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WW2: SOUTH LONDON
ALMOST TOO YOUNG TO REMEMBER
Tony Shelton

I dislike the phrase ‘a good war’. No-one who saw action of any kind or who had eyes to read and ears to hear could have possibly thought WW2 was good even if they survived unscathed and laid the foundations of a post-war middle-class career. But I have to admit that I had one. My excuse is that I was only three when it all ended. But our house came through in one piece, no member of my family was hurt (unless you count my father who picked up a piece of shrapnel in the street as a souvenir, only to find it was still hot) and my sister found a pen friend in the RAF and, in 1945, married him. And, of course, amid all the terror and anxiety, I was conceived and born.
I seem to have entered a lucky family when it came to the horrors of war. For generations as far back as the early nineteenth century, no male had been called up, pressed or otherwise seen any service. All had been born at just the right time and were therefore too young or too old for any of the major wars. There was only a cousin of my mother’s who was badly gassed in the Somme trenches and suffered from bronchitis for the rest of his blighted, shortened life.
In WW2, of course, war came to the home front and civilians were as vulnerable as any front-line servicemen and —women. But in South London the family luck held out. We lived with a munitions factory at our back fence but it received hardly any damage. My parents were both employed in the Ministry of Supply in central London but got there, did their work and got back without injury or trauma. My father was an ARP warden, I think, fire-watching from the Ministry roof but saw no emergency. There were two near misses, though. Dad was walking home from the station when a land mine landed in the next road. The blast threw him high into the air and across the road and landed him on top of — you guessed it — a soft, if scratchy, privet hedge. He apparently walked home, as if nothing had happened, except he had a story to tell. In the second incident, my mother was walking home with me, in my pushchair: another landmine dropped nearby, but landmines didn’t fall, they drifted down under their parachutes and she had time to see it. Just in time, she hurled me into a back alley and threw herself on top of me. This remains the best example of the maternal instinct I have ever come across. Thanks, Mum.
I don’t, of course, remember these things. They were told to me in later life. There are other things that I do remember. At least I think I do. You grow up with your first memories in your system: it is very hard to decide whether you remember the incidents or merely recall hearing about them. I think I recall hearing, in the night, the sirens wailing, getting up with out being told, going down to the air raid shelter in the garden and sitting there in the dark and damp until the all-clear. The sound of the siren still has its effect on the hairs at the back of my neck: is that down to memory or is it a universal reaction? I think I recognise the sound the the V1 doodlebug whenever it appears on radio or TV. I think I still finding myself waiting to see if the motor stops before or after it has passed over. I think I remember seeing barrage balloons on Mitcham Common, tethered with long ropes like floating cows.
However, I know I remember the street (or rather avenue) party held in 1945 to celebrate VJ day. I have a strong picture of myself being taken down as a special after-bedtime treat to watch the bonfire. I see myself sitting in a maroon dressing down on a bright red three-legged stool. I feel the excitement without knowing why it was all happening. I can also remember the long zig-zag fire-crack in the concrete road surface which lasted from the morning after well into my childhood (road maintenance was little better then than it is now). And I have a fleeting misty vision of a huge elevated stage (on a lorry back?), covered in bright red and of being high up at the top. This comes from the year before, on the only other time when our street acted as a community — another party to mark VE Day. The day coincided with my second birthday and I was the star turn, singing ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ to the delight of all war-weary adults, a symbol for them of hope for the future perhaps. I must have enjoyed this, my first and last public appearance on the stage, for on my next birthday I bawled my eyes out when told that there would not be another street party for me.
War leaves a legacy for anyone who lives through it, no matter how young. For me and my family there were bomb sites to play on (and to be told not to play in) cracks on the plaster of all the rooms and a wooden step-ladder. This last was left behind by the builders who came at last to repair those cracks — the minimal ‘war damage’; it was useful to us for at least ten years. There was also the air raid shelter in our back garden. This was more substantial than any Anderson shelter: aggregate concrete base and roof, six inches thick, with walls of white bricks. It stood for several years, used as a general storehouse and as a play feature: the most adventurous thing I have ever done is to jump, for a dare, from its roof, plummeting some seven feet down to the lawn. But it blocked out the light in the dining room and eventually had to go. How he did it I do not know but, unaided, my father demolished it little by little, concrete and all, down to the base. It became what he called an ‘Italian garden’.
I was one of the fortunate generation; we benefited from the new education system and all the improvements in social provision conceived in the wartime aspirations for a better peacetime world. You could say I was also lucky in being too young to know or understand what was really going on between 1939 and 1945: in the concentration camps, the death camps, the firestorms, the Burmese jungles. You might say I was trivialising it all. Perhaps, but shouldn’t all aspects of war be recorded? And if I sailed through the worst war in history without being affected, why is it that I regard war with abhorrence, a measure of very, very last resort, and regard with suspicion those who try to promote and justify war, especially on moral grounds. Why do I feel there is something unhealthy about the men I see searching in the war sections of libraries and bookshops and browsing obsessively through the war magazines in WH Smiths? And why do I mourn all the lost lives but feel uncomfortable about all war commemoration ceremonies which talk of glory and sacrifice and yet parade with flags and weapons? And shy away from anyone who says they had a ‘good’ war but admire without question anyone who risked their life but say little about it.


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