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A childhood of war

I was just two years old at the outbreak of war. My earliest memories were of being evacuated, but I was lucky: my father as a schoolteacher at White Lion Street school in Islington came with his class to Crowland, near Peterborough. I remember being with my older brother, holding his hand tightly, in the railway station with hundreds of children. From the journey I can remember the smell of frightened children, probably having wet themselves. The next thing that I remember is my father not being there, he had volunteered for the Royal Air Force. What I want to record is the effect upon my mother and upon myself. She was a country woman, coming up to thirty years old, and she was someone who would make the best of whatever we had, but she felt desperately frightened. France fell and the Dunkirk retreat left her terrified that the invasion would come. We were aware of much military activity around us. I can remember clearly waiting for an age whilst a convoy of lorries and Bren Gun carriers (tracked personnel vehicles) blocked us crossing the road in Peterborough, whilst shopping with my mother. My mother joined in with the identification of aircraft that I know was being encouraged. She went through the different ‘planes with us. One day I saw a twin engined ‘plane with German markings, flying low along the railway line near our house. I knew it was a Heinkel 133; we spotted aircraft instead of cars. I knew that my mother was unhappy and frightened and lonely. My brother started school in Crowland, being eighteen months older than myself, and I spent hours alone with my mother, knowing her despair and fear. Eventually father began to have occasional leave, but I felt I never saw him enough. In 1942 mother decided to take us to live in Lancashire, near where father was stationed, in Preston. I started school in Freckleton and we lived in a converted horse drawn caravan, accommodation being so difficult. Water came through the roof and we had not much food, no bathroom, and it rained constantly. My mother could not stand the rain (and the accent my brother and I were picking up at school) so she took us to live with her mother and brother on a small farm in Devon. A few weeks later Freckleton school was obliterated when a bomb laden aircraft crashed on it; most of the village children were killed.

We saw very little of father and the war was ever present. ‘Before the war’ was a mystic time, when there had been butter, cheese and bacon to eat and there had been holidays (camping expeditions, transported in my parents tandem and side car). We knew that there were such things as sweets, chocolate, ice creams and bananas, and toys, but we never saw them. Christmas and birthday presents were second hand, or home made.

Father, as a school teacher had been made into a Physical Training Instructor, which he hated. Eventually he re-mustered and was assigned training as a wireless fitter, a year long course in the Holloway Road Polytechnic, back in Islington. My parents managed to get a flat in Hornsey Road, so we were together as a family again. But there were still bombing raids on London, even in 1943, and I remember nights up, sitting under the stairs of the flats (the shelters had no doors and my mother could not stand the cold and the smell of cats) but I enjoyed the jolliness of the conversations of the grown-ups and the fun of the teenaged girls from the flat above. Collecting shrapnel from the gutters was a school going activity, and looking at the gaps in the streets nearby. My mother would never acknowledge that bombs were dropping, she always explained their screaming as ‘rocket guns’ which I believe were mythical. The searchlights in the skies, the massed droning of the bombers and the buzz of defending aircraft and the incessant explosions remain vividly in my mind as memory of being in an air raid.

When the V 1 and V 2 weapons appeared, my mother once again took us back to Devonshire. The farm, near the estuary of the Exe, was under Woodbury Common, a training ground for commandos. We were very aware of massive amounts of intense military training going on, and of parachute and coastal attack training, in the build up to D-Day, and American soldiers in their jeeps, racing through our tiny village. Father was based in Yeovil and Southampton, working on the ‘tweeters’, radio devices attached to anti-aircraft balloons and to the allied war ‘planes to avoid self inflicted disasters to our own craft. We saw him occasionally and my younger brother was born three months before D-Day.

We returned to London, to Islington, before VE day, and I remember the street parties, bonfires at the crossroads and dancing on the bomb shelter roofs along the street.

After the war, my father returned to teaching in White Lion Street, but he had begun to take a further degree, to change his profession, so I still felt I had too little of him, and he later undertook a professional training, and had to work at weekends to pay for it. He told the story of his war time service as a series of ridiculous, humorous, well honed anecdotes, in which he mocked the muddle, the inefficiency, the complete lack of dedication. My father had always been fiercely anti-fascist, and he believed that the war was necessary, but he thought that it had failed to unite the country. He and my mother loathed Winston Churchill, believing that he was anti-working people and an arrant imperialist. No one that I knew believed what was said on the wireless, or in the papers, about ‘the war-time spirit’. My parents believed that people were better fed in the war, than before, because food distribution was fair, but they believed that those with money, had access to black market luxuries, denied us.

At school, from the age of fourteen, participation in military education was compulsory, in ‘the CCF’ (Combined Cadet Force). Naturally I opted for the blue uniform of the air force cadets. I became a medical student and my conscription for National Service was postponed until I qualified, but the Service was abolished a few months before I was due for call-up. For much of my life, I expected to have to go to war, although the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, brought some sense that it might not happen. As I get older, I become more sensitive to accounts of the war, and more troubled by it. In some manner, that I cannot fully understand, I believe the war marked me in some bad way.

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