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Zeppelins and the Luftwaffe

I lived near Chesterfield in Derbyshire and was eight years old in 1939. I remember that particular Sunday morning, 3rd September, seeing my mother crying for the first and only time. Neville Chamberlain had just announced on radio that we were at war with Germany.

I did not realise, until I was considerably older, that the reason for my mother’s distress was the fact that she had been 23 in 1914 and had lived through the 1st World War and its consequences. My father was nine years older than my mother and I heard them discussing strange things like GAS and ZEPPELINS.

My sister, who was 12 years older than me, was a domestic servant working for Captain Paget and his family in Grosvenor Square in London. Captain Paget was an equerry to King George V and Queen Mary. Obviously all domestic staff were almost immediately directed into factory work to help the war effort. My sister somehow survived the London blitz and came home to us in 1943 where she worked a three-shift system in a munitions factory for the remaining war years. She will be 87 in February.

My brother, at 18, was called up for duty and, after his initial Fleet Air Arm training in Gosport, Hants., we did not see him again for five years. While at Gosport he attended a funeral for 13 Wrens — killed when their billet received a direct hit from a German bomber. My father worked at a local steelworks where field guns were manufactured.

I vividly remember coaches from London arriving in our village, bringing very young children who were being evacuated. Little children, parted from their parents and carrying the inevitable gas masks in little cardboard boxes tied up with string, which we all carried, though I never remember wearing mine for a gas attack.

I also clearly remember my mother being convinced we were about to experience a gas attack when, upon hearing the air raid warning siren early one morning, she looked out of the bedroom window to see the morning mist covering the fields.

I felt most frightened the night the German Luftwaffe chose Sheffield as their target. We were ten miles away and land mines were dropped onto the local steelworks. To this day I get flashbacks on bonfire night.

One of my mother’s friends brought her nine month old son to live with us so he at least could escape the London bombings. However, she fetched little John home again before he was two as she could not bear to be parted from him and he no longer knew here each time she visited.

Another friend of my mother’s lived in Croydon and while in the air raid shelter one night her house received a direct hit from a V1 — known as a Doodle Bug. She came to us with only the clothes she was wearing and stayed until she died at 57. She told us of her neighbour’s house being demolished in the bombing. The neighbour lost four of her five children, the one survivor being a seven year old boy who, she thought, only survived because she had put a pan on his head. He didn’t speak again for seven months.

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