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On Saturday 2 September, the day before war started, I played with a friend in the morning and said goodbye as I went home for lunch not knowing that we wouldn’t meet again until six years later.
When I got home my parents told me that in the afternoon I was being evacuated to Chelmsford where I would stay with an aunt, uncle and cousins. (I lived in Woodford, Essex, which in 1938 was classed as a London area war zone and I would have been evacuated with the school had war broken out then. In 1939 Woodford was not included in the list).
It was while I was in Chelmsford that Identity Cards were issued, so mine was included different letters to my parents’. At school in Chelmsford we were taught what to do if planes swooped low to machine gun us, and we had regular practice at putting on our gas masks. We knew what the siren and the all clear sounded like and that the sound of hand rattles would mean a gas attack, and hand bells that the danger was past. Church bells would be used to notify an invasion. The use of all these sounds for other purposes was, of course, banned.
In case an air raid should detain us at school we had to always have an apple and some Horlicks tablets in our desks (the apple we ate and replaced each day). There were about a dozen other evacuees in the school, and a refugee, a girl from Czechoslovakia. At Christmas we were given a special Christmas dinner just before school broke up for the Christmas holidays. There was also a big party in the town hall for all the evacuees in Chelmsford.
I made some friends in Chelmsford but I grew increasingly unhappy there, because the older of my two cousins bullied me. My arms were black and blue from her where she pinched me to try to make me cry. I pleaded with my parents to be allowed back home, and as there had been more air raid warnings in Chelmsford than in Woodford (3 against 1) there seemed no need to make me remain. So in February I was taken home again. A lot of other evacuees had returned to London by then
Although the heavy raids expected at the outbreak of war had not occurred, the blackout, started just before war broke out, was still in full force. For some of our windows we had blackout material, a heavy cotton sateen. But for the downstairs windows my father made wooden shutters that could be easily clipped on to the frames.
In the summer my Dad dug in an air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. Not an Anderson, but a reinforced concrete one which cost a little bit more. Towards the end of August Woodford had its first bombs, and in early September the blitz really started. We slept in the shelter every night; my Dad added to its meagre comforts by running electric light to it, and constructed a crystal wireless that we could listen to using headphones. Once in a while, to my mother’s consternation, my father let me come outside with him and stand under the eaves(with a tin hat on my head) to watch the dog fights picked out by the searchlights. One evening in late December we saw the sky was all red in the direction of London. It must have been the night when a lot of London was on fire, caught in a famous photo of St Paul’s still standing with smoke around it. Raids were now coming by both day and night, though we in Woodford weren’t bombed as heavily as the East End, but quite a few bombs fell in the area as we were on the route into London. At first there were just three of us in our little shelter, but later my grandmother from East Ham joined us after the house opposite hers was demolished.
Sometimes there was a mobile ack-ack gun in the side turning next to our house. The noise was terrific, but it was comforting to know we were defended. In the mornings I would search the garden for shrapnel and amassed quite a collection. One evening the air raid warden came round and told everyone in our road to go to the underground public shelter, which could hold 500 people He said there was an unexploded bomb in the area.
Back at my old school, if there was an air raid warning we had to go into a concrete shelter above ground. It was lit by hurricane lamps, and still smelt of fresh concrete. We sang patriotic songs to drown the noise of what was going on outside.
Food was rationed and there were shortages in a wide range of goods. Pencils were not longer painted, they were just plain wood and had to be used down to the last inch. You could get a plastic holder to make is easier to hold the stub. At school we had to use our rough books twice, first in pencil and then, turned upside down and starting from what had been the back, in ink.
Clothes rationing started at Whitsun 1941 (the Bank Holiday gave the shops an extra day to make the necessary preparations). This made it difficult when we had to buy my uniform for the high school I started in September 1941. The big white building had been painted grey to make it less conspicuous. There was a brick built shelter on the sports field, but within the school if there was an air raid we had to shelter in the downstairs corridors where blast walls had been put in at intervals. The gym was in an older part of the school with stone floors, and if the siren sounded while we were in there we would end up standing on the cold stone with bare feet. The gym itself had a wooden floor, of course.
We were lucky in having very little bomb damage to our house, just a broken glass canopy when something dropped on it. A classmate who was bombed out was annoyed that the only one of her possessions that was salvaged was her Latin grammar book. There were one or two deaths I remember, but not among my own friends.
Later in the war the threat was V1s, which we knew as doodlebugs or buzzbombs. A friend and I worked out a number to which we would count when we heard the engine stop. The theory was that if we were still there by the time we reached the allotted number the bomb had fallen somewhere else!
The later rockets, V2s, were more insidious since there was no warning whatsoever of their arrival. I once saw one explode, when I was walking along the road to South Woodford. It was a huge explosion, with debris thrown high in the air. I was so appalled and shocked that I continued to walk as in a dream.
When the war ended in May 1945 I was ill, and unable to join in the street celebrations. By the time the war in Japan ended my friend had returned from Northern Ireland, where she had spent the war, so we were re-united after six years apart. We had written to each other, and she now told me that many of my letters had arrived with blacked out passages. They had been censured, of course, and my accounts of air raids weren’t allowed. For VJ celebrations we were together at a street party for local children. By then, aged 15, we were the oldest there.

Christine Hacklett (née Maple)

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