大象传媒

The following memories are those my late mother told me about what life was like for her and her family during World War 2 in Kensal Rise, West London.

3rd September 1939 was a bright, warm Sunday morning but instead of attending their local chapel as usual, the Stanleys were listening to the radio at 11.00 a.m. Then they heard Neville Chamberlain announce in his tired Midland-accented voice that Britain was at war with Germany. Hearing this, my grandmother sank down in her chair and burst into tears. She had lost two of her five brothers in the Great War and thought this new war would be the same as before with poison gas, trenches, mud and terrible loss of life. Eventually she dried her eyes and glared at Peggy who was 16 at the times and snapped, "Now you listen to me, Margaret. You're not to got out with any of them Australians, d'you understand?" (There had been many Australians stationed in the UK during World War 1 and she thought they would all come back again).

Once hostilities were declared, everyone in the street began donating their aluminium pots and pans for munitions. All the wrought iron railing outside the houses were removed and even the small decorative rails on the windowsills, including attractive wrought iron flowers, were taken away. There was sticky tape criss-crossing the windows and there was the all-important blackout to be observed. Gasmasks and identity cards had to be carried at all times.

Schoolchildren were evacuated to the countryside, in anticipation of massed bombing, and Betty who was 10 years old was sent to Northampton. She remembered afterwards that the whole town, being a centre for boot and shoe manufacturing, smelled of cheesy feet. After a few weeks my grandparents went up to Northampton and brought Betty home, as they missed her and they felt nothing was happening as it was the period of the "phoney war". Thereafter the family stayed together in spite of all that was to happen to them.

The "Phoney war" ended in the spring of 1940 when the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway before blitzkrieging into the Low Countries and France. In Britain the news was censored and most people did not know what was really happening; until the evacuation of Dunkirk and the return of thousands of exhausted, dirty yet defiant soldiers who had escaped the German Army's clutches. Of course there were those who did not return, who were either captured or killed, among the latter was a boyfriend of Peggy's.

The summer of 1940 was so hot and beautiful and Peggy would look up into the cloudless sky day after day, past the barrage balloons, to gaze at the white writhing vapour trails scrawled against the blue background, where the RAF were battling (outnumbered four to one) against the onslaught of the Luftwaffe. It was hard to realised that at the edge of the stratosphere the fate of Britain and the free world was being decided by the desperate actions of the Few.

As summer faded, beside the distant dogfights which were mounting to a vicious climax, there were the heavy daylight raids in the east of London aiming for the docks and the East End. The nights drew in and the London Blitz began in ernest. Night after night bombs rained down on humble homes and strategic targets alike; Kensal Rise being heavily hit as it was very near to the Kensal Green gasworks and Paddington Station, nestling beside the Harrow Road.

The Stanley's house was near the huge Kensal Green cemetery and during one bad air raid there was a tremendous explosion in the cemetery, with flames and debris shooting up hundreds of feet into the ski and night turned into day. My grandfather saw it all as he stood at the open back door (he was a quiet, gently comical soul who did not smoke, drink or swear) and apparently in sheer amazement he was using language that would make a sailor blush. Later on it transpired that a German bomb had hit a secret petrol dump hidden in the cemetary and the whole lot had gone up.

Eventually the Stanleys' luck ran out when they were bombed out one night and they went to stay for a while with my grandmother's sister Hilda who lived in Acton. Altogether the Stanley family were bombed out twice and blasted out of nine other dwellings during the war, losing almost everything they had - but their ginger cat survived and lived into the 1950s. Ever afterwards Peggy would gulp, "Oh God!" and visibly shudder whenever she heard the sounds of the "Alert" or the "All-Clear" on the TV or the radio. At this time she tried to keep a diary but it proved to be impossible because of the disruption and in the end she abandoned it and had to rely on her memory.

The Baptist chapel the family attended was destroyed in the Blitz, so when Peggy chose to be confirmed she and other candidates were confirmed in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Besides the terrors of the Blitz, most items were rationed and what was off the ration was in short supply. Food was basic but there was never enough and Peggy lost a lot of weight, going below 7 stone which was a lot to lose as she was 5'6" at the time. Substitutes of all kinds were tried out and she recalled that when eggs and fats were scarce, they whisked sugar and liquid paraffin together (before adding the flour) to make a sponge cake. Later the family kept a few hens in the back yard so at least they had some eggs. Once Peggy went out with a boyfriend (He was either Australian or a New Zealander in the RAF who was later killed in action) to a cafe for a rare wartime steak. When they were paying the bill, she saw a sign by the till saying, "Horsemeat served here", which she was not too happy about.

What Peggy really missed were good clothes to wear and decent stockings, she being almost a Rita Hayworth Look-alike with wavy auburn hair and hazel eyes. She would paint her legs with cold tea or gravy browning and draw a line up the backs with eyebrow pencil to imitate a seam. Instead of setting lotion for hair, sugar would be melted in warm water and brushed on to the hair for styling. Some cosmetics were available as the authorities thought they were good for keeping up morale. Lipsticks cams in wooden cases instead of metal.

At that time Peggy was working in a shop when her call-up papers arrived, conscripting her into the WAAF but it was deferred as she had a heart murmur, the result of rheumatic fever as a child. She then went to work in a war factory near her home (instead of being directed somewhere else as the authorities could do at the time)as a clerk-typist. By this time Peggy was in a low physical and mental state and one day when there was an air raid warning, she could not face going into the ahelter and refused to go inside, nearly at screaming point. Instead of reprimanding her, the company realised she needed some rest away from London and they put her on a train to Belper. When she arrived at the home where she would stay, she was helped to settle in and then the woman asked her to go out to the kitchen garden and pick some beetroot leaves for lunch. The leaves were cooked just like greens and actually tasted rather nice. Altogether Peggy stayed in Belper for several weeks, repairing her ragged nerves.

Peggy returned to London, rested if not cured, returned to work and joined the American Red Cross, for by now the US was in the war. She go to know many Americans, they were young, well-dressed, friendly and mostly very nice personalities; although often immature, well-meaning but woefully ignorant of the world outside the US and very homesick, being thousands of miles awayr from home for the first time in their lives. Several of them would visit Peggy's home, meet her family and hear first hand about life was like for civilians in a war-scarred city. One was a US Marine who used to stand guard outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in No. 1 uniform, who sadly was posted later to the Pacific and was killed during the invasion of Iwo Jima where several thousand Marines died. Another was a Virginian called Bobby Harmon who was in the USAAF and got shot down over Germany on a daylight raid, but survivied and ended up in a prison camp, from where he would write to Peggy on POW mail forms in pencil.

There was a young USAAF pilot Peggy also knew, a sweet boy who would often visit her and being the family food from the American PX. There were things they had never seen before like tinned butter, which tasted rather oily and horrible but they were glad of it. One morning he turned up on the doorstep, stinking drunk and in a dreadful state, desperately needing to talk to someone. Peggy and my grandmother managed to sober him up with black coffee (Camp coffee syrup out of a bottle, no doubt) and after a while he pulled himself together. He had been on his first daylight bombing mission over Germany in a B17 Flying Fortress, the formation had been attacked by German fighter planes; several of the crew were badly wounded and his co-pilot had been killed in the seat next to him. No wonder he had been hitting the bottle after such a horrifying experience.

Finally D-Day arrived and, as Churchill said, this was the beginning of the end. But as people were starting to think that the end would be in sight, then the onslaught of the flying bombs began on London - as if the tired, undernourished Londoners had not had enought to put up with, now they had these terrifying missiles to contend with. One evening Peggy was visiting friends in Neasden and was holding a cup with cups and saucers on it when they heard a strange rasping, grating noise in the sky which then stopped - and a few seconds later there was a massive explosion some way off, making the crockery jump and rattle on the tray. This was her first experience of a doodlebug (V1).

The cinema was a welcome refuge from reality where Peggy went frequently, her favourite film stars being Loretta Young and Robert Taylor. However on day in April 1945 she was watching the newsreels when the first footage of the liberation of Belsen by British troops was shown, revealing the true horror of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The audience was so shocked and appalled at the terrible sights shown on the screen that many of them began vomiting in their seats and were unable to stop. Peggy would always remember people were throwing up all around her and for the rest of her life she would quietly weep whenever films of the death camps were shown on TV.

Then suddenly the war was over and servicemen and women began to be demobbed and were coming home at last. As for the civilians they slowly began to reassemble their lives again, although hampered by rationing and austerity and sapped by nearly six years of war; beginning to hope that things would become easier - but it would take a long time, as it turned out.

In spite of everything that had happened to her Peggy had somehow always retained a religious belief. She had heard of a modern Anglican church at Mill Hill in outer London called John Keble Church who enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for warmly welcoming all visitors. She began attending and found this to be true, the atmosphere at JK (as it is still called locally) being far removed from the narrowmindedness of the Baptist chapel she had grown up in. There she met a tall ex-Royal Engineers sergeant and Arnhem veteran called Robert King, recently demobbed after returning from India where he had spent the last months of the war based in Delhi. Bob and Peggy were married in 1948 and were together for 54 years.

In loving memory of Margaret Jane (Peggy) King, 1923-2002.

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