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World War 2 Memories

I was a toddler, living in Sidcup, Kent, when World War 2 broke out, just coming up to three and a half, but I can remember the declaration very vividly. I was sitting at the table, Having something to eat, with french windows into the garden behind me and the fireplace with a mantelpiece above it on my right. Both parents were in the room with me, one on the opposite side of the table, one behind me.
There was a radio at one end of the mantelpiece, wooden cased, tall, with a rounded top and a circle cut out of the front of it with a lightning shaped zigzag of wood across the loosely woven material that covered the circle. There were at least two darker wooden knobs under the circle. The radio had a habit of drifting off station, and was fairly crackly in any case. I remember a man’s voice coming out of the radio, discovering later that it was Neville Chamberlain, and what he was saying. The radio drifted off into an unintelligible crackle, and both parents rushed to it from the opposite sides of the room and my father twiddled the knobs to get the signal back, in time to hear the declaration of war on Germany. I remember the horrified silence, and no more.
The next memory was of an air raid, with something landing near the house with a big bang, causing the biscuit barrel to leap off the sideboard, the metal lid rolling across the floor. By then my father, who had been in the Merchant Navy before I was born, but had left to be at home, had been called up. He joined the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, and stayed in it until his retirement, rank Chief Engineer, in 1968. For all his service he was on munition ships and oil tankers, ferrying supplies to wherever the y were needed. It must have been a constant worry for my mother, knowing that he was always on a floating bomb, but she never transmitted the worry to me or my younger brother Anthony.
I remember the Anderson shelter being dug into the garden lawn, among the fruit trees; we children enjoyed playing over the grassy mound and I remember gashing my arm on the sharp, square edge of the metal protruding from the grass above the door. I do not remember ever going into that shelter, but we must have done so, the area was bombed. I remember my mother, who was in the ARP, going off in a tin hat for her watch, and having climbed over the earth round a bomb crater in the road on her way out, finding it roped off on her return; there was an unexploded bomb in the crater! I remember one noisy night before we had the shelter in the garden when my brother was fractious and so taken into my mother’s bed. That night a shell came through the roof and straight through my brother’s cot. Before the shelter came, we used to go under the stairs during a bad air raid; there were pillows and blankets, and I remember how often I had an attack of croup under the stairs, and my mother feeding me with butter, sugar and vinegar, which was supposed to ease it - well, I am still alive 60 years later!
Eventually, our house, 99 Marlborough Park Avenue, was bombed, and my parents lost almost everything - all their wedding presents and furniture. I don’t think we could have been at home when the house was bombed, I certainly don’t remember it.
We moved away from Sidcup to Southampton, living with my maternal grandmother in Portswood for a while, before evacuating into the Hampshire countryside, to a village near Alton, to share an Elizabethan cottage with my mother’s cousin and her family. It was an idyllic cottage, with a massive oak tree in the garden, with a tree house in it. I had my fifth birthday there, the eggless cake glazed with icing sugar and water icing and decorated with five prunes. The village was very rural, with a squire. We played with the squire’s children, and had hot milk for elevenses. I didn’t like hot milk, but the squire insisted that we all drank it. There were cows and hens in the village, and, but no bath in the cottage; my mother and my aunt went to the squire’s house once a week for a bath. We spent a Christmas card winter, with deep snow, in the cottage, when one of the children developed pneumonia and was taken off through the snow in someone’s arms, wrapped up in a blanket, to the cottage hospital. Apart from the rationing, the village was untouched by war.
We found a house of our own in Southampton, renting 66 Kitchener Road, a couple of streets away from my grandmother’s house. It was out of the frying pan into the fire - we got there in time for the bombardment of Southampton. I do remember the Anderson shelter in that home - it was halfway down the garden on the right, with a hazel tree above it and a flowering cherry beyond it, at the end of the garden. It was damp and dark, but it had a tin of slightly soggy chocolate biscuits in it, a very great treat. I remember running down the garden path through a sky sparkling and banging like a firework display, into the shelter of the Anderson. After nights like that we went looking for shrapnel the next morning. Twisted and torn pieces of metal, parts of shell cases, bullet cases, and, prize find, the wire reinforced glass from a cockpit cover, from a damaged or shot down ‘plane. By that time, I was going to school, where we compared our shrapnel collections.
I remember school, with its great brick air raid shelter in the playground, with hot water pipes running round the bottom of the walls to warm it. We took our very battered school books into the shelter with us, and the teachers tried to continue our education. The geography book dated from prewar days, had a shiny orange cover with black lettering and woodcut illustrations, black and white - I remember the story of coal, with an illustration of a great amphibian, drawn from a fossil, crawling out of the water into a forest of giant ferns.
I remember empty desks in our class rooms after a bad air raid, with fellow pupils injured or dead. I remember glass blasted out of windows and doors blown in - and we were the lucky ones, the house was still there! I remember the strips of brown paper stuck across the windows so that even if they were broken the glass would not fly in and cut us.
I remember my Uncle Harold, an RAF pilot with a handlebar moustache, arriving at my grandmother’s house on his precious motorbike and overhauling it in the garden. I remember him telling me that the thick, black sticky stuff staining the grass was alligator blood, which fuelled the bike. I remember his marriage breaking up, and parting from Aunty Gladys. He survived the war, and ended up as a teacher in Bulawayo, with a South African wife.
I remember the joy of a Saturday morning, with a trip to Portswood Road, to the library to change our library books, to the dairy, where we were registered, for the tiny weekly rations of butter, margarine and cheese, and to the sweet shop for our weekly ration of 2 oz of sweets. If you chose dolly mixture, or tiny fruit gums, you could spread it out over a week, but there weren’t enough bullseyes in 2 oz to have one a day for a week. They were all loose of course, sold out of a big glass jar in small paper bags. I remember my mother trying to describe the taste of fruits we could not remember - bananas and pomegranates
I remember walking to school across a recreation park, with a barrage balloon and a gun battery in it. The barrage balloons were called Wimpeys, after an elephant of the same name in a story. I remember the wail of the siren, and the great silvery balloon going up on its tethering cables - and on one occasion, in thunderstorm, a balloon being struck by lightning and descending in flames. I remember the comforting booms from the ack ack guns in the park when the enemy ‘planes droned over. I remember that I could identify a ‘plane by the sound of its engines - spitfires, bombers, friend or foe, and dived for cover if it was foe. I remember the ‘planes, going home after a raid, dumping whatever they had left on Southampton, shooting along the streets and even across our school playground. The old buildings below the Bargate in Southampton High Street still have pock marks from the bullets in the brickwork of their upper storeys.
I remember playing after school in the roads, safe because there were so few cars. The bread was delivered by a horse and van, and so was the milk. We used to sneak into the bombed houses to play. I’m not surprised that we had sheltered under the stairs, the staircases always seemed to survive the bombing. We were told not to play on bombed sites, a very sensible restriction which we all ignored. I can remember climbing up the staircase in a house with very little roof and no floorboards on the upper floor. Whether they had been broken or taken to repair something else, I don’t know - everything was in short supply and whatever could be reused, was! Wherever they went, the joists were still there and I can remember running across them, looking down through the wooden beams to the floor below.
I remember the dark, lightless street, walking home with dim, shaded torches if out after dark, Usually after a treat - a trip to the cinema to see a Walt Disney film, or Shirley Temple in The Bluebird. It was exciting, being out in the dark when there wasn’t a raid going on! I remember coming home from a Christmas treat - The Three Caballeros , with Donald Duck in it, I think - and finding a tiny tabby and white kitten curled up on the black and white tiles of the front step, almost dead. We took it in and it became part of the household.
I don’t remember D Day itself, but I do remember the days before it, when every house that had space in Kitchener Road, all the surrounding roads, the surrounding towns and all along the central south coast took in lodgers. American soldiers were billeted in private houses in one, twos and threes at the edge of the Channel, waiting for the word to begin Operation Over Lord - not that I knew all that at the time, all I knew then was that we had two American soldiers named Woodrow and Carrol staying in the house. Since then I have realised that no camps were set up for the soldiers, because no one wanted the enemy to know that troops were being concentrated in the area; the resident population were happy to help to keep the army hidden in their houses.
American soldiers had been in Southampton for a while, and well brought up children were strictly forbidden to approach them with the request ‘Got any gum, chum?’ We were even forbidden to accept sweets if they were offered by strangers, so having two generous American soldiers in the house with an inexhaustible supply of Hershey Bars and gum - even Bubble Gum! And we knew them, so we were allowed to accept gifts of sweets. They also brought American comics, Captain Marvel, Superman and creepy horror comics with green monsters in them. And glossy magazines. I don’t remember what was written in the magazines, but I do remember the advertisements; pictures of bathing belles on giant cakes of Ivory soap, improbably coloured cars, which they called automobiles, and, most memorable of all, pictures of stemmed glass dishes piled high with scoops of ice cream, and dimly remembered treat from prewar days. The glasses were misted, with a trickle of water running down the side, and they were mouth-watering!! We had never seen ice-cream like hat. I could just remember Lyons Snofruit sticks, a triangular lolly, eaten in the back of my grandfather’s small black car on an outing, but a whole dish of differently coloured ice cream scoops - it was beyond belief. So the two soldiers were associated with luxuries and were welcome guests - and then they suddenly left, all of them in the street, off to the Normandy beaches.
I remember the lightening of spirits when the war news got better, and wearing red, white and blue hair bands at the beginning of 1945. I remember my first post-war ice cream - served in a paper cake cup, a scoop of something with crunchy little pieces of ice in it. Then the enormous excitement of May 8th, when my mother got us out of bed and we went into town. We sat on the brick wall of the passage that connected the back of Woolworths, which was still standing, across the bombed front section to the street. We wondered at the lights, blazing everywhere, the sound of the ships hooting in the docks, the wild joy of the crowds, wild enough to make a bonfire in the high street, wild enough to add a tramcar to it! It felt as though we really would see bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.
For the adults, it was a great strain over. It wasn’t for the children. I don’t remember any strain. Life had been exciting, but at that age, it was the only life I had known. We just accepted the destruction of homes, moving from place to place, the loss of belongings, the loss of family and friends - it was the way things were. It must be said that peace time was less exciting! Looking back now, from a world where children are escorted to school in a car and wear helmets on bicycles , where people are offered counselling when anything unpleasant happens, I wonder how we managed grow up into normal adults, with remarkably few hang-ups. If today’s children were suddenly transported to, say, Iraq, would they take it in their stride as we did? They probably would!

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