大象传媒

World War II memories from living in London

My parents Lawrence & Irene Kemp were married in 1937 and lived in London at 2, Dorville Road, Lee Green. When the Second World broke out my mother was six months pregnant with me.

I was born in Lewisham hospital in the early hours of 4th December 1940. My mother鈥檚 sister, my aunt, told me that when the air raid siren sounded all the nurses could do was to push the beds away from the windows and give the mothers tin basins to put on their heads to protect them. Often my aunt Elsie would wait to see my mother and myself but would not always be let into the hospital because of the air raids.

All three of us lived in Lee Green throughout the war. This was quite unusual it appears. The reason for this was because my father had been at the Front in the First World War and was old to enlist so was in the Home Guard. My mother鈥檚 health was very poor and so she was excused from doing war work. I was in the unusual position, therefore, of not being evacuated.

The days were orderly - interrupted by the air raid sirens and the 鈥榓ll clear鈥�. I remember these vividly and from an early age. My best doll Patsy and I would either shelter under the table in the kitchen or in the toy cupboard. As we lived on the lower two floors of a Victorian house there were several large cupboards.

Mr & Mrs Ballard who lived next door let us share the Anderson shelter in their back garden. A little gate had been cut in the fence so we could get through quickly.

I particularly remember a night in May 1943. At the end of our long South London back gardens were some allotments and a Methodist Church. It took a 鈥榙irect hit鈥� from an incendiary bomb and was ablaze. I was standing at the bedroom window, watching the fire fascinated. My father was trying to persuade me to go down to the Anderson Shelter and I did not want to go and was furious that I could not continue to watch the fire.

In later years when I told my father about this incident he said that I could not have remembered it because I was so young.

I remember the rabbit stew for lunch and taking the scraps and the vegetable peelings to the pig bin on the corner of our road.

I use to play in the street with the other children (so they could not all have been evacuated)! In the next street was a large area (like a small swimming pool) with a raised concrete surround. A little friend and I used to walk round the edge. I used to play out in the street after dark with other children, usually older than me, until my father came to collect me wriggling and screaming for tea.

My aunt married Arthur Watkins in 1943 and they lived in a flat in Brixton. They both were with the Auxiliary Fire Service. One night when they were in bed the block of flats took a 鈥渄irect hit鈥�. Their bed went through the floor and it was some hours before they were able to be rescued unhurt. After this, they went to live at Abbots Langley.

My parents and I went to visit some people at Bidborough in Kent. We went for a walk into a field and then through a leafy path at the edge of a wood. Suddenly there was a sound of an aeroplane and my father said 鈥淛erries鈥� and we hid among the trees.

I used to go and stay with my maternal grandmother in Hellingly in Sussex. When I was about four or five years of age, I was allowed to take her little dog for walks on my own. It was only down the lane and back through a path into the village but it seemed a long way to me. On one occasion I remember passing a P.O.W mending the road being guarded by soldiers.

One of my enduring memories is of being in the Mall on V.E. Day. My mother and my aunt took me but my father did not want to come. We stood on the left hand side of the Mall at the top near Buckingham Palace. I was pushed to the front as there were a lot of people. I saw Mr Churchill and the Royal Family on the balcony.

I remember the bomb sites in central London which remained into the mid 1950鈥檚 as well the ration books.

It seems to me that of the many people I have spoken to in later life those who were either in the country during the war or who had had an unremarkable early childhood recall little of their early years while my memories are very vivid.

My father kept a 鈥渨ar diary鈥� in several notebooks which I still possess.

Mrs Jacky Adie (nee Kemp)
Cornwall

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