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From: Philip AG Kelly pagkelly@hotmail.com
To: www.bbc.co.uk/ww2
Subject: My Memories of WW2
Date: Tuesday, 17 February 2004

We lived through World War II by Philip AG Kelly
GENESIS
I was the second of four brothers born in a Council Flat near the great Beckton Gasworks. The eldest was born in October 1934 and the last in March 1939. No war babies in our family. East Ham and West Ham were then County Boroughs of Essex. We were therefore Essex boys and all at school in Essex before the war ended.

EXODUS
Soon after the beginning of hostilities, long before we boys had heard of any war, we made a hurried departure from Beckton to stay at my mother鈥檚 parents home in Penwortham, Lancashire. Father, mother, our youngest step-sister, us three boys and the new baby. Our departure from London was by night, during the Black-out. My father being an employee of the London North Eastern Railway, we travelled by train on the LNER line from London to Manchester. Travelling northwards through the darkened countryside, little could be seen besides other trains passing and some busy collieries. Not much could be seen on the blacked-out train either, apart from glowing cigarettes. The train was packed. Men slept on the overhead luggage racks. Others were perched on suitcases and kit-bags in the corridors.

My father already had a previous family of three girls and a boy by his first wife, who died young. Our step-sisters and step-brother went to stay with various of my father relatives. One sister went to my father鈥檚 uncle and aunt in Plaistow. Aunt Polly would never enter an air raid shelter and always stayed indoors. My sister Ivy would be sitting on the coal under the stairs. Uncle Tom was deaf and kept to his armchair as he didn鈥檛 hear the bombs. That鈥檚 how they were when a bomb demolished the house next door. After the bomb, Aunt Polly鈥檚 house leaned dangerously and they had to quickly evacuate. Later, Aunt Polly鈥檚 frying-pan was found lodged in the chimney of a house further up the street.

By then we boys were with our grand-parents across the road from a farm where we watched the farmer milking his cows. A single old stone building had the house, dairy, cow-shed and stable with a hay barn 鈥� all under one roof. We were six months at Penwortham in Lancashire.

That dark night in 1939, we had crossed from Manchester to Preston by branch line and then by taxi to Penwortham. I must have slept on the second train. There was snow on the ground when we arrived. Mother asked the cab-driver to sound his hooter. A squeeze or two of the big rubber bulb brought Granny downstairs to open the front-door and let Queenie the bull-mastiff out onto the snow-covered lawn. Somehow, in various ways, we managed to get to bed. My brothers and I, except for the baby, slept on a flimsy spare mattress hurriedly laid over boxes and tea-chests in the dressing room outside the bathroom. We were amused later to see an enamel plate saying 鈥淟AVATORY鈥� on the door to our room.

The snow and cold continued for weeks. Snowdrifts blocked the rail line after our hurried journey north. In Grandpa鈥檚 orchard, snow lay over a foot deep. I could only go to see him milk the goats by stepping in my mother鈥檚 footprints while she held my younger brother. My father walked daily to Penwortham station to know when the main-line was open for trains to and from London. For a while, he was unable to return to his job at Bishopsgate Goods Station. Penwortham station, on the line to Southport, had wooden platforms.

OLDER BROTHER STARTS SCHOOL
My brother David, who was fifteen months or so older than me, had first started school in East Ham. Next he had to attend the village school in Penwortham. And after we were settled in Ingatestone, he started his third school in Fryerning Lane. Our house in Ingatestone was one of a Victorian terrace which had been bought by the Ministry of Transport in preparation for building a by-pass of the village. My father鈥檚 cousin in Ingatestone let him know of these houses to let. They had no electricity and were hurriedly connected to the gas main when we moved in. I was in bed with chicken-pox or something as I watched the gas-fitter. For the next seventeen years we lived there with only gas for lighting and cooking.

LIFE IN PENWORTHAM
Our grand-parents in Lancashire had only oil-lamps and candles for lighting and the cooking was done on the open coal-fire. I remember the slipper-irons heated in the fire for ironing clothes. No 鈥� we didn't have warming pans 鈥� the beds were cold. When grandpa was ill in bed, two of us boys had to hold a sheet of newspaper across the opening to draw his coal-fire into a blaze. He was cold through sitting up to shoot birds through the open window. Granny had to go out to pick up shot birds from the snow. They were lined up along the kitchen dresser. Grandpa had several guns, including a big punt gun used in his younger days, wild-fowling down the Ribble Estuary.

WAR
We were too young to know about war but we four all lived through it. It began for us boys when some of us were exploring the district a few hundred yards from and just out-of-sight of our new home in Essex. (Although Victorian, they were named New Cottages.) Our play was suddenly disturbed by the rat-at-at of machine-guns high in the sky above us. The Battle of Britain was beginning. But before we could locate the unseen aircraft, an older sister came to hurry us home.

Throughout the war, my father commuted from Ingatestone to his railway job in London. Few trains stopped at Ingatestone during the war. There were more stopping trains at Shenfield but he often needed to cycle to Brentwood station. For a shift starting at 6 AM at Bishopsgate, he might leave home two or three hours earlier. For some time he assumed the pillar-box at the bottom of Queens Road in Brentwood was a lonely Policeman by the kerb and he used to call out a greeting in the darkness. One morning a real Policeman stood in the Shenfield road. An unexploded bomb in the main road to Brentwood forced a detour by unfamiliar side roads. Coming home from night shift one morning, a fire-engine loomed up in the dark and the driver called out, 鈥淗ello brother鈥�. It was his younger brother Joe, from Edney Common.

PREPARATIONS FOR ENEMY INVASION
By the time I was ready for school, frantic preparations were in progress for the expected enemy invasion. Air-raid shelters were built in the school playgrounds and telephone lines were connected to schools for warning of air raids. Another phone line was laid across the fields to connect a look-out post on the church tower at Fryerning to the Home Guard Drill Hall.

I START SCHOOL
Mrs Simmonds, the Infants Schoolteacher walked to school past me. I was far too engrossed in the noisy pneumatic drills making holes in the road to notice her. The exciting noise drowned her calls to come to school. One of the workmen drew my young attention to the teacher, waving and calling for me. Sockets were being set in the road surface for tank traps to go in when they might be needed. These were welded vees of steel 鈥楬鈥� girders. They were never used and were cut up to be taken away after the war.

Between the nearest houses on both sides of the tank-trap sockets, other workmen built concrete 鈥榩imples鈥� using wooden formers. These and the terraced houses would form a continuous barrier if any enemy vehicles approached. The concrete 鈥榩imples鈥� made a wonderful playground throughout the war years. The local Home Guard came and erected yards of barbed-wire barriers nearby and other anti-personnel traps. Road signs, name boards and notices were all removed or covered over. The ARP Warden, a Mr Flack, patrolled at night to notify us of any small chinks of light showing.

I saw my first film-show at the school. The Mixed Infants, attached to the Girls School. We had to file into the Girls鈥� Hall to stand and watch two films. The second was a war episode showing planes taking off to attack an enemy warship. I was unable to visualise the camera filming an approaching aircraft and then swinging round to follow the same plane departing. I was puzzled to see taxiing planes suddenly and violently changing direction. Before this newsreel, a comedy was shown. This also seemed to me nonsensical. A man in a Pillar-box kept moving the box whenever people tried to post their letters.

WAR COMES TO US
Two soldiers arrived in Fryerning Lane one day to dig a small trench behind a post and rail fence over-looking the road. They lined the trench with sandbags and installed a machine-gun. A day or two later, their trench was filled in and more soldiers built a bigger gun emplacement on a small mound nearby. Then the local Home Guard came to make long barricades of coiled barbed-wire across and around the area. There were also steel foot-traps in the grass. Intended to make walking difficult for enemy infantry. With all that and the concrete "pimples" are houses had the war close by.

During the 鈥榖lackout鈥� it was fun to watch the night sky from a bed near the window. Criss-crossing searchlights and red tracer-bullets arcing across the blackness. For a short time, a searchlight with its accompanying mobile generator was placed in the next side-road. It was said to glow red after switch-off. Further away, near the place where we had seen the overhead dog-fight, a searchlight was installed on a more permanent basis. The place was for years known to us as 鈥榮earchlight meadow鈥�.

There was usually plenty of military activity to interest us. A motor-cycle dispatch rider might stop to chat with us. Or a troop of soldiers would pass, whistling a tune as they quick-marched down to the village. Buzzing tracks warned of the approach of a bren-gun carrier. Quite the noisiest things around. School could hardly match the war for interest. Two large bomb craters appeared overnight in a field near Ingatestone Hall. We walked with our Dad to see them and a big metal canister (land mine?) where the lane meets the main road. Another bomb left a crater in the garden of the house where the Anglican Bishop now lives in Margaretting.

Bus fares were cheap in those days and we sometimes went over to Kent for a family day out. Regular buses ran between Chelmsford and Tilbury Ferry. My mother had made friends in East Ham who had moved to a bungalow in rural Kent. They pointed out to us a hill to the south of them where the V1 flying bombs flew over and then appeared to take various tracks on their way north. Few V1s fell near Ingatestone but I remember one 鈥榙oodle-bug鈥� spluttering its way well clear to the north of us. One of these flying bombs fell in the field opposite the chapel in Mountnessing. The Congregational Church was demolished by the blast and the house next door was damaged. I remember Mr Sawyer, the house-owner, coming to church with sticking-plaster on his bald head.

Our friends in Kent kept chickens and one hen-house in their large garden was being fitted out as a first home for some young newly-weds. Among the fittings was a small wash-basin secretly retrieved from an enemy submarine. Our journey home was during the black-out. The buses had one small, dim lamp which ran in a track under the roof. The bus Conductor slid the lamp along to each seat to issue and check tickets.

THE ALLIED INVASION
In 1944, one side of the dual-carriageway between Margaretting and Widford filled up with Army vehicles in preparation for the still-secret Allied Invasion. Army lorries also parked close to our house and soldiers with towels tucked into their shirt-collars shaved using the lorries rear-view mirrors. We often watched passing convoys of Army lorries and jeeps. A major event one day was seeing the sky covered in gliders and their tug planes, heading south-east with the Invasion Forces. An unforgettable sight.

After a visit to the Out-patient Clinic at Colchester Hospital, some American soldiers shared our compartment on the train. One of them offered me a stick of chewing-gum. I knew other boys would have been envious. Later out-patient visits were in Chelmsford where we travelled by bus. This was when we passed the camp of Army vehicles preparing for the Allied Invasion. It was also in Chelmsford that a Christmas Party was held for child hospital patients. A Father Christmas gave out second-hand toys as presents.
(For more about my wartime hospital experiences see A child in Hospital by Philip Kelly)

VICTORY IN EUROPE
Although very hard-of-hearing, when well enough I attended school and used to read books in the back row of class. Hours were passed in this fashion. Our lives began to change. No more air raids and more American planes than RAF. Then came the announcement that we could all have a day to celebrate the ending of hostilities in Europe. On VE Day, we ran around with home-made flags and quickly built a big bonfire to joyfully burn an effigy of Hitler. Soon, the German POWs working in the fields were sent back to Europe. They were well fed here and at peace with only their German Corporal to keep them working. We quite missed them when they had to go. But it gave chance to earn pocket-money picking peas and potatoes. Of course, many boys鈥� fathers had gone off to the war. Some were still away in the Far East on VE Day and some never returned. One boy had a coconut posted home by his father who was later lost at sea.

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