大象传媒

War in Kensington

All through the war my Mother, two brothers and me lived in London, Kensington, just off the High Street. . I can still remember anti aircraft guns being stationed in Hyde Park and Holland Park either side of us. In fact my aunt Queenie was in the ATS on a gun battery in Hyde Park.. They never shot anything down. Partly due to the fact that the searchlights couldn't reach the height of the aircraft. The lights just gave a target point for the bombers. Still Churchill said it would scare the pants off the Germans so the guns kept thundering and missing. My brother Paul, our friends and me used to collect shrapnel from the guns and bombs. Useless great chunks of metal really. We kept them in boxes for 'swapsies'. The things' kids do.

We lived in a mews backing on to our school playground. A nice enough if small flat which used to be a stable hayloft in the earlier part of the century. I remember at the beginning of the war when a temporary mortuary was set up at the bottom of the mews and a building erected in the playground to store bodies and coffins. Not pleasant particularly when a bomb hit the store and burning bodies were blown all over the playground. My mother couldn't eat red meat from then on. The blast and hose water damaged our flat so we were evacuated to an aunt in of all places Exmouth. Turned out to be as much if not more bombing there than in London. I went with my Mother, Brother Paul, Aunt Gladys and Cousin Angela. I remember us three children had to share a bed, inconvenient when I caught measles and had to be in the dark for three weeks. My Sibling and Cousin caught it as well so my Mother and Aunt were stuck in the house all day with a step sister they didn't get on with. As we got better we had to spend all day on freezing cold benches by the sea just to avoid the dreaded aunt.

My father and uncle were with the eight army somewhere in the desert. I remember Dad saying later that he was involved in the El Alamein conflict and lucky to come out alive. He was a motor mechanic in the Royal Signals. One day he was repairing a lorry when a German Stukka bomber attacked. He made a dive behind a wheel on the lorry but found his mate had got there first. Dad moved to another wheel as the bullets flew. When the attack was over he crawled out and called to his mate only to find him shot dead behind the first wheel Dad had gone for.

Dad went on to pass through Monte Cassino, just after the Allies had sacked it. Then into the rest of Europe before coming home in 1945.

My Cousin's father Uncle Bert had one or two near misses as well. Like Dad he was in the Royal Signals but as a linesman running telephone cables to the front. One day he and his mate were detailed to get to a ridge to wait the advancing British tanks. Quietly smoking a fag or two - he was always a great smoker (it killed him in the end) - he spotted advancing tanks and started to drive towards them. Half way there his mate said hang on I don't recognise the shape of those tanks. Sure enough they were Germans. Pulling the lorry around my Uncle beat a hasty retreat but the Germans spotted them and bullets started whistling through the canvas covering of the lorry one splintering the windscreen. They escaped ok and later found it quite amusing but I bet it wasn't at the time.

So it was just the five of us in Exeter as my eldest Brother Geoff was evacuated to a school in Addlestone outside London. My Mother worried a lot about him and was pleased when the Battle of Britain was over and we could return to London. Of course we'd caught the first of the Battle of Britain and we used to go into the Kensington Underground station to shelter from the bombs. Can't remember too much of that myself as I was too young but you've probably seen the shots on television from time to time. Later we moved to a purpose built shelter at the bottom of our Mews. But we weren't welcome as the more adjacent residence said it was theirs and we were interlopers - so much for the war spirit. A shelter was then built under our house and we would go down there whenever a siren sounded. I remember my eldest brother used to come home at weekends and join us which pleased Mother. We had a bobby living opposite - a PC Marsh. Huge fat chap who looked most imposing and reassuring in his uniform. But looks can lie. One day an incendiary bomb fell outside the shelter and broke in half but didn't explode. The policeman heard the bomb hitting the road and suggested my brother Geof a fifteen years' old, go and investigate. Reporting back to the sheltering copper that the bomb was in two halves the quivering blob instructed Geoff to put sand over each half of the bomb and go and report it to the air raid wardens. My Mother went ballistic when she heard.

My Brother Paul and I were then deposited with another Aunt in Devonshire - Hill Croft where Whiteways had a cider production plant. I don't even have the vaguest recall but I'm told I was a difficult child refusing to talk whilst in London - maybe the trauma of the times, who knows. Anyway when mother came to collect us some weeks later, to her surprise I was talking freely using full sentences. She exclaimed he can talk! 'Course he can' retorted my Aunt in that phlegmatic Devonshire way 'he just didn't bother before as he didn't think there was anything worth saying' .My wife says she's not surprised as I still don't make small talk.

We then went again with my Cousin to some friends of my parents in Aryshire Scotland. The Scots on the West Coast wouldn't have known that there was a war going on apart from the rationing. I seem to recall we had a goodish time as it was near a beach for us to play on and I vaguely remember we had a garden with vegetables to play in something we didn't have in London.

By now I was of school age and went to St Mary Abbots, Kensington just at the back of our flat. A load of Gibraltarians were evacuated later to London and many of them joined our school. All the British mothers were up in arms as the evacuees brought head nits with them. Every time I smell disinfectant I still recall the steel combing of our hair to get rid of the pests and the plop as they hit the strategically placed news paper . Still they say nits only live in clean hair so I guess we were washed.

I also remember Italian prisoners of war or maybe they were interred residents, being billeted in Kensington Gardens. The prisoners weren't restricted and they had better food than us. We kids used to go to the camp and walk freely into the enclosures to cadge bits. I remember they gave us peanuts something I'd never tasted before. One of the Italians was an ice skating coach before the war and he spend endless hours teaching one of our neighbour's daughter's moves which she later used in becoming a World skating champion - I only wish I could remember her name. I know her mother used to pay the coach by giving him cakes that he shared with us. I liked the Italian prisoners - very friendly and they seemed to like children. They were all grateful to be out of the war so none escaped. Later on they were sent to Canada I think.

After the bombs Hitler launched his Doodlebugs. You know flying bombs. We used to watch the Spitfires chasing them and tipping their wings so they turned away from the city and dived into waste land. But we did have one land on a deserted Abbey near us. My Aunt lived across the Mews from us and the bomb blast moved her back wall about 10 inches out. It stayed like that for the rest of the war. In retrospect, how the floor stayed up is beyond me.

One day a Doodlebug fell at the top of Earls Court Road during the lunch hour. Over two thousand people killed and I can remember the bodies being transported to the mortuary at the bottom of our mews using dustcarts. Feet were sticking out the backend as the stacked bodies were shipped in. Us school kids used to climb up the mortuary windows to watch the bodies being dissected. Proper ghouls we were. Some of the older boys used to get inside the coffins in the playground store and others would then push the younger ones into the building. Huddling in the dark you can imagine the fear when all of a sudden a coffin lid started to open. But we were hardy then and had seen a lot so didn't need counselling like the kids would today. I remember the biggest boy was called Jackson. He smoked and was quite the hero to us small kids. Bit of a villain though and I think he ended up in gaol for burglary.

I remember falling off a tricycle and hitting a large iron garage-door hinge. This perforated an eardrum and I had to spend two weeks in Guys Hospital at the height of the Dooddlebug attacks. I recall listening to the engines stopping and wondering where the bomb would fall on me. It worried my Mother no end and she used to visit every day for the two weeks I was in the hospital.

My poor mother went through a lot. She used to work to help make ends meet - there was minimal money coming- in with my father away. One day at work she got a call to say a bomb had fallen on the school. It hadn't it was a near miss but, she didn't know that and rushed home to find Paul and me sitting at the lunch table eating the food provided by our grandmother who lived with us at the time.

In fact not only did our Grandma live there but our Aunt Queenie as well. Unbelievable looking back that so many people could stay in such a small 4 roomed space. Probably explains why all three brothers now have such large houses. I recall Queenie had fads and one of these was Spanish dancing. She used to come in from her night shift on the guns and get her maracas out and click them until the early hours - that was until Mother asked her to stop as it was keeping us all awake.

Against all odds Queenie found a husband a gentle soul called Frank. They married and moved in with Aunty Gladys and her daughter Angela. Queenie changed her name to Lydia and so it remained to the day she died. Frank played guitar and Lydia took it up as well so Gladys and Angela had to put up with unsolicited musical evenings - every evening. Gladys also had a lodger called Elsie Tanner an old lady who loved cats and always smelt of fish and pee. Elsie ruled the house with her cats like a latter day Mrs Faversham striking great terror into Gladys and Angela. Eventually when Bert returned Elsie was invited to leave and we heard no more of her.

The Doodlebugs were followed by V2 rockets one falling on Harrods in Knightsbridge. The shell was in the Science Museum for some years after. But by now the war was effectively over and the mortuary was closed down and some years later the store in the playground was demolished

I can remember meeting my Dad a total stranger to me (I was only two when he went to war) at I think Paddington Station, when he returned. I can just visualise my Brother Paul and me as very shy children, not knowing what to say or do. Dad was then posted to Aldershot where he waited to be discharged. My Mother would take us to visit him. The smell of the cleaning paste he used to wash his hands of grease he'd smeared on himself in repairing lorries and other army vehicles still sticks with me. My Dad was an immensely strong man and once he appeared at home with a purloined army motor bike. Now our flat was serviced by narrowish stairs and we had an attic accessed by a portable ladder. Dad being impatient and not wishing to be caught with a 'borrowed' motorbike couldn't wait for help to arrive. He hoisted the thing onto his back and clambered up the stairs and ladder into the loft crooking his back in the process. I don't think he ever rode the bike but sold it to an acquaintance for probably not much money. Was it all worth it? I don't think so.

I can just about remember Dad and Uncle Bert getting their demob suits and the laughs as they paraded in the ill-fitting garments. Also Brother Paul coming across some, what he thought, were balloons in a drawer in Mother's room and how angry she was and told him not to meddle in her things again".

Bert's was a real character and his return saw a turn for the best in my young childhood. In those days everybody had an upright piano and Bert had a natural ear for music and it seemed to me could play any tune he put mind to. Probably couldn't it just seemed that way. He also bought a table tennis net and bats and I can still see my Aunt and Cousin Angela playing using their assumed rules of not letting the ball bounce on the table! He also bought a snooker table and dart board which Paul and me would play on when ever possible. He then obtained one of the first table top television sets. A nine inch tube with a large magnifying screen on the front so those viewing from the side could only see people with fat legs and distorted faces rather like today's overweight Northerners I guess. I remember seeing my first spiritual horror play on it and being scared to go to bed afterwards. I also remember Geof taking me to see my first horror film - 'The Spiral Staircase'. I've seen it since and it's laughable but it gave me nightmares for weeks then.

After the war we used to get pleasure from simple things. My brother, friends and me used to roller skate all over West London. To the Imperial Museum where there were always free travel films to see; to the park for a game of football or cricket. Playing tag in the Mews and rounders at Sunday school. Later ice skating at Queens Gate and once on Wimbledon Common in the winter. Getting sweet rations - the smell of the tuck shop um. I don't recall being bored.

John Nicholls
johnandjoynicholls@btinternet.com

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