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PART 2
MORE AIR RAIDS
Auntie Nan and Uncle Bill Thomas lived just across the road from us at No.17, with my cousins Lily and Fred. My Grandmother, Auntie Lil and my Cousin Ted lived next door at No. 15. I cannot remember the reason, it was probably over Christmas time, but we stayed at No.17 for a while and I remember my cousins Ted and Fred had stage make-up kits for Christmas and they used to scare me when I was in bed by making up gruesome faces and coming into the room, in the dark, and then shining a torch on their faces. They were made to stop when the grown-ups got very tired of my screaming! Because I was the smallest I had a bed made up under a big iron framed double bed. To amuse myself I would make plasticine ‘bombs’, stick them to the bedsprings and then I would hit the springs so that the ’bombs’ would fall off.
While we were at my aunt’s, there was a night when there was an incendiary bomb raid. They may have been trying for the houses along the Kinston Road or the railway line, , or perhaps there was a wind that made a difference, anyway, all the incendiary bombs fell in the fields behind Albany Park Road (Therfield School). Everyone grabbed their sand buckets and ran to put out the fires, which were lighting up the whole area. There were so many that the sand ran out. Water was no use because the devices were oily and the fire just floated on top of the water. Luckily, there had been a herd of cows in the field that day, from Prewett’s Farm at the top of Cleave Road, (later United Dairies) and everyone, including my two uncles Tom and Bill, used the cowpats to put out the fires! They worked very well - but the state of my uncles when they came home - the smell was terrible!
I was at my aunt’s house on another occasion, during the day, when there was an air raid alarm. I went into the kitchen and my uncle was standing at the open kitchen door watching a ‘dog fight’, which must have been over the Fetcham/Bookham area. My aunt and I stood beside him at watched also. Suddenly, my aunt said ‘What are those little black things coming out of the back of the plane?’ ’What do you think they are you silly thing, they’re bombs!’ came the reply. My aunt let out a screech and ran into the dining room. I went after her to find her on her knees, her head under the table but with the rest of her comfortably plump body sticking out into the middle of the room.
On another occasion at the end of an air raid, we children went out into the road to play when we saw a parachute coming down. We all ran for our bikes and we were going to capture the Gerry! There were three wheelers, fairy cycles and bikes that were much too big for the boys who rode them. They rode with one leg under the crossbar to reach the far pedal and they wobbled all over the place. Goodness knows what would have happened if we had ever come near to that pilot.
I remember standing in our garden one day and, looking up on hearing planes, I saw aircraft going over which seemed to be towing other planes, one in front and two behind. There seemed to be dozens of them they took so long to fly past. They could have been on their way to Arnhem.
During air raids we used to go into the cupboard under the stairs, the safest place in the event of a direct hit. Then came the great day when our Morrison shelter was delivered. (The other shelters, which were built outside in the garden were called Anderson Shelters) There was a great pile of angle iron in our front room, and a huge piece of sheet metal, two long and two shorter lengths of iron grill, all painted brown. When it was all put together with nuts and bolts it made a big iron cage, with a ‘table’ top, in which we were all supposed to sleep. We were to share the shelter with our relations from over the road. When the siren went they were to run over the road to us and into the shelter. A mattress was put on the floor of the cage, but because there were so many of us we had to lie across the mattress instead of along it. We were supposed to fix the iron grill along the front of the shelter once we got in but, because the shelter was not as wide as people were tall, this was never done and their feet stuck out of the side.
The other problem was that the mattress was not quite long enough and the gap was filled with pillows. Being the smallest, my place was on the pillows. I used to moan bitterly and constantly that I was uncomfortable One night my poor Auntie Margaret, goaded by my complaining, shouted ‘You are not supposed to be comfortable, there’s a war on!’.
On a lovely sunny morning I was standing under the front porch, leaning against the wall beside our Victory V sign — every house had chalked up a large V followed by the Morse code sign for V [® ® ® ], the call sign of Radio Free Europe. Suddenly I heard the sound of a plane but it was like nothing I had heard before. I craned my neck to try to see where this funny-sounding plane was when I was grabbed by my aunt and dragged indoors and pushed into the shelter. I was yelling ‘I’m not scared’, my aunt’s reply was ‘Well I b****y am, get inside!’. I was so shocked at my aunt swearing!
The funny-sounding plane was, of course a V1 — a doodlebug — and it must have been one of the first to be sent over. These terrible weapons came over day and night. It was the most awful sound and one that I will never forget. It always seemed be worse at night though. We would hear them coming and pray until they went over and then we could relax a bit. Suddenly, the engine would cut out and the doodlebug would plummet down. The damage they did was appalling. Our fighter pilots would go up to try to shoot down the doodlebugs and they also got adept at turning them round and sent them back from whence they came. It was a very different matter with the V2 rockets though; they were silent and there was no chance to do anything about them.
Holidays in Sunderland
My mother and I used to go on holiday to Sunderland to stay with my father’s mother. We also used to go north to ‘get away from the bombs’ On one journey we were waiting at King’s Cross Station for the train when a raid started and we stood, huddled under the arches within the station, while the bombs fell and the glass from the station’s roof shattered and littered the ground around us. I also remember travelling on the London Underground and seeing the stations with bunk beds along the platforms for the Londoners to use at night to escape from the air raids, and the terrible sight of the bomb damage in the streets.
My grandmother lived beside the River Wear and the shipyards were right across the river. My Auntie Mattie worked in Parson’s Shipyard as a riveter. I do not ever remember an air raid while we were staying in Sunderland but there was one raid there that did make a very big impact on me even though I was not there at the time. My grandmother lived in Sheepfolds Road, which was the first turning on the left from Monkwearmouth Bridge which goes over the River Wear. On the other side of that main road was a cinema called ‘The Bromarsh’. On one Saturday morning, during children’s matinee, a lone bomber got through and tried to bomb the shipyards. He missed, but scored a direct hit on the cinema on the other side of the river. The next time I went north, a lot of my friends were just not there any more. A lot of children died that day. My aunt was one of those who went to help and she was handed a neighbour’s little girl. She had no injuries at all and my aunt thought that she was just unconscious, but she was dead. My aunt said it was as if the blast had just blown the life out of the child. At six years old it was very hard to understand what, and why this terrible thing, had happened.
SOLDIERS
There must have been several army camps in this area. I know that the Canadian army was here because we used to see the soldiers in the cinema with their ‘Canada’ shoulder flashes and there were American troops too - many based under canvas in Oxshott Woods.
A few years ago, on a trip to Guernsey my husband and I went for a walk along the cliffs when we met two elderly gentlemen who were taking their ease on a cliff top seat. We fell into conversation with them and we were asked where we lived and, thinking that they would have heard of Epsom we said that we came from a small town to the south of there. One of the gentlemen said that he knew the area because he had been stationed in a place called Leatherhead during the war and did we know it. He had left Guernsey before the invasion and had joined the army. He said they had been under canvas in the woods to the north of Leatherhead and the thing that he remembered most was the big fields all around and how green everywhere was. He also mentioned how friendly everyone in the town was to the soldiers.
There were soldiers billeted in private houses in the town; there was no room to spare so our home was never used as a billet.
The only ‘enemy’ soldiers we saw during the war were Italians. Towards the end of the war there was a very small prisoner of war camp set up at Hook, right beside the main road where now the library is, and we used to see the prisoners from the top of the bus on the way to Kingston.
There were always convoys of trucks and tanks going along the Kingston Road, Leatherhead. For years after the war the kerbstones on the railway bridge bore the marks where the tank tracks had bitten chunks from their edges. I remember one day, when out walking with my North-Country grandmother, a long convoy of trucks filled with soldiers passed us, heading south. Nanna stood at the side to the road, and with tears streaming down her face, she waved and called, to every truck that passed, ‘Haway, my bonnie lads’. All the ‘lads’ waved back and shouted a greeting back to her. We realised later, of course, that they were on their way to the South Coast to prepare for the D-Day landings on 6th June, 1944.
On the morning of 7th June, when we went to play in the fields behind our houses we found masses of silver strips - about the size of the paper used to make paper chains at Christmas. After giving the strips a poke with a stick to make sure they didn’t do anything we collected loads of them. We found out later that this was the ‘window’ which the planes had dropped to confuse the German radar and to make them think that the invasion was to be in the Pas de Calais

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