大象传媒

WWII

When war was declared I was aged 9 and on holiday with my parents, together with my brother aged 19 and sister aged 16. We were at a farm near Strete in South Devon and I recall us all gathering in the farmhouse to hear Neville Chamberlain鈥檚 announcement on the radio and the solemn faces of all there. I can now imagine the concern my parents must have felt although at the time it didn鈥檛 really register with me.

My father left for London. He worked for the Admiralty and as we lived in London he thought it best to leave us in Devon until the situation clarified. In the event I finished up going to school there (30 children of all ages from 5 to 15 in one classroom). After a few months we returned to London, not to our house in Hampstead, but further out to Mill Hill which, being on the edge of the countryside, was thought to put us out of harm鈥檚 way, not unreasonably at the time.

I spent the war days at Mill Hill. Like most parts of London we had our share of bombing, including incendiaries, and the nights, especially during the blitz, were quite noisy. Initially those nights were spent under a Morrison shelter in the dining room but I can also recall nights in my bedroom and hearing the odd doodlebug cut out and waiting for the subsequent explosion. The largest bang I heard was when a land mine fell by a housing estate on the edge of the Welsh Harp Reservoir some 5 miles away and 600 houses were damaged.

Noisy nights were always followed by an early morning expedition looking for shrapnel including shell caps (a much sought after prize) and other odd items like metal foil. A good piece of shrapnel would be about 6 inches long and could always be bartered for something else.

An ARP warden lived next door and my sister was roped in for stirrup pump duties when the incendiaries fell. My brother was at Imperial College London working on incendiary bombs and had his back burnt when one went off, clearly by mistake. My father was working on teleprinter messages at the Admiralty. One highly secret one could not be communicated in the normal way and my father delivered it personally to Bath. The up side of this was that he was locked into a single compartment on the train from Paddington along with two Wrens but I never found out exactly what the purpose of this was! My mother became quite proficient at wrapping up food parcels for service personnel.
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Spare time for me was spent playing in the nearby fields with friends, using toy guns which we had made ourselves. Collecting engine numbers was another pastime, 鈥渟pecials鈥�, that is trains not in the normal timetables, were a much used wartime phenomena and resulted in steam engines from Scotland coming down South, pulling troop trains. A somewhat more risky activity than collecting engine numbers was riding in the railway trucks which the Italian prisoners of war had left empty at the end of each day at Scratch Wood sidings. They had arrived daily from Cricklewood engine sheds full of ash and clinker from the steam engines and having been emptied by the Italians were lined up ready to go back. As they were at the top of a gentle gradient they didn鈥檛 need much of a push to get them rolling!

An even riskier activity, strictly for the 鈥渂ig boys鈥�, was riding on narrow gauge trucks to which the Home Guard had fixed targets for firing practice. Not that these dangerous rides were ever made when being fired at but the switchback type track, which made the targets not only move at speed but go up and down as well, gave any boys brave enough to start them rolling and then jump on, quite an exhilarating ride.

School went on, of course, including interruptions for air raids and the consequent visits to the shelters. One girl had a bomb in her back garden. This left a very deep crater in the clay but presumably this saved the house itself which only appeared to have broken windows. This was a house in a road at Mill Hill which ran parallel with the railway so no prizes for guessing what the target was. The prefects at my last school were posted to roof top duties to identify air raid warnings and all clears, presumably in advance of the local sirens going off. The school itself had a direct hit but fortunately at night time so no one was hurt.

With sweets rationed (even supplemented by relative鈥檚 coupons) visits to the grocers for broken biscuits became part of the journey home from school. Breathing in the gorgeous smell wafting from Kemp鈥檚 biscuit factory as the train passed over the North Circular probably stoked up the desire! I only tried eating Oxo cubes once but I did appreciate the very smart American service lady at Stanmore who gave me some gum saying 鈥淵ou鈥檙e the only boy today who hasn鈥檛 asked for some!鈥�

I can鈥檛 say that fear really came into my life, we just got on with each day. I do recall when my brother had his 21st birthday in 1941 we all went
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to a cinema on the Edgware Road at Colindale to celebrate. It was
evening time and an air raid started. This was flashed on the screen so that those who wanted to could find a shelter. We stayed but we could hear the bombs exploding outside!

I guess seeing the sky over London glowing red when the docks were
bombed, a doodlebug in broad daylight going very low over our back garden , the long convoys of our troops heading south down the Barnet Bypass prior to D-Day and finally the VE and VJ celebrations in London were the most memorable events of all.

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