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Dear Katherine,

I gather that your school project for this half term is about children in the Second World War. I was almost seven when the war began in September 1939, and I thought you might like to hear some of my wartime memories. They begin with my brother Keith and I being evacuated from our home in south London to a safe place in the country.

Why the children were evacuated

The war had been coming for some time and everyone knew that there was a great danger that London would be badly bombed. It was therefore decided that the children would be sent to places in the countryside where they would be safe and could continue their schooling without too much disruption. The biggest problem was to persuade parents to part with the children they loved so much, but most mums and dads realised the danger everyone would be in if the German bombers came.

OUR FIRST EVACUATION

Our mum and dad decided not to wait for the government scheme and so, even before war came, they sent us down to stay with my dad’s parents in Sompting in Sussex. I am not sure how old they were at that time, but they seemed really ancient to us, probably as we do to you. They lived in a small bungalow and neither they nor their home were really suited to having two small boys descend on them. My outstanding memory of the time was watching with horror as my homemade glider flew straight towards one of the bungalow’s windows. It broke, of course, and I was not a very popular grandson.

War was declared while my parents were making one of their regular visits. You may have heard a recording of the famous broadcast by the prime minister, Mr Chamberlain, telling us that the country was at war with Germany. We all sat round the radio listening to his solemn words, but I am sure that Keith and I did not realise what it all meant. Anyway, the first months of the war were very quiet and so mum and dad took us back to London.

OUR SECOND EVACUATION

Although there had been no air raids on London in those first few months of the war, it was obvious that the city would soon be bombed. The government therefore organised an evacuation of the children and mum and dad decided that we should go away again.

The day we went

I am sure all this was explained to nine year old Keith and myself, but my first memory of the evacuation is of the whole school lining up with our suitcases and gas masks to board a fleet of red double-decker London buses. Although all the mums were very sad, our main feeling was one of excitement, which continued as we were taken to a main line station and put on a train. We had no idea where we were going, and I cannot remember how long the journey took, but after several hours we ended up in Cornwall. You can look at the atlas to see how far Cornwall is from south London.

It must have been quite difficult to spread all the children between the various villages and families in the area, and each household must have been asked how many evacuees they had room for. Keith and I were taken to a cottage in a tiny village called St. Mellion and discovered that we were being ‘billeted’ on the headmistress of the local school. We did not realise the significance of this at first, but it soon became apparent that we had been rather unlucky and that she was a real old dragon.

Our new home

The cottage was very small and, by modern standards, extremely primitive. There was no running water and the people in all the cottages had to go to village pump to collect their water in buckets. The toilet was in a little shed at the bottom of the garden and ran into an open sewer which flowed across the field - a source of great amusement to us small boys who used to play ‘chicken’ leaping across it. The only lighting in the house was by oil lamps and candles, and I well remember going up the stairs to bed holding a lighted candle, just like Wee Willy Winky in the nursery rhyme.

Getting up in the morning was not very pleasant. If it was very cold there would be ice on the inside of the windows. When we washed ourselves we poured cold water from a large china jug into one of the matching china wash bowls like those you sometimes see in antique shops. The dirty water had to be taken downstairs and emptied in the garden. If the potty under the bed had been used during the night, it had to be emptied down the outside toilet.

Then it was off to school, which meant a short walk up the village street. The school had two entrances; one had ‘Girls’ above the door and the other ‘Boys’. I am not sure why this was so, because we all mixed together inside. The evacuees were distributed among the classes according to age; and we seemed to get on with the local children alright, although our arrival must have upset their quiet village life.

Life in the village

Although Keith and I were very sad at being so far away from our mum and dad, there were many things which were new to us in the village, so we forgot our sadness for most of the time. One of my clearest memories is going out with our next door neighbour to catch rabbits. He had several ferrets in a sack and lots of nets to put over the holes leading into the rabbits’ burrows. We boys would help him peg the nets over the holes and he would then put a ferret down one of them. After less than a minute rabbits would start popping up into the nets and he would quickly kill them. We then went back to his cottage and he showed us how to skin them: something which I can still do. All that my seem horrid to you, but rabbit meat was a very valuable addition to the wartime meat ration. One of the farmers also taught me to drive a tractor, although now I cannot imagine how I reached the pedals, because I was still quite small.

The war seemed a long way away until one day we were in the garden and suddenly heard a great droning of aircraft. Looking towards Plymouth (look at the atlas again), we saw that the sky was black with planes; there must have been hundreds of them. At first we thought they were coming over us, but then they split into three groups and turned towards the city. It was one of the heaviest raids of the war and Plymouth suffered terrible damage.

We also used to hear Plymouth being bombed at night. The Germans used ‘screaming’ bombs to increase the terror of their air raids, and we could hear these from our little village. Apart from that the war did not disturb us much, although one plane did drop some bombs just outside the village, where they made very large holes in the fields.

Our poor parents

We had no idea that London was going through the ‘Blitz’ at the time and was being bombed almost every night. My dad was in the Auxiliary Fire Service and was fighting fires at night and still doing his normal job at an electricity generating station during the day. This lasted for several weeks until the German attacks became less frequent. Our mum had travelled down to see us once, to make sure that we were being properly looked after, but when the attacks on London had lessened she and dad decided to take us home.

LIFE IN LONDON

The air raids

As you can imagine, after eight months away from our parents it was wonderful to be home again, although we discovered that many things had altered. The most exciting change was to the sleeping arrangements. Although we normally slept in our own beds, as soon as soon as the air raid sirens went we tumbled downstairs to the place in the house which would give us the best protection if a bomb fell nearby. Dad had built a ‘blast wall’ under the stairs. It was constructed of very thick wood and made a space where we could all snuggle down with blankets and pillows. From there we could listen to the air raid; the drone of the bombers overhead, the roar of the anti-aircraft guns, the hollow sound of their shells exploding in the air and the whistle of the occasional falling bomb. It was all very exciting for myself and Keith, but I know that mum and dad were worried that the house might be hit.

The morning after a raid we would go out into the street and collect as many pieces of bomb and shell as we could find. There would be a lot of swapping in the playground before school began, and I could then add new pieces to my collection of incendiary bombs and other souvenirs. Most of the raids were at night, although once there was the sudden roar of low flying planes and four German fighterbombers swept over our garden, so low that I could see the pilots in their cockpits.

Gradually the air raids died away and we began sending more of our planes on raids over enemy territory. My dad gave me a big telescope through which I tried to identify all the aircraft I saw in the sky. Sometimes it was hundreds of American Flying Fortresses and sometimes just a few Hurricanes or Spitfires. I kept a log of everything I saw but, unfortunately, it went missing after the war.

Moving school and the flying bombs

In 1943 it was time for me to move from my elementary school to a grammar school, which is what primary and secondary schools were called in those days. The problem was that all the grammar schools had been evacuated leaving just a few of their pupils in London. So the few boys from each of those schools were put all together in one big ‘emergency’ grammar school. When I joined them they were in a school in fairly near my home, but in 1944 a V.1 flying bomb hit the building during the night, so we had to move on to another school farther away.
It took me quite a long time to cycle to there from home and, as the school was at the top of a steep hill, I used to walk the last bit. One day I was halfway up the hill when I heard a sort of a swishing noise. I looked up and there was a flying bomb coming over the trees in front of me. Its engine had cut out and that meant it was going to crash and explode very soon. I flung myself to the ground and glanced to the right and there was the bomb going straight down between the houses two roads away. There was an enormous bang and my bike and I were blown into the trunk of a nearby tree, but with no ill effects apart from a bent mudguard on my bike and a few bruises on me. It was a great story to tell when I got to school, but I believe that many people were killed by that bomb.

In a way the flying bombs were rather fun. I did a newspaper round before I went to school and often heard the buzz of a bomb long before it could be seen. They came from several directions and sometimes had been hit by the anti-aircraft guns and were on fire. When they went down there was a big flash and often a blast wave spreading out into the air like a ripple in a pond.

One day I saw the trail of a V.2 rocket climbing up from the Dutch coast and I eventually heard it explode somewhere in east London. The V.2s were very unpleasant because they travelled so fast you could not hear them coming. One of the boys in my class was killed when a V.2 fell on Woolworths in New Cross where he was shopping.

Now the war was nearly over

By this time my school had come back from evacuation and so I joined them in our very own school building in Brockley. Shortly afterwards the invasion of Normandy took place and we watched as hundreds of planes went overhead towards the beaches in France. They were all marked with black and white stripes so that they could be easily recognised as being friendly aircraft.

After that, with most of the danger gone, my war became far less fun; although I am sure my mum and dad were pleased that they did not have to worry about our safety any more. However, there were many problems which still made wartime life quite interesting. Food was rationed and we had some rather strange things to eat, including powdered egg, which I became used to and still like. Ice cream was nowhere to be found and so my mum used to make it for us. Fruit which came from overseas, like oranges and bananas, had not been seen since the beginning of the war, so we had to make do with what grew in England. Meat was also in short supply and I remember eating whale meat and horse meat, both of which I liked. We also grew our own vegetables in the garden and they needed manure. Because of the wartime shortage of petrol most of the vans which delivered the milk and the coal were drawn by horses. If one of them did a poo near the house I used to dash out with a bucket to pick up all that wonderful manure.

The end of the war came when I was nearly thirteen and, looking back on it, I had been lucky and had a really exciting time. However, to most people, especially those in Europe, the war had been a cruel and awful time and millions of them had been killed or injured. It is not something I would want you to experience.

Grandad, September 2001

SOME DATA

In case you should ever want to find out more about our family’s life in the war, I am jotting down a few facts which might help you.

Me (Grandad): Michael John Reggler born: 13 September 1932

My brother: Keith Alan Reggler born: 1 February 1931
(your great uncle, who now lives in Australia)

My parents: Raymond Stanley Reggler born: 16 June 1901
Hester Elizabeth Kemm born: 18 December 1902
(your great grandparents)

My dad’s parents: Stanley Griggs Reggler born: 20 February 1877
Nellie White born: about 1878
(your great great grandparents)

(My mum’s parents had both died long before the war)

Our address: 2 Exford Road, Grove Park, London S.E.12

My grandparents’ address: 61 Berriedale Drive, Sompting, Sussex

My first school: Coopers Lane Elementary School, Grove Park, London S.E.12

Cornwall: St Mellion is about 5 miles north of Saltash and about 10 miles
from Plymouth. The headmistress was Mrs Maunder.

My next school: The South East London Emergency Grammar School for Boys,
which was housed in Colfe’s school at Lewisham until bombed
out, and then in Haberdashers Askes school near New Cross.

My final school: Brockley County Grammar School, at Hilly Fields in Brockley.

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