大象传媒

A TEENAGER`S WAR By Tusker

I was 12 years old when war was declared on 3rd September 1939 and living in a Victorian tenement estate in Blackfriars Road, Central London not far from the Elephant and Castle. I was an only child and Mum and Dad decided I would remain with them in London instead of being evacuated with my school to a safe area. Underground air raid shelters were dug under the quadrangle of the estate where we lived with a neighbour commenting that she would not use them because she preferred to be buried at Streatham Park cemetery! We all laughed.

We lived on the top floor of a three storey block and in 1940 I frequently watched from my bedroom window the vapour trails of enemy aircraft approaching from the east in the clear morning sky and wondering whether they would reach Blackfriars or would our fighters turn them back over Kent. The trails would subsequently become a mass of interwoven scribbling against the sky as the bomber formations were attacked by the RAF. It didn鈥檛 occur to me that I was seeing brave young men trying to kill each other up there. Some bombers did get through, of course, and one particular morning a bomb through the railway bridge in Blackfriars Road wrecked two trams full of people going to work. On September 7 the Luftwaffe launched a huge daylight raid on the East End of London and that afternoon I walked the mile or so to Tower Bridge and watched the Thames-side warehouses and docks burning. This raid marked the start of the London Blitz with the Luftwaffe returning later that night to bomb London on 57 consecutive nights.

During the Blitz Mum, Dad and myself took shelter deep down in Waterloo underground station sleeping on the platforms. Tube passengers navigated round the reclining bodies and bedding of the shelterers in order to board and alight from the trains. When the air raid warning sounded above, the trains stopped running and floodgates at the river end of the platforms were closed to protect the system from flooding should a bomb penetrate the bed of the Thames and breach the tube tunnels below. We returned home next morning carrying our bedding like nomads often picking our way through scattered shrapnel and incendiary debris lying on the streets and wondering whether our home was still standing. The estate escaped direct hits by bombs but suffered blast damage from near misses and was undamaged by the later V1 (flying bomb) and V2 (long range rocket) attacks in spite of being in the prime target area. The solid Victorian walls and stone staircases gave us a degree of confidence and, fortunately, there was never a bomb through the roof to put them to the test.

I attended a wartime emergency school and in 1941, aged 14, I left school to start work as a Post Office telegram boy messenger walking the streets of the City of London just across the Thames from my home. In addition to my uniform, I was issued with an official steel helmet and gas mask container, which made me feel I was now really part of the war effort. Many families dreaded the sight of a telegram boy coming to their door as we were usually associated with messages of bad news in those dark days. I remember saying a little prayer each morning that I would not have to deliver a war casualty telegram to a bereaved family that day. Most of my delivery work in the City, however, involved business telegrams with the odd trip to the Tower of London with a telegram for a soldier stationed there. That was exciting because we messengers had to go into the Tower to find the soldier in his barrack room, or wherever, and personally hand the message to him to await any reply he may wish to send. If he dictated a reply we had to price up the telegram and collect the money, unless it was a `reply paid` telegram. This provided us with a good excuse for taking our time in getting back to the office for another delivery; a practice called `Miking`.

I was given further schooling by the Post Office to prepare me for the Civil Service general examination which we boys had to sit at the age of 16 to determine what future work we would do in the service. I managed to obtain a high enough pass to be appointed, in 1944, as a telegraphist at the Central Telegraph Office in the shadow of St Paul鈥檚. The CTO had been rebuilt inside the shell of the original office building that was gutted by fire in the Blitz a couple of years or so earlier. It was the operational hub of the Post Office Telegraph system and at 8 o鈥檆lock each evening we took the precaution of transferring all the telegraph circuits to a reserve location below ground until the next morning but air raids were few and far between at that time.

There was always talk of Hitler鈥檚 secret weapon and in 1944 the V1 attacks began, reminding us that the war was still very much on. My first experience of a `doodlebug` (the nickname for the V1) was hearing the sound of a spluttering motor overhead as if a plane had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and was about to crash. We did not realise until later that there was no pilot on board and the `plane` was merely a bomb with wings and a jet motor with enough fuel to get it to London, then cut out to kill and demolish whatever it fell on. Then came the V2 rockets that were fired indiscriminately at London and South East England. They were faster than the speed of sound so you couldn鈥檛 hear them coming. One hit a Woolworth鈥檚 store at New Cross one afternoon killing many shoppers. I remember visiting the site of an early V2 hit near the Elephant and Castle, which was said to be caused by an old unexploded bomb left over from the Blitz going off. I don鈥檛 know which bothered us most - the eerie silence after a V1 motor cut out while it glided to explode on impact with the ground or the faster than sound V2`s which hit and exploded without any warning at all. When we left for work in the morning we never knew whether we would be around for our tea that evening, but our social life, such as making arrangements to meet friends to go to the pictures in the evenings, went on as usual.

V2 rocket technology and German rocket scientists were the foundation of the post-war American space programme, of course, and in 1969 when I watched the television pictures of the first man to walk on the Moon my thoughts were of the shoppers killed at New Cross and the several thousand civilians killed in South East England by those wartime rockets, not forgetting the countless European slave workers who were worked to death on the German rocket sites.

Leisure activities were pretty limited for teenagers during the war. Home entertainment consisted mainly of listening to the radio with Tommy Handley and ITMA being our main treat once a week. We also tuned in our battery wireless set to William Joyce, known as Lord Haw Haw, who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany, to see whether we had all been wiped out by the air raids of the previous night. Joyce was English and he was hanged as a traitor in 1946, although his broadcasts were treated as a joke at the time and they really had the effect of strengthening our resolve to carry on during the Blitz. Going to the pictures several times a week was our main leisure activity, in spite of air raids, and my favourite outdoor activity was cycling into the countryside of Kent and Surrey at weekends. My particular pal was named Joe and one memorable summer Sunday we both cycled from Blackfriars to Detling, near Maidstone, and back to visit a couple of his cousins who were in the Women`s Land Army working on a farm down there. Joe was a year or so older than me and so was called up to the army before I was and how I envied him at the time. Unfortunately he was back in a military hospital in Epsom within the year with German Spandau machine gun bullet wounds to one of his knees, which put paid to his cycling days

Together with Mum and Dad I was lucky and came through six years of war physically unscathed and shortly after Victory Europe day in 1945 I was conscripted under wartime regulations to serve in the Royal Corps of Signals and I got to march with my training unit in the Victory Japan parade in Scarborough later that year. It was 1948 before I was released from military service, so it could be said my `war` lasted for nine years. No campaign medals though!

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