大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by a volunteer from Lincoln CSV Action Desk on behalf of Graham Johnson and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Johnson fully accepts and understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was born in Epsom in July 1933 and lived in Woodmansterne, Surrey. In 1939 my mother said that she thought the evacuee system sounded a good idea so she declared that she was going to send me to my Aunt and Uncle, the Parkers, in Alfriston in Sussex. For the second time in my short life I was being sent away from my home. The first time was when I was four. I had whooping cough on that occasion and she decided it was best if I was sent to my grandma鈥檚 in Lincoln.

The Parkers lived in North Street and my uncle was the scout leader there. Within a short time of me getting there I remember standing at the bottom of the road and watching three green Southdown buses arriving in the village with children, who had been evacuated from London, on board.

My uncle was told by the Welcoming Committee that since he was the scout master in Alfriston it would be his job to look after twin boys who were amongst the party of children. This was because they were supposedly little devils although I don鈥檛 remember seeing anything untoward in their behaviour.

My aunt would take us all out to Beachy Head where we would swim in the sea and go winkle picking around the rocks there. When she brought us back home she would boil them up and we would eat them for tea, using a pin to extract them from their shells.

A concrete Pill Box was built at the estuary of the River Cuckmere beneath the cliffs of Beachy Head. On a visit to Brighton I noticed that a single strand of barbed wire had been erected along the front. I did wonder at the time whether these defences would have been enough to stop any German soldiers landing.

There were concerts in the village hall and everybody stood and sang songs like 鈥楻un rabbit run鈥� and 鈥楲and of Hope and Glory鈥� However, things got worse.

There were civil defence exercises held in the village. One night all the men of the village left and when I asked where they were going I was told that they were going to paint out the Long Man so that the German aircraft would not be able to get a fix on their positions when they were over the south coast.

One Sunday my mother came to see me and while we were out walking together down North Street I begged her to let me come home; this was because my uncle was hitting me all the time. She turned on me screaming and pointing her finger at me say that she wouldn鈥檛 take me home because she was far too busy at the hospital to be looking after me. On the Monday morning, my uncle got me out of bed at 7.00am and I got a whacking before going to school for asking my mother to take me home. I have often wondered if their reluctance towards me was because I had been dumped on them.

The news got a lot worse and a general emergency came into being in the south of England and I was then sent back home. The new school had just opened on Carshalton Road. The headmistress, Miss Williams, inspired us to do our bit for the War effort and had all the children going round Woodmansterne collecting money for it. We raised 拢40.00 which was spent on a new dinghy for a Spitfire pilot. We then wrote letters of thanks to the people who had donated their cash. It was a lot of money in those days when you think that an average week鈥檚 wages was about 拢3.00. All the money we collected was in 3d bits, pennies and halfpennies. We all like to think that we had tried to help save a pilot鈥檚 life. I have since discovered that other schools in the south of England also raised money for the war effort in a similar way.

At about that time I remember going down into Chipstead Valley Road one day. I saw the troops being brought back on the trains from Dunkirk and they were wearing ragged uniforms and looked totally exhausted from their experiences in France. Seeing them in this collapsed state I wondered what was going to happen next. The war and all it brought with it was a frightening experience for a child, especially standing watching everything happening around me.

My mother took me shopping to the little shop down the road and as we left, on our way home, she told me that if the authorities came to my school looking for children to send away, she was going to send me to Canada. This absolutely scared me to death. To think my mother wanted to send me out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean amongst the U-boats was frightening. It made me wonder why my mother didn鈥檛 like. She seemed to have spent a lot of time trying to get rid of me. Within a few weeks of this conversation, the SS City of Benares was sunk in the Atlantic with 77 children losing their lives. There was a public outcry in the newspapers and on the radio and this type of evacuation was stopped as a result of this tragedy.

My father was an ARP Warden throughout the Blitz and he took me to the ARP post in the village. It was opposite The Woodsman pub. I remember seeing a telephone in there but not much else.

The Battle of Britain was fought out in thee sky above us. One Sunday our tea was interrupted with the sound of gunfire and the noise of aircraft above us. There had been no warning of a raid and it had taken us by complete surprise. My mother left the kitchen and our tea, and ran for the shelter shouting for us all to hurry up. However, I stopped to look at what was happening in the blue skies above me. Seeing a Messerschmitt 109 twisting and turning between the puff of white clouds was fascinating to me and I stood on the path watching the dog fight. This was not to my mother鈥檚 liking and she started to scream at me. Reluctantly I made my way to the shelter having left my tea on the kitchen table.

The school hours changed to 10 am until 2.00pm with half an hour for lunch. If the siren went we ran to the shelters that had been built in the left hand corner of the playing field. We then had stories read to us. At home we moved into our Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden which my dad had erected next to the shed and we would spend the night there.

The Hurricanes stationed at Croydon airport would come skimming across the rooftops at Woodmansterne. I would stand in the garden watching them as they climbed into the sky on their way to engage the Germans. I was playing with my friend Lionel Graham in one of his dad鈥檚 fields one evening when we saw a JU88 come from the direction of Chipstead Valley Road and it flew over Scratch Wood. We both stood and watched it with its big black Swastika on, as it flew across the sky and headed off towards Epsom. It had barely reached the horizon when two Spitfires dived, firing their machine guns at it bringing it crashing to the ground. We both jumped for joy and cheered.

Soon the Germans were bombing London and my mother got me up one night and we both stood by our shelter looking at the night sky that was lit up from one end to the other with a red glow. I could hear the bombs crashing down and the explosions along with the popping of the anti aircraft guns. I remember my mother telling me that I would never forget that sight and she was right; I haven鈥檛.

The following day we walked into Banstead through a cloud of black smoke from the fires in London that had blotted out the sun. It was quite strange for people would appear from out of the smog, pass you by then disappear again like ghosts and to me it seemed an eerie world we were living in. On the left hand side of Woodmansterne Lane, just before we turned down Longcroft Avenue we passes a 鈥楬engest farm鈥�. They had suffered a direct hit with a bomb right through the middle of the roof near the chimney stack. On turning down Longcroft Avenue I could see that all the gardens were dug up and everyone was digging for victory. Where there once had been magnificent gardens with flowers and lawns there were now huge vegetable gardens.

I remember seeing a hospital on Epsom Road which had been badly damaged in a raid. However, the main hospital on Banstead Heath was never bombed. The inmates who were veterans of the First World War would hide in the corner of their rooms saying that the Germans were coming whenever the aircraft were over head but it seems that the Luftwaffe used the hospital as a navigational point and once there would alter course and head for targets elsewhere.

One Saturday night, a stick of bombs dropped across Woodmansterne. T fell on Kingscroft Road about 20 yards from Woodmansterne Lane. The first stick fell on the last but one house on the corner of Rectory Lane and Manor Way just before the lane drops into Chipstead Valley Road. I walked there on the Sunday morning collecting shrapnel and understood there were fatalities at the house but I'm not sure. The second stick fell at the back of one of the houses on Kingscroft road and did not explode. My father, as warden, was faced with the problem of what to do with the people who were in danger. As you can appreciate, the survivors were all at full stretch, so it was left to him to sort it out on his won. He decided to bring the people who were in immediate danger from the bomb, to our bungalow. I heard the swish of the bombs then the explosion across the village. I was also aware of my mother chuntering to herself wondering out loud why my father was 'bringing all those people from the council houses and putting them in our beds, the silly bugger'. However, what was my father to do? It was the early hours of Sunday morning and there was no village hall, only an old galvanised building on the recreation ground which was always kept locked. To make matters worse as far as my mother was concerned, he gave them all breakfast in the morning, of eggs and bacon. After they had left, she started yelling at him because he had given away all our weeks rations and we had nothing left for ourselves to eat.

One night my father was returning home from the warden鈥檚 post with his friends who was a fellow ARP warden. I heard him shout and they both started running down the garden path as a German plane flew low over the village and started machine gunning. Everything seemed to happen all at once; first the shouting then hearing them both running down the garden, the noise of the plane getting louder and the rattle of its guns. The swish and then the thud as the bullets hit the ground around their feet. The plane roared across the top of the beech trees off into the night as my father and his friend jumped into the shelter. They laughed about it the next morning. My dad鈥檚 friend said 鈥淚 knew if I stuck close to you Charlie I would be alright for you are the luckiest bugger I have ever known鈥�.

That was a turning point in my life for if he had been hit he would never have gone into the Army as he did soon after the blitz. After he left, my mother started to bring home some of her Canadian soldier friends and my father, who owned the house, evicted us from our home and we went to live in Nettleham with my grandparents. My grandfather and uncle both worked as tradesmen at the RAF camps, my uncle eventually being called up to join the navy. There was evidence of digging for victory here too. The gardens were dug up to grow vegetables as they had been in Surrey but most people here seemed to have a pig in the bottom of their gardens as well.

My mother worked 12 hour shifts in Clayton Dewandre's Titanic Works so I didn't see her much. From living near the flight path at Croydon airport I was familiar with the sights and sounds of the Hurricane fighters. In Nettleham I was near to the bomber bases and spent time either wandering up to the Dunholme airfield and watching the ground crew maintaining the aircraft or observing how the flight crews lived for the moment 贸 grasping brief interludes of happiness in the local pubs, enjoying each other's company before their next duty called.

My father served in the Royal Signals as cook and went ashore on D Day +12 into France and then onto Hamburg. Before the war he had been a landscape gardener and afterwards he worked in the recreation department at Banstead council.

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