´óÏó´«Ã½

Memories of the 1939-45 War.

As a school child I lived through the Blitz. Our home was in Kent, in a village called St Paul’s Cray, near Orpington. We found ourselves immediately under the flight path of bombers heading for the capital. Although I was only young, I quickly learned the difference in the sound they made as they passed overhead either fully laden, or having dropped their lethal loads. The village was about 5 miles from the RAF fighter base at Biggin Hill and had an army camp housing 9 anti-aircraft guns, and an assortment of mobile guns, which protected Biggin Hill. It was a very noisy, frightening and dangerous place to live. My father was the shelter marshal for the local public air-raid shelter and, at various times during the war, we slept there along with a number of our neighbours. There were times when we heard bombs dropping nearby and we would emerge in the morning to damaged houses. We were lucky in that ours only suffered broken windows, collapsed ceilings, and soot covering all the furniture, and we would find our cat delicately picking its way over splinters of glass. One night the recreation ground behind the shelter was set alight by 200 incendiary bombs, presumably intended for the nearby army camp. There were no streetlights, or any lights allowed to stream from people’s windows, but powerful searchlights would often light up the sky as enemy planes droned overhead. After a heavy raid overnight I would search the garden the following morning for shrapnel and I remember one particular piece that looked like a pair of trousers! We had to carry our gasmasks everywhere and were immediately sent home if we arrived at school without them.

In the latter part of the war we would stand at our windows and watch the doodlebugs passing overhead, fully aware that their destination was London. Gradually, as the allied troops penetrated further into Europe, the doodlebugs fell short of London and when those times came we had to make for the shelters until the doodlebug raid was over. I can also remember one bright sunny day when our fighter planes, returning from an encounter with the enemy, made a vapour trail in the sky in the shape of a swastika with a number beside it, and we assumed the RAF were telling us they had destroyed that number of German planes.

As children, my friends and I were deprived of many freedoms. If you went to a party you needed to be home before dark as raids often started soon after nightfall. You also took your own food with you, to be pooled and shared, as rationing made catering any other way quite out of the question. But they were good times too, in some ways. People were very willing to be co-operative and supportive, to lend a hand wherever there was need. We had little, but we shared it. Clothes were turned, made over, adapted, passed on and rejuvenated in many ingenious ways and ideas of how to ‘make and mend’ were broadcast over the wireless, as were equally inventive suggestions for making our food more interesting. Everything was rationed but somehow we managed, at times taxing our mothers’ ingenuity as we outgrew all our clothes and our appetites increased.

With the end of the war came freedom to move around without fear of enemy attack. That was the greatest bonus. Rationing finished gradually over a period of, I think, around 7 or 8 years. It seems hard to believe all this was over half-a-century ago.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.