop at lunch time on Friday 1st September. The adults were all talking about the German invasion of Poland. On the Sunday morning after breakfast I had to deliver a message to Mrs Palmer who worked behind the bar in the club that my father owned. When I got there Mr Palmer was putting up black out curtains. He said to me: 鈥淲e will be at war by 11 o鈥檆lock鈥�. I went home, and at eleven we were all listening to the radio and heard Chamberlain tell us that we were at war with Germany. Then the siren sounded. It was a false alarm, but a woman in the next road put her head in the gas oven and killed herself.

For us kids at school those first few months of the war were a wonderful time. We were completely unsupervised and left to run amok. There was no school until January because there were no air raid shelters. The public shelters were built first.

I left school at 14, just as the Battle of Britain was beginning. I wanted to go to sea, but had two years to wait until I could do an apprenticeship to be an engineer with the merchant Navy. So, for the next two years I worked in a factory.

During the Blitz there were air raids every night right through the winter. Our house became a kind of mini refugee camp as various groups of relatives were bombed out and came to live with us for a few weeks until they found somewhere to live.

I went round to my uncle鈥檚 house the morning after they were bombed, to lend a hand. There was rubble and glass everywhere. There was a young girl there who was about my age. A slither of glass must have been dislodged and dropped down piercing an artery in her foot. The blood was pulsating out in little squirts as her heart beat. That was my first practical sight of war. I can recall quite a number of times when going to work in the mornings I would pass a pile of rubble where the night before there had been someone鈥檚 house. I, like most children, had a box in which I kept pieces of shrapnel, spent cartridges, pieces of parachutes or mines, etc. It is said that some girls had wedding dresses made of large pieces of parachute, though the pieces that I got were always blue.

I started my apprenticeship in the summer of 1942 in a shipyard in the London docks. The docks had been very heavily bombed and there was very little commercial shipping using them. So the work was mainly on war ships, mostly corvettes and destroyers.

On one occasion, a rivet boy was on the fore deck of a corvette playing around the single gun that was mounted there. What he did not know was that someone had inadvertently left a round in the breach. He fired the gun and blew the corner off a warehouse on the opposite side of the dock.
After D Day the V1s or Doodlebugs started coming over. If you could hear them you were alright: when the sound stopped you took cover. I was going to work on my bike one day, just crossing Barking Creak when I saw a Doodlebug flying out to my left, about a quarter of a mile away. The engine cut out and I jumped off my bike, laying down by the parapet of the bridge. After it had gone off I went to get back on my bike and found the tyres were flat. Then I noticed that everyone else was also pumping up their tyres. Somehow the blast had sucked all the air out of them - a very strange phenomenon. Later that autumn the V2s started coming. They travelled faster than sound so you didn鈥檛 have any warning of them.

During the winter months I went to work by train. Mr and Mrs Palmer, who I mentioned earlier, had a daughter Joan who was the same age as me. She worked in a small factory close to the railway line, just outside Ilford Station. One evening, just before Christmas 1944, I was aware of a lot of activity as the train pulled out of the station. Later it transpired that a V2 had hit the factory at lunch time. Joan and her colleagues were all blown to pieces. Nothing was ever found of her. Her mother had to go and identify a few pieces of blood stained clothing. They never had a body to bury or a grave to visit. They appeared to recover, but how they coped is had to imagine.

There were men whose job was to go round after an air raid and pick up bits and pieces of human remains. A ghastly job, but one that had to be done.

On VE Day, the 8th May, several of us went into central London. There were scenes of wild jubilation, with parties in the streets, and in the evening bonfires were lit in the middle of the road. There must have been hundreds of them. People were singing and dancing down the escalators and on the tube.

In the summer of 1946 the official victory parade was held in London. This, as it turned out, was the last great imperial parade of the British Empire. I, together with three friends, and hundreds of thousands of others, went up to London for the day. We made for the Mall, and being well back from the front, we climbed up into the plane trees that line the Mall. The Mall was bedecked with bunting and flags and lined by hundreds of soldiers. Dozens of bands and thousands of troops from all over the Empire and Allied countries marched up the Mall. Vampire and Meteor jet fighters flew overhead. This was the first time that any of us had ever seen a jet plane. In Hyde Park there was a display of captured German weapons, including V1s and V2s, enabling us to see them close up. In the evening there was a fireworks display on the Thames from barges moored in front of the Houses of Parliament.

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