大象传媒

This story has been written to the 大象传媒 People's War site by CSV Storygatherer Coralie on behalf of Elizabeth Burgess. The story has been added with her permission and Elizabeth fully understands the terms and conditions of the site.

I was 13 when the Second World War began on the 3rd September, 1939. My school was evacuated from Streatham to Worthing, Sussex. We went at short notice, leaving our parents and homes not knowing at the time where we were going. We each had a packet of sandwiches to eat on the train, a small case for our clothes and had to wear a gas mask slung around our shoulders with a label showing our names and addresses. I remember we were rather excited and a little afraid.

When we arrived at Worthing we were taken in groups by our teachers to various houses to be billeted with families. Another girl and myself were 'chosen' by a Major and Mrs. Wall who lived in a big corner house close to the sea. They didn't want boys. They were very kind to us but had no children themselves (unless they were grown up and away from home). School as we had known it was now disorganised; in fact I can't remember where we attended classes. Our parents were not encouraged to visit us for fear of unsettling us so we had to be content with exchanging letters. I still have the letters my father wrote. We did enjoy hunting for fossils on the pebble beach though.

After three months - it still being quiet on the air raid front - my parents decided I should return home for Christmas, which of course was lovely. Unfortunately, my father was taken ill with bronchitis and asthma early in January, which was exceptionally cold - much like the weather Scotland has been experiencing now. There was very heavy snow and ice and the water pipes in the houses were frozen, and the only way we could get water was from stand pipes manned by a 'water man' in the road. We used to queue up with our buckets and jugs. We didn't have central heating in those days, just coal fires and free-standing paraffin stoves, which had a distinctive smell. My father needed oxygen which then could only be supplied in hospital and due to the condition of the roads it was felt too risky for him to be moved by ambulance and so he remained at home. Consequently my father developed pneumonia and tragically died in February. At that time we didn't have antibiotics which could have been prescribed as nowadays.

We had an Anderson air raid shelter in the garden, which my father had erected and I remember my mother saying that had he lived he would never have gone in it for shelter. He was in the Scottish regiment, the Black Watch, in the First World War.

Needless to say, I didn't return to Worthing. I attended a makeshift junior school near to home which was opened up to take children who for some reason hadn't been evacuated and those, like me, who had returned home. We were an assorted lot, seven to fourteen years old, having 'lessons' together with an ex-cookery teacher who had retired! However, we did a lot of mental arithmetic and spelling - playing a game called Lexicon helped with that. We also played a game with picture cards (like Happy Families). It sharpened our memories. We also did a lot of reading. That consisted of my school days apart from what I had learned prior to being evacuated.

The Battle of Britain began in August 1940. Waves of bombers were sent to bomb London accompanied by many fighter planes to protect the bombers from our fighters and anti-aircraft fire from the ground. I remember watching the dog-fights overhead and every evening the 'wireless' relayed the number of planes which were shot down by our fighters - and how many we had lost - there was no television then. We used to be glued to the 'wireless' when Mr. Winston Churchill made one of his famously inspiring speeches. He was the Prime Minister who would never surrender to Hitler. Towards the end of this campaign 115 German planes were shot down in one day. Hitler realised he wasn't going to defeat us in this way and couldn't have known how stretched to the limit our own Air Force was. The fighter pilots had to sleep in their clothes and in the daytime would be seated in any old chairs practically alongside their planes ready for take off at a few minutes notice.

The Luftwaffe - as the German Air Force was known - then turned to night bombing of London and other big cities. We didn't shelter in the Anderson shelter at night, instead my mother, brother and sister and myself went in the cupboard under the stairs. It was generally felt to be safer than remaining in a room although I can remember taking shelter one day under our big mahogany dining room table! Invariably, being the smallest (and youngest) my legs and feet were pointed towards the narrowest part of the sloping cupboard. I can remember the cramp and desire to stretch my legs out straight even now. It was routine to hear the air raid siren wail at around 8 o'clock each evening and to spend the night huddled together listening to the drone of aeroplanes passing overhead. I remember seeing the huge red glow in the sky of fires burning in London when the Docks were hit. We weren't bombed out of our home but the playground to the school I attended received a direct hit in the night; fortunately no-one was killed. We had a few ornaments dislodged from furniture, that's all. Also, a few doors away, an unexploded bomb was discovered and had to be dealt with quickly and we had to move to safety for the time being. We must have had charmed lives.

I left school between 14-15 years old and went to a 'Continuation School' to learn shorthand and typing. By now Hitler was sending over dreadful machines called V1's - nicknamed "doodle-bugs" by everyone. They looked like small wingless aeroplanes and did not have a human pilot. They were launched from sites on the German-occupied French coast and were jet-propelled, like rockets. They were designed to travel set distances over England before 'cutting out' and dropping like a stone from the sky to explode on ground impact. They were extremely fast and low-flying and emitted a bright red flame from the rear. The awful humming sound as they approached was frightening but even more so was the deathly silence when the 'engine' stopped as we knew what to expect then, but didn't know where the thing was going to fall.

Eventually, I was qualified to take my first job at 16 which was in the City of London, travelling by tram car. Heavy bombing at night resumed and by then my sister was married and my brother was working in Carlisle as an aircraft maintenance inspector. My mother decided to move for the duration to an Aunt's house in Conyer, Kent. I used to travel to London on the workmen's train, which left at 6 a.m., having first cycled to the station. The carriage was always thick with smoke and the windows tightly closed and difficult to see out of because of the accumulation of smoke-caused grime. I seemed to be the only female occupant and non-smoker. (Nowadays we hear a lot about passive smoking - breathing other people's cigarette smoke). There wasn't much time for leisure activities but I did enjoy cherry-picking and also scrumping other fruit from the orchards, also hop-picking and cycling at the weekends. The weekly bath in a tin bath in my Aunt's kitchen was also a bit of a hoot.

Although we were rationed with food and hardly had any sweets or chocolate we were never very hungry. We each had a ration book with so many coupons which had to last each week, i.e. a quarter of a pound of butter, half a pound of meat etc. My mother was very clever at providing nourishing meals, if perhaps limited in variety - it was helpful to have home-grown vegetables from my Aunt's garden. We longed for bananas and oranges though. We did have Walls Frozen Snow Fruits - a fruit flavoured ice stick in a cardboard case which we used to buy from the 'Stop Me and Buy One' man who came along on his bicycle-driven cart. They were delicious, much more flavoursome than today's ice lollies - or so I thought.

I was 19 when the war ended after six years. I would have liked to have joined the W.R.N.S. ( Women's Royal Naval Service) but was exempted from National Service because my mother was a widow and needed the family's support.

Looking back, everybody had the same common determination to join together in the huge endeavour to hold out against Hitler. Of course we missed our freedom to do things like take holidays, dine out, etc., but we did live in the time of the cinema and the best 'pictures'. I remember seeing 'The Wizard of Oz' when the air raid siren sounded but nobody left the cinema, and also seeing 'Gone With the Wind' and having to queue outside for an hour and then having to stand at the back of the stalls for another half hour or so before we could get a seat. It was a 3 1/2 hour film and had an interval half-way through. Happy days.

As a footnote, when I met my husband years later, through a mutual friend, I discovered that he had been evacuated to Horsham which was not a million miles from Worthing!

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