大象传媒

This is the second of Brian Cable鈥檚 鈥楥HILDHOOD MEMORIES FROM RAYLEIGH IN ESSEX鈥�.

These memories were written by Brian, edited by Jo Taylor of the Holmewood and Heath CAP team, and added to the site with the author鈥檚 permission.

AIR RAIDS AND SHELTERS

When the air raids first started they were mostly in the day and quite spasmodic, I saw my first German planes one morning when I was at home. They were Heinkel 111s, flying in formation with an escort of Me109s. As the war proceeded we lads got quite expert at aircraft recognition, we even founded a club and met on a Saturday morning in a closed caf茅 owned by the parents of one of our members.
We bought books, and silhouette cards of aircraft, which we showed on a screen with an epidiascope for the rest to identify.
Soon we were losing quite a bit of schoolwork, and quite a bit of sleep owing to the raids.
At home, when the raids were at night, at first we hurriedly dressed and went down to our elaborate shelter. There we would make a cup of tea and try to sleep, but as the nights got colder we tended to take our chance under the stairs.
My father was an air raid warden, so as soon as the siren sounded he had to go out. One night my mother and I clung to each other as glass and slates rattled down the stairs. A land mine had landed not very far away, and after the explosion there was a deadly silence. It seemed as if we were the only people left alive. We wondered if my father was all right and then a voice came through the letterbox, it was one of his fellow wardens saying that he was OK and had gone down to where some more bombs had landed.

During the early part of the end of the phoney war my father would have to go out whenever the siren sounded and my mother would wake me and we would go out to the shelter. As however there were so many sirens and all clears, with nothing happening in between, she got to only getting me up if things got noisy. One night she came into my room and gently shook me awake, and as I came to consciousness I could hear the guns pounding away. She told me to go and get something to read in the shelter while she got a flask and some blankets ready.
While I was sitting sorting out a book on the settee in the lounge she suddenly appeared shouting to me to get out! I instinctively looked up and saw a huge heavy wooden chandelier swinging on just one of its four supports. As I jumped off of the settee it crashed down right where I had been sitting. A land mine had come down barely half a mile away as the crow flies. We dived under the stairs and this was the time we clung to each other as slates and glass rattled down, and in the ensuing silence we felt as if we were the only two people left alive. We wondered what had happened to my father and if he was all right, when there was a voice through the letterbox. It was one of my father鈥檚 fellow wardens saying that he was OK and had gone down to help where another mine had come down. Night raids were always more frightening because you never really knew what was going on.
Often there were so many alerts and all clears during the night you never knew whether there was supposed to be a raid on or not. Several times I went to school in the morning only to be sent home again because there was a raid still on. It was all very strange, they were not allowed to send us home while a raid was on during the day, but they could send us home if one was still on in the morning!

Unexploded Bomb
One of the worries of those times was unexploded bombs, whether they were meant to be timed, or just failed to go off. After a raid one afternoon we were sent home when the all clear sounded because bombs had landed in the area. My friend Charley and I decided to take the short cut home, which led us though, the bottom end of an unmade road. We came upon a couple of bungalows where a bomb had landed in the garden of one of them, and damaged both severely. No one lived at either so there were no casualties. We next came upon a hole in the centre of the road with steep sides, and we jumped in to see if there were any odd bits of the bomb. As we were grovelling around we were startled by a voice from above,
鈥淲hat the hell do you think you are doing in there, there鈥檚 an unexploded bomb!鈥� Looking up we saw an irate warden and we scrambled out,
鈥淗ow did you get in here?鈥� he continued, 鈥淚鈥檝e cordoned the road off at the end.鈥� We told him we had come in at the bottom and saying,
鈥淭ypical!鈥� We ran off and hid behind some bushes.
His attention was taken by the arrival of a bren gun carrier and the bomb disposal squad, and from our shelter we watched them lift the bomb out, defuse it and fix it to the back of the carrier and drive off. The fact that if it had gone off it could have killed us never occurred to us.
One night during a raid, while my father and I had gone up to calm the chickens, we heard the whistle of a bomb and a dull thud close by. It appeared to come from the direction of the north paddock but as it was very dark, and as the raid had now quietened down we left it till daylight.
In the morning I went up to the paddock and looking around noticed a depression that I was certain was not there before. I showed my father but he couldn鈥檛 say either way, as he never went there very often.
To be on the safe side he notified the police and they came up with some army bomb disposal men. They looked around, tested the ground and declared that there was nothing there. I tried to put in my two penny worth but they took no notice of me.
I am still convinced to this day that something came down in the paddock that night. Today the area is covered with an estate of houses and when I visited there a few years ago I took my wife to show her. I could pinpoint the spot fairly accurately in relation to the front gate of a bungalow which still stood there from those days. It was a lovely warm afternoon and children were playing in the garden of the house which seemed nearest the spot. My wife asked me if I was going to tell them,
鈥淲ould you want to know that your brand new house might be sitting on a World War II unexploded bomb?鈥� I replied.
Of course the whole thing might have been the wild imaginations of youth, and I just wanted it to be what I wished it to be?

Doodlebugs.
As the war progressed, and we got older, we no longer went into the long underground shelters but into surface ones built of brick with concrete roofs and a section of brickwork that was loose and could be broken out as an escape route in an emergency. Instead of the teachers coming in with us they tended to go to a shelter on their own and have a natter.
One morning the siren had sounded but there was no sign of any activity, we stood in the entrance of our shelter when we heard a kind of rapid popping sound. Suddenly there a appeared a plane, a weird affair, flying very very fast. It certainly moved faster than anything we had ever seen before, and being as we considered ourselves experts at aircraft recognition had never seen anything like it before. We were completely baffled, quickly leafing through our books to try and see if we could find anything like it. We only heard one more in the distance and the all clear soon sounded, and it was the object of much speculation for the rest of the day.
The newspapers the next morning solved the puzzle, the Germans were now sending over pilot less planes, flying bombs, with no one inside, it all seemed very eerie! The papers gave drawings and silhouettes and they conformed perfectly to what we had witnessed. They were given the name 鈥楧oodlebug鈥� but were officially known as V1 flying bombs. When you heard them coming you just prayed that they would keep going, for when the pop pop popping鈥�. stopped, there was an ominous silence, and then you heard the explosion. You knew that if they kept going you were all right, but that some other poor devil was going to get it!
I saw several of them after dark, and they were a very strange sight, like gigantic blowlamps roaring across the night sky, a length of flame behind about half as long again as the craft.
We lived opposite a farm, and one Sunday night after coming home from church I saw the farmer looking up and shading his eyes from the evening sun. I went over to him and saw what he was looking at; a doodlebug was flying in quite low from over the coast. It drifted and swayed as it pop pop popped along, and as it drew level with us we heard its engine falter, and then cut out. Stepping back we prepared to take cover, but then it dived and swerved a little, began to splutter, and the engine restarted and on it flew and we never did hear it explode.
One morning we heard that a V1 had exploded in a field only about a mile a way from the school. We cycled up there hoping to get some souvenirs, and found the explosion had destroyed a large circle of wheat. In a ditch there was a complete wing lying on its side, and we had excited ideas of getting it back to school. It was far too heaving however, and despite our combined efforts we could not shift it, and had to go on to school disappointed.
These weapons were to have a devastating effort while they lasted, with great damage and loss of life; however, they were to be replaced with a far more deadlier weapon which no one had any idea it was coming, until it arrived!

Morrison Shelter.
About the middle of 1944 my parents decided they would like to move back to the bungalow. As there was no air raid shelter there we applied for a Morrison one, a huge indoor device like a gigantic table made of steel. It just about filled my bedroom and I helped my father and brother-in-law put it up. The top was made of thick steel supported by heavy angle steel legs which were linked by angle frame. Mesh shields covered the sides so that falling debris was kept out. My mother and I liked to play table tennis, but we only had a small table, and when the Morrison arrived we were delighted at the prospect of being able to play on such a large surface. Imagine our disappointment when we tried to play and found the balls would not bounce on it at all!
I used to sleep in the Morrison on a permanent basis, my mother coming in if things got noisy. Many a time we have laid there hearing Doodlebugs cut out, waiting in trepidation for the explosion. It was an ideal indoor shelter which I believe saved many lives.

V2s.
We were sitting in church one Sunday morning when there was a loud explosion, no sirens had sounded and we had heard no aircraft of any sort. This was the advent of the V2, a rocket-propelled missile that travelled faster than sound and of which there could not possibly be any warning. No one ever saw one coming down, but one day I was out with some friends and heard what we now recognised was one exploding. On looking up, through a gap in some cloud, we saw a spiral trail, and heard the faint whine of it coming down. The explosion point was obviously nearer to us than the path of its approach; hence we heard its approach a few seconds after it had exploded.
The last V2 to land on this country actually came down only a few hundred yards from our bungalow. By this time we were living back home and the explosion rocked the bungalow, and woke us up in the early hours of the morning. It had landed opposite a farm right in the front garden of a house, in which lived a woman in her 90s and her companion who I think was probably in her 60s. They were both asleep indoors in a Morrison shelter when the whole house collapsed into the crater. They both survived and lived for some years after the war ended.
When I went over to inspect the scene, the sight that amazed me most was on the farm, where chickens were running about without a feather on them. They actually survived and their feathers grew back.
Another strange sight at the scene of V2 explosions was the vast amount of glass wool that festooned trees, bushes and telephone wires etc. This I understand was used for insulation to protect the warhead during flight.
With this last V2 came the end of all enemy activity over our land, and all the aircraft we now saw were squadrons of our own as they headed out to destroy Germany.

Barrage Balloons
When we were in the shelters at school we could hear a raid going on outside but could see nothing. On going home, however, we could often trace the course of the raid in the vapour trails in the blue sky above. You could follow the trails of the German planes coming in over the coast, the white puffs of ack ack fire still lingering up to a certain point. Then the trails as the fighters took over, weaving in and out of the bomber trails. A black trail going down towards the horizon indicated where a plane had been shot down. If it hadn鈥檛 been so serious, the mass of trails in the sky of that warm 1940s summer would have been quite an attractive work of art.

Late one afternoon while taking a short cut across the field to the shops, I noticed something silver shining in the sky. As the sun glinted upon it I realised it was a barrage balloon that had broken free of its moorings and was now drifting dangerously across the air lanes. Suddenly a Spitfire appeared, (probably from Rochford,) and as it swooped up towards the balloon there was short burst of canon fire, and as it turned away there was an orange flash. The remnants of the balloon fluttered down to earth like some huge stricken bird.
From where we lived barrage balloons were a wonderful sight, they also gave a certain feeling of comfort. About twenty or thirty of them, moored at different heights around the estuary, caught the setting sun like giant silver shimmering whales against a deep blue sea.
It seemed to us that when they were low in the sky we had a quiet night, but when they were well up things tended to get rough. This of course could have been our imagination but perhaps the balloon crews did maybe get some advance warning?

The Turning Point?
There was a period during the Battle of Britain when there was what is generally agreed was a turning point. Churchill mentions this in one of his speeches, which were released on records after the war. I think that my father and I may have witnessed this moment one Sunday afternoon.
We had arrived home from Sunday School and were just walking up the drive to feed the chickens, while my mother had gone indoors to get the tea ready.
We began to hear the roar of aircraft, and stopped to look as squadrons of planes were flying in from over the estuary. My father said they were probably our lads returning from a raid, but my aircraft recognition was better then his, and I said they were Heinkel 111s!
鈥淎re you sure?鈥� he asked, and I said I was very sure. He said I鈥檇 better go and get my mother and we get down the shelter.
The coastal guns had now opened up, but very soon grew silent as fighters appeared from different directions. Spitfires and Hurricanes roared up between the squadrons climbing high and then diving to the attack. The air was rent with cannon fire as planes went down in flames and parachutes opened up all around.
The three of us watched the spectacular display from the entrance to the shelter, the raid was completely routed and I believe that as a result of this day Hitler shelved his plans for the invasion of Britain.

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