大象传媒

A Junior in WW2

My earliest memories more or less coincide with the start of WWII, when my parents had just moved into their house on Heather Avenue, Romford. The empty echoing rooms, being prevented from running into a table corner (it just cleared the top of my head), and having a fascination for the gas igniter on the cooker. I also remember fondly the wireless set, which played an important part in my life, even at a young age. I have a memory of the receiver standing before open French windows, facing outwards instead of into the room. This must have been for the benefit of the neighbourhood awaiting Chamberlain鈥檚 announcement of the declaration of war.

We had an Anderson shelter in the back garden - which was used until it filled with water. Where my bunk fitted against the corrugated metal I was able to stow small bags of sweets such as jelly babies into the crevice. When we eventually retired indoors the bunk was put into the meter cupboard under the stairs. Here my night-time companions during the Blitz were a pyjama case in the shape of a dog and a Disney annual with cartoons of Donald Duck and Goofy. From my vantage point in the cupboard I once or twice saw my Dad in his tin helmet running through the house with buckets of water 鈥� presumably in anticipation of fires from incendiary bombs. Whether the meter cupboard, with exposed gas pipes and cables, was the safest place to be in the event of a hit is another matter, but I remember being bothered as much by the whirring and ticking noises of the meters as anything else. The other sounds that kept us company were of course the drone of aircraft engines, the boom of ack-ack and sometimes the whump of explosions. But even more alarming for me was the wail of the alert siren. Even at this distance in time the sound of the siren evokes an eerie feeling.

A similar point could be made about gas masks. For me the goggle eyes and corrugated pipe of one version were scary to start with, and the type I wore had a rubbery smell, a steamed-up visor and made you feel you were suffocating. All in all the gas mask was a nuisance, the only good thing about it being the chance to make burping noises through the side flaps. Nor do I remember having to carry a gas mask with me to school 鈥� I think we must have relaxed a bit after the worst of the Blitz. But on one occasion, during the Baby Blitz of early Spring 1944, my Mum and I had to use the baby respirator for my sister. We were on our way to the doctor鈥檚 surgery when the siren went. I jog-trotted alongside my Mum, whilst trying to operate the bellows as she struggled to carry the contraption containing my sister. All that can be said about the episode is that it was a good job we didn鈥檛 have far to go. It wasn鈥檛 long before I had the gas mask apart, and covered myself in particles of carbon.

At the start of the war my Dad was teaching crafts in a secondary school - the Warren School, Chadwell Heath - but, according to what I was told, declined to move with the school when it was evacuated. Instead he worked as an instrument maker at Woolwich Arsenal, and shared the use of a motorbike with a neighbour 鈥� the machine being incidentally an old Brough Superior. The nature of my Dad鈥檚 work was confirmed by a strange formula that my mother would repeat to me:

- Daddy makes the gauges, the gauges make the tools, the tools make the guns, and the guns shoot the Germans!

At some later point in the war my father transferred to work on communications equipment, wireless being one of his keen hobbies. I understood subsequently that he was involved in testing or servicing the radios fitted to Sherman tanks.

When he left the Warren School, Dad brought home with him a number school textbooks surplus to requirements 鈥� mainly for English subjects. Thus I was in possession of a small home library.

In mid-year 1942 I started my schooling at Havering Road School, already pretty much able to read. The rest of my diet consisted of comics such as Tiny Tots and Chips, but I quickly graduated through the Beacon Reader series via Milly-Molly-Mandy to tales of heroes and legends and newspaper strip cartoons. As a privileged milk monitor at school, I got to read Garth and Jane, courtesy of the milk lady鈥檚 Daily Mirror which she kindly left in her cubby-hole.

When I first arrived, the school had part of the field converted to an allotment, but I do not recall spending much time there. Similarly a patch of ground at the front of our house - a corner plot - was used to grow potatoes, no doubt as part of the Dig for Victory campaign, but the novelty wore off. The school also had air-raid shelters, some of which were half-buried in the ground, and some the brick-built surface type. I can recall classes being sent to the surface type both for drill purposes, and for real when the V1 and V2 alerts were on. We sat on slatted benches under a bare electric light bulb and sang verses of Ten Green Bottles 鈥� in the circumstances there wasn鈥檛 much else we could do.

However, although the aforementioned sunken shelters were useless, they provided ideal playgrounds. We would run up and down the grassy humps, try to sail on upturned benches in the flooded interiors, and squirt water on the unsuspecting from the outlet pipes of the hand pumps meant for discharging flood water.

The school already bore the scars of a hit on the Junior School hall during the Blitz, and classroom windows had the usual criss-cross paper strips to stop flying glass, but otherwise there was little mention of the war in lessons, except for one instance, when it was presented in dramatic form. One day some visitors came to a morning assembly. Some of them had scorched and torn clothing, and they held up various objects, warning us against touching them. The purpose was to make us aware of the dangers of butterfly bombs, but I am not too sure the demonstration had the effect intended. Most of the boys were keen collectors of shrapnel and similar debris, and this was yet another possibility for a find. For my part I had a small collection of jagged rusty metal and a piece of twisted metal plate with a sickly smell - an older boy told me this was duralumin - but this was not my special interest.

At dinnertime I would go home to bubble-and-squeak or shepherd鈥檚 pie, to the familiar strains of the Workers鈥� Playtime signature tune, and the voices of Frank Phillips, Bruce Beveridge, Wilfrid Pickles and Co, who always identified themselves before reading the news bulletins. Sometimes I would take the dinner scraps afterwards to the pig bin on the street corner, itself identified in warm weather by a cloud of blowflies and wasps.

On a winter mid afternoon in we walked home in semi-darkness. No street lamps came on and what cars there were had slatted hoods on the headlamps. An inky blackness in the evening and at night was the normal state of affairs, unless the moon was up. I regretted not being able to stay up more often to watch the searchlights criss-crossing the sky in a light show. In fact anything that threw a beam for me was an attraction. Hand torches were - as far as I was concerned 鈥� utterly ruined by the use of frosted glass and the lack of a reflector. So the end of the war was very exciting when I could at last get hold of the proper article.

Once the blackout curtains were drawn in the bedroom I could lay awake and hear snatches of wireless programmes up from below. The signature tunes of Hi, Gang! Happidrome and Itma, among others, formed part of my inner world. The voices of Bebe Daniels, Ben Lyon, Vic Oliver, Tommy Handley, Robb Wilton etc were familiar, even if the sentiments were not necessarily understood.

Sometimes my Mum and I went to a neighbour鈥檚 for company in the evening while Dad was at work and I had the chance to swap comics with older boys or leaf through Picture Post. The magazine gave me some idea of what the armed forces were doing and I picked up tips on how to tell a Spitfire from a Hurricane or a Lancaster from a Wellington.

Once or twice we went to the pictures, and the newsreels must have filled in what Picture Post left out. However the character I most identify with these trips was, of all people, Charlie Chan and the film that made the most impression 鈥� Walt Disney鈥檚 Fantasia.

During the summer of 1943, when my sister was born, I was sent on holiday to grandma鈥檚 in East Finchley. Apart from getting a good view of various kinds of bomb-damage in East and North London, I was taken on rides on London trams and on double-decker buses with outside staircases. A fascinating new world was opened up: drivers and conductors, ticket machines, bell cords, two-way folding seats, and windows with embedded wire grids to stop shattering. Grandpa was himself a bus-driver and sported a peaked cap with a crisply starched white cover. Once I got back home, I turned a chair round and pretended to be a bus-driver.

With my sister arrived, there were journeys to collect various supplements such as milk powder as well as orange juice, cod-liver oil and malt. For a time I thought that MOF was the name of the stuff 鈥� not simply Ministry Of Food.

In April 1944, in the Mini-Blitz referred to above, a few German bombers paid a visit and a message came through that school was closed because of bomb damage. We enjoyed a brief holiday, and when we returned, we saw that, sure enough, the school playground was dotted with small craters and the school hall this time completely burned out. Our general amusement cooled off somewhat when we found on moving up to the next class that morning assembly was taken outside on the playground, with cold winds, blue knees and all.

Shortly after this the doodlebugs, or flying bombs, began to arrive. They flew over at all times of the day and we learned to recognise their stuttering exhaust note. You were safe while they could still be heard, but in trouble once the buzzing stopped. I was keen to spot one of these V1鈥檚, and had a golden opportunity when on the way to the shops with Mum and baby sister. I was able to track the path of the rocket as it passed directly overhead when to my annoyance I was thrown to the ground by a well-meaning neighbour. I managed to lift my head enough to keep the doodlebug in view as it disappeared over the horizon. But there was no doubting their destructive power, and we soon saw what they could do to blocks of houses 鈥� some of them too close for comfort.

During the course of the summer we began to see more aircraft overhead and had to switch to identifying American types 鈥� sightings of Flying Fortresses and twin-boomed Lightnings. The Americans also appeared on the ground on columns of vehicles along the Southend arterial road. We knew we had to shout: Got any gum, chum? as they passed, but I cannot remember any packets of gum changing hands.

As the flying bombs continued to arrive, there was talk of more evacuations. My parents however decided to make their own arrangements and took up an offer from a contact in Cambridge. Whilst Dad continued at work, I accompanied Mum along with little sister - our identity cards (still in existence) recording the move. The journey was the first time I had travelled by train, and the experience of seeing locomotives at close quarters with their noise, smoke steam and vibration was impressive. On arrival our host gave us a tour of the colleges and showed us his charcoal sketches of the riverside and backs. During the day we were left to our own devices, and we would spend afternoons on Parker鈥檚 Piece where I would launch cardboard model aircraft and note the American airmen strolling by, usually in pairs.

The Cambridge interlude lasted only a few weeks as my mother felt out on a limb, so we returned to Romford. As the buzz-bombs were still dropping round about I went back to the meter cupboard at night, but now my bed was made up on the floor. Already the Normandy landings were under way, and a map of Europe 鈥� probably taken from a newspaper - went up on the dining room wall.

Towards the end of 1944 we started to get V2 rocket bombs, which we soon realised could not be seen or heard until they had landed. One morning I was just waking up in my 鈥榮helter鈥� under the stairs when the ground shook and there was a dull thumping sound. I knew this was the work of a V2 that had dropped close by, and this proved to be correct.

Half a street close to our school was demolished, and we children would walk past the site and see strange sights 鈥� fireplaces and windows hanging in mid-air and piles of rubble with curiosities such as piano keyboards inviting us in to have a go on them. In fact this particular area 鈥� Collier Row 鈥� seemed to 鈥榗op鈥� more than its fair share of V1 and V2 attacks, presumably (with hindsight) because it happened to be more or less on the flight path from launch sites moving round towards the Low Countries.

Eventually we got news of VE day and at school we were given celebration mugs. A street party was set up, the folding benches and tables being stored temporarily in our front garden. We had the usual sandwiches, jelly and blancmange and did sack and three-legged races.

Once more I spent the summer holiday at grandma鈥檚, where one morning grandpa seemed for some reason very interested in his 鈥淒aily Herald鈥�. It showed a picture of the notorious mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. I got back home in time for the VJ Day celebration - which was a re-run of VE day. For me the excitement was a huge bonfire in the street that left a black tarry patch for years afterwards.

When the war ended there were revelations: a cousin of mine had served in the Fleet Air Arm, an uncle in Signals. On day a neighbour鈥檚 son came home hobbling down the street on crutches. It was said he had stepped on an anti-personnel mine, so he was fortunate. Those of us on the home front had also come through unscathed, so we were lucky too.

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