大象传媒

Someone up there likes me

My name is Desmond Connelly I was born in Greenwich, London, on the 11th June 1927 and was twelve years old at the beginning of the war.

The Government shut down all the schools in London and evacuated the children to various parts of the country; my mother decided that if I had to leave London she would take me to Bourne in Lincolnshire to stay with our relations.

My uncle Jim and aunt Fanny had a big old country pub with plenty of spare bedrooms so that is where we went to stay, I had a great time as I had lots of cousins to play with and it was completely different to living in a big city, I enjoyed this part of my life being so different to what had gone before.

However after about six months my mother got bored with the quiet country life and missed the noise, the people also the convenience of being able to jump on a bus or tram to get about, this was the time when few people had cars and being stuck in the country really meant that with out transport you either walked or stayed at home.

My father wrote that nothing much was happening and we might as well come home, so that鈥檚 what we did, almost as soon as we moved out the Army billeted six officers into the pub.

We had not been back in London less than six weeks when the air raids started, but the biggest surprise was the first casualties in my family were the aunt and uncle we had just left when a German bomber crashed on to the pub killing them both and all the army personnel as well.

As all the London schools were closed it meant that I was on one long holiday, one or two of my mates had also returned so we spent the days on our bikes, swimming, on roller skates, sledging as there was a lot of snow in 1940 the list was endless and we were never bored.

The air raids grew in intensity both night and day, so we soon got used to spending every night in the shelter, as children we never seemed frightened, one day when my mother sent me to the shops on my bike, as I cycled down the road I noticed two women chatting over the front garden fence and when I got to the shop the air raid siren sounded and the ack ack guns started firing and I heard bombs dropping so I waited in the shop until the all clear went and I could cycle back home.

As I past the front garden where the ladies had been chatting there was a big hole in the front garden and an Air Raid Warden placing sheets on the ground covering the two bodies, if I had cycled home five minuets sooner I could have been a third.

I suppose it was at this time I should have realized that some one up there likes me.

My father was born in Ireland and had a strong will (Irish pig headed my mother called him) and had lost his leg in an industrial accident, he was not very mobile and refused to go to an air raid shelter, he said he was a fatalist and if a bomb had his name on it, it would get him no matter where he was so if he was going to die it would be in the comfort of his own bed.

That summer the Battle of Britain started in earnest with the Germans so disdainful of our ability to defend ourselves that he sent an armada of bombers to crush London, one fateful Saturday we could here them coming in the distance like thunder and the sky went black with their sheer numbers.

It was the day the 鈥淏iggin Hill Boys鈥� showed what they were made of, they really tore into the Germans and gave them a bloody nose, it was not without loss on our side but the boost it gave to Londoners morale was great, we could see for our selves what was going on as we were in the thick of it.

My mates and I were enjoying a front row seat until things got very close when my mother came flying out of the house and dragged me off to the shelter, as we run across the courtyard to our shelter a ME109 swooped down hotly pursued by a Spitfire as I looked up at what was going on I will always remember my mothers face screwed up in terror as if she expected the planes to hit her in the back of the neck.

I think we were fairly safe as they only had eyes for each other and as our plane past over and started firing at Jerry something came out of the plane and landed in a flower bed, I could hardly wait for the raid to end so I could go and investigate the flower bed, much to my delight it was a belt of dummy ammunition that is used to lead the real stuff into the machine guns, what a trophy?

I think Jerry got such a public clobbering that Saturday he changed his tactics to nighttime raids to reduce his losses.

The second loss came to my family when a bomb killed aunt Maude and uncle Bert who lived in Greenwich near the Generating station that provided power for the tramcars in South London. (Now the site of the Dome), the 鈥淕enner鈥� was always a prime target for German bombers.

They lived in a terraced house and the bomb completely demolished their house leaving the two on either side untouched, the neighbor on one side heard my aunt shouting to my uncle to hurry, but as he had broken his leg at work and could not rush down the stairs to the shelter, then the bomb struck the house killing them both, the neighbors house was saved and he lived to tell the tale.

My aunt Alice came down from Coventry to the funeral and that started off another chain of events to change my life and put a strain on my privileged position.

Aunt Alice was unconventional, she had married a Romany Gypsy and spent all her married life wandering the midlands in a horse drawn caravan, she was a bit of an entrepreneur and made a good living selling Hessian sacks she got made up in Coventry to farmers and such. for potatoes and other vegetables.

She was very talented and as soon as she walked in a pub and got the drinks in would sit down at the ubiquitous piano and entertain all and sundry, she had a lived in face that I always felt needed a pointed witches hat and a broom stick to complete the picture.

Although they had the odd bomb in Coventry she did not realize the subterranean life Londoners were now living, sleeping in air raid shelters every night was the accepted way of life.

Alice was all set to go down to the pub the evening she came to see us, as it was her way of life, but this guy Hitler had stop all that with a heavy bombardment that night and she was not best pleased.

After the funeral as soon as she got back to Coventry she sent for us having found my father a much better job than the one he had in London, we took the train to Coventry and spent a few days looking round the place but my father was told by my mother to find an excuse not to take it, however he like Coventry, and the lack of bombs so he took it, much to my mothers dismay, so my mother and I returned to London to bring the furniture.

My father had started working for a company called Alvis which made high quality motorcars before the war and was now refurbishing Rolls Royce Merlin aircraft engines and was an important part of the war effort, the money was good and the job better than he had in London.

When we went back to London we were staying with my aunty Dot and uncle Bill in New Cross as my mother thought we would not see them for sometime, as I had become accustom to sleeping in a bed Coventry, I persuaded my mother not to follow the rest to the shelter but sleep in the house with me, however after two nights she could no longer stand the noise of the Anti Aircraft guns in the street so I reluctantly had to joined the rest of the family in the shelter.

That was the night a bomb fell in the front garden of my uncles house completely gutted the ground floor where we had been sleeping and all the furniture wound up in the back garden!

Yet another close encounter.

So off we went to the comparative peace of Coventry, all our possessions were to be stored in the front two rooms of the house we were staying in until we got our own place.

How ever we were not going to get used to sleeping in a bed for some time, on that fateful night the raid seem to start rather earlier than usual and concentrate on the area were we living, so we headed for a shelter, this was a large communal one dug in the car park of a local pub.

It was later we realized it was not just us Jerry was after, he was giving the whole of Coventry a pounding the like of which it had never known, in the morning when we came out it was the worse I had ever seen, because it was concentrated in a relatively small city of Coventry in comparison to the vast area of London.

My father walked down to Alvis as best he could, where he worked was all devastated and he was told the whole lot was being moved out of the area lock, stock and barrel.

Aunt Alice was crying continuously as she felt it was her fault she had brought us to this, then things went from bad to worse when we were moved out of the house as a land mine had caught up on a tree in an adjacent garden and could go off at any minute.

A land mine was a bomb on a time fuse that was dropped by parachute so as to cause maximum disruption to people on the ground, as you never knew when it would explode.

That night a token raid in which a few bombs were dropped took place just to cause fear in the population, however we had to spend the night in the shelter, as we could not go back to the house anyway.

The following day the Army bomb disposal came and defused our land mine and took it away on the back of a lorry, so we could go back to the rather battered house, with no windows at all in the rear and the bath room was rather public as the bathroom window had been blown out completely and embedded its self almost entirely in the bathroom door with hardly any glass on the floor.

Our happiness at being able to live in the house again was somewhat short lived when we learned that the bomb disposal team that had made it possible had got blown up on their very next job.

My father and the rest of the factory were being shipped up to Stafford and Stone to rebuild the plant and my mother and I were relocated in a village outside Coventry called Long Lawford until we could move up to Stafford.

The cottage in Long Lawford was barely habitable with two rooms up and two down, outside communal toilet and cooking and heating facilities were an open fire in the living room, this was a cultural shock for my mother who had always had either gas or electric cookers to work with, however this enabled aunt Alice to showed her other skills of cooking on an open fire Gipsy style, my favorite was when she grilled bacon she had scrounged off a local farmer, on a long fork and collected the dripping on the bread below to make the sandwich, I have never tasted better before or since.

To be continued.

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