大象传媒

My name is Richard Beckett. I was born in 1935 and lived in Beckenham during the war.

I do not recall anything about declaration of war in September 1939. The first thing that really springs to mind about that period, was when some men came and dug a hole in our back garden and put an Air Raid Shelter in. This shelter was one of the curved metal types which I later found out was called an Anderson shelter, named after the man who invented it. The Anderson shelter was made of galvanised corrugated iron sheets bent in the shape of a 鈥淛鈥�. Two of these would be put into the ground with the curve at the top and bolted together so that they looked like a U upside down, and several put end to end to form a short tunnel. Then flat pieces were bolted onto the ends to fill in the space, with a gap in the middle at one end so that it made a doorway.

This of course meant that the wind and rain could blow in if that end was not sheltered, so my father made a porch of wooden railway sleepers on end round the doorway and then put some on the top to form a roof like a porch. He then banked all the earth, which had been dug out, up the sides and over the top of the shelter. He also connected up a set of Christmas lights into the shelter so that at least we had light when we were in there, although there were also candles as a standby. The sleepers which formed the porch round the door of the shelter, not only kept out the weather, but they also acted as a buffer against bomb blast, as did the earth on the sides and roof. My father must have had foresight, for that porch of sleepers was in fact to save my mothers life, as I will describe later.

At the bottom of our back garden ran a railway line, which was on an embankment. I remember some time shortly after the air raid shelter was put in the council men had to come and put a concrete box lining round the bottom on the inside of the shelter. This was because the water draining from the railway bank was seeping into the shelter and partly filling it. In the bottom slab of concrete, I remember that they set a round tin like a cake tin so that there was a small pit into which any water seepage collected and could be bailed out. Apart from the type of shelter, which we had, there were two other kinds of shelter. One was a brick-built one in the garden, which looked like a shed but with a concrete roof about 4 inches thick. The other was known as the Table or Morrison shelter, named I believe after Herbert Morrison the Home Secretary at that time. That type of shelter was kept indoors and as its nickname suggests looked like a table with four legs at the corners made of angle iron and with a sheet of steel bolted on the top. Round both sides and at one end, steel mesh was bolted. The idea was that if you were in under the table, it would protect you from any rubble, which fell in the event of bomb damage to your house, but as will become evident from my memories later on, this did not protect you from flying glass.

The house windows themselves all had gauze stuck over them, so that in the event of bomb blast, the glass did not shatter and splinters fly about everywhere. Blacking out the windows at night was another thing that we had to get used to. This involved covering the inside of the house windows every night with thick curtains or something similar in order to prevent any light shining out during darkness for enemy bombers to see. Woe betide you if the Air Raid Wardens going around at night saw a light for it was a punishable offence, and it was not uncommon to hear the cry 鈥淧UT OUT THAT LIGHT鈥�.

At night when the enemy planes came over very high we would watch the searchlights zigzag about trying to find them, and occasionally they would succeed and the planes seemed to be like little white stars in the beams. One thing we were warned about were the anti personnel bombs. These were dropped from the enemy planes and were designed to make people curious and to pick them up, and if you did, they could explode and maim or kill you. There were two basic types, one called the PENCIL BOMB, and the other called a BUTTERFLY BOMB. The butterfly bomb was like a small tin can with wings so that floated down fairly slowly, which was why it got its nickname, and the pencil bomb was like a propelling pencil.

When travelling on the trains the after dark the blinds had to be pulled down and the bulbs in the trains were painted blue with a small round unpainted area underneath so that very little light showed when the train doors were opened.

We all had gas masks and mine was in a cardboard box. At some later date another piece was taped on the bottom of the gas mask, which was a shiny green and had carbon particles in it. My baby sister was given one of the large gas masks, which was like a big rubber carrycot and had a hand pump similar to those which nowadays are used to pump up airbeds.

When the Blitz got pretty bad, my parents decided that we should get away from the bombing. So it was decided that apart from my father who had to remain at work in London, we would all stay with an uncle who had rented a house in a small Devon village for the duration of the war. The night before we went, we were in bed in the shelter in the garden when I spilt a cup of tea on my pyjamas. When we returned some six months later, those pyjamas were still in the shelter still stained with tea.

I can vaguely remember that journey away to Devon. I have learned since that it had been intended that we should go from Waterloo to Plymouth but when we got to Waterloo, the station had suffered bomb damage and I recall travelling in a taxi (apparently to go to Paddington) but I remember nothing of the journey down,

I do however remember getting off a train at a small wayside station in Devon called Ivybridge, where a taxi was waiting to take us the few miles to the village to my aunt and uncles place. My young sister, who was just a few months old, was on my mother's knee and could see the moon shining in the sky. To my sister it appeared like a flame of a matchstick and she kept trying to blow it out.

The house where we stayed was called Millview in a village called Modbury in Devon. I later found out, my Uncle and Aunt were renting this house. Although I suppose my parents were grateful for the shelter which my Aunt and Uncle gave us, years later my Mother used to say she did not like the arrangements. Whether it was my Mother's decision or not to live like that I do not know, but my mother, my elder sister, myself and my baby sister lived, ate and slept in a single large room at the front of the house on the first floor which looked down on the main road running through the village. Every day the cows used to come down the road on their way to be milked and also we used to watch for the GWR van which delivered parcels, for my father occasionally sent stuff to us.

My mother did all the cooking on paraffin stove or on the coal fire in that room. We used to have bottles of lemonade and, my mother kept the paraffin for cooking in the old empty lemonade bottles after they were empty. These bottles of paraffin were always kept near the cooker, while the bottles of lemonade were kept in a cupboard. One day I went to get a drink of lemonade and without thinking took it from the bottles by the stove. I took one mouthful of Paraffin and was nearly sick. I can remember that taste to this day.

The only other room we were allowed to use was the toilet, and I remember that the toilet paper was newspaper torn up into squares and hung by string on a nail.

I can also vaguely remember the evacuee boy who was billeted with my aunt and uncle. In those days many children from London were evacuated to safe areas, and they were billeted with families. Modbury had some of these evacuees and one boy was placed with my aunt and uncle. What remains most in my memory about it is that although the house was large and had many rooms, my uncle made the evacuee boy sleep in the open area under the stairs. What I cannot remember is how long the evacuee stayed there for although we were only there for six months, I am sure that he had disappeared long before we left.

In those days there was a scheme to collect acorns for pig food and the farmers gave us a shilling for every sack of acorns we collected. We schoolchildren all used to go looking for acorns, but we did not get much money for it takes a lot to fill a sack.

Modbury is about 12 miles away from Plymouth. Being a naval port, Plymouth was therefore the target of much enemy air attack. The house had no air raid shelter and whenever there was an air raid and Plymouth was being bombed, we all used to troop down to the old brick garage with the asbestos roof, which was situated at the bottom of the garden. (As I know now, little good it would have done us if there had been a bomb).

There was only one bus a week from Modbury to other places and this travelled from Dartmouth to Plymouth via Modbury and one day my mother and aunt took us into Plymouth to go shopping. There had been a very heavy air raid the previous night so that when we went into one big shop, which had suffered damage, we had to pick our way through all sorts of rubble. Another day we went on the bus to Bigbury which is on the coast and that was the first time I saw the passenger carrying vehicle which goes through the water to take people out to Burgh Island when the tide is in.

Modbury is a small village surrounded by countryside and we often went for walks. On one particular occasion we all went somewhere in the country near by. My aunt pointed to somewhere away across the hills and said, 鈥渓ook at that train going round the hill鈥�. I could not see it but I now believe it must have been the track, which used to go up to Princetown where Dartmoor prison is.

Down the road was a fish and chip shop and it was in there that I used to stand fascinated as they made the chips by putting the potatoes in a machine and then pushing a handle down so that chips came out at the bottom. Almost opposite the fish and chip shop was a grocer's and on the door were two big glass handles which were like large diamonds with brass handles in between. When you entered, a large bell rang and once inside the only thing I remember was the smell of the Cornish pasties. When I visited Modbury again in 1957 I went in the shop, and there were the same old glass handles, doorbell and same old Cornish Pastie smell. Alas at a later visit in the 1980's, glass handles, doorbell and Cornish Pastie smell were all gone.

For some reason, we were not allowed to use the bathroom in the house at Modbury so every morning my mother put a large saucepan of water on the stove to heat so that we could wash. One day my elder sister, who was about eight at the time, fell over and sat down in the hot water causing severe blistering on her backside. Although I cannot recall the incident, she was apparently badly scalded and as a result she had to lay face down in bed in another room for some days.

Although my father had come with us when we were evacuated to Modbury in 1940, he returned to London to work on the Railway. I was supposed to go to school but I kept refusing, and my mother told me later that in the end my cousin Mary finally lost patience and after some fruitless days of trying, literally picked me up under her arm and carried me there.

The school was about quarter mile up the road and although I cannot remember much about it, I know we all had to do knitting and I knitted something small in green & mauve wool and I have hated those colours ever since. At that time my parents always made me wear boots (because they were strong I suppose) and these always had Blakeys or metal studs in the soles like army boots. One day in the classroom, I slipped over on the polished wooden floor and hit my head on the metal strip around the edge of a desk. This made a cut over my left eye and I have a scar there to this day. Now I had two scars, one over each eye for I had pulled the smoothing iron off the table at home a couple of years before when I was about two.

Apparently after six months my mother got fed up living like that and we returned to London (the bombing had died down by then). When we got home the windows in the front room had been cracked and broken by bomb blast and were all stuck up with tarred brown paper as well as gauze.

2410 words

End of part 1 of 3 parts

For part 2 see A8118803

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