´óÏó´«Ã½

Dodging the bombs and the bugs Frank Page

I was nine years old, and playing on my bike with friends, when the second world war broke out. More specifically, I was around Cecil Close, a circular string of council bungalows in Pinner, Middlesex. That was just opposite the house where I was born, 98 Pinner Hill Road. When the sirens sounded, I pedalled down the road to 4 Pinner Hill Road, my home since 1934, to ask what was going on. ‘The war has started’ my mother told me, and as if to make sure I took it seriously, a lady called Mrs Barnett from up the road, who had been trained as an Air Raid Warden, appeared. She was booted and dressed from head to toe in yellow anti-gas overalls, with respirator strapped on, tin hat firmly in place and rattle and whistle at the ready. ‘Take cover’ she commanded imperiously, but we still stood on the pavement, wondering what it all meant.
The Prime Minister — Neville Chamberlain — had announced on the wireless (nobody called it ‘radio’ in those days) that we were at war with Germany from 11 o’clock that September Sunday morning. That the sirens sounded almost immediately seemed very ominous. In fact, it was a false alarm, and nothing very much happened - as far as a junior school boy could tell - until many months later. Yes, my father strengthened our small kitchen, by propping up planks across the ceiling and building an extra ‘wall’ round the outside to make it as bomb-proof as possible, but then everything went quiet.
That was Hitler’s decision. He was too busy invading Poland — despite the British ultimatum — to take on France and Britain. So the so-called ‘phoney war’ lasted in Pinner through a particularly bitter winter and I had turned ten by the time the real war started in May 1940, with the onslaught in France, the Dunkirk evacuation and the arrival in Downing Street of Winston Churchill.
There were Air Raid Posts, shelters, ambulance depots (with lots of smart thirties cars converted into mini casualty carriers by chopping off the rear seats and building an enclosure for two stretchers on the back end of the chassis) and even pill boxes at strategic points.
There was a big pill box at the Bell corner, Pinner Green. We boys played in it, of course, and I even became its first casualty by falling off the top and breaking an arm. So when we moved from the old Victorian school building at the far end of Pinner, to the just-completed Pinnerwood School in Latimer Gardens, I was ‘walking wounded’, with an arm in a sling.
It was in the playground of that school that a chum came up and told me France had capitulated, adding that they were all cowards and we were better off without them. I couldn’t take it so lightly, and I remember wandering off and thinking ‘We are on our own now’ and wondering what would happen next. What did happen next was the blitz on London, starting in September 1940, just a year after those first sirens sounded. Now they wailed away almost every night, followed by lots of bangs all around. My father, a veteran of the Great War, assured us that the bangs were all anti-aircraft batteries, but we soon learned to recognise the other noises of the blitz — the unsynchronised drone of the engines in German bombers, the strident bells of ambulances and fire engines, and the earth-shaking thump of bombs landing.
To be sure, Pinner was on the outskirts of London — almost country when I was growing up in the thirties — but there were quite a few bombs that fell in the area, the closest to my home about half a mile away in Waxwell Lane. And when daylight came we boys cycled round, gawping at shattered homes and gaping windows and collecting bits of jagged shrapnel to take home as souvenirs. I remember walking home from a Christmas party at the home of my aunt and uncle and seeing a huge red glow in the sky to the south. That was 29th December 1940, the night the London docks were ablaze. But a little before that the Goering bombing offensive had partly shifted to other centres — first Coventry, then Birmingham, Southampton, Bristol, Plymouth and Liverpool. Nevertheless, the raids went on in the London area and my parents and I still slept in our strengthened room (by this time the kitchen had been restored and it was the downstairs sitting room which boasted a strutted ceiling and sandbag-filled bow window).
If the raids came in the daytime, the squadrons of Spitfires based at Northolt were soon in action. It was a great thrill to see them flying so low over Pinner Green as they assembled into squadron formation. One pilot seemed to have a soft spot for one of the girls who worked in the uniform-making ‘factory’ opposite the Starling pub (it centred on empty shops in the parade there, which had been finished, but not let, by the time the war started). He would fly very low over the building and zoom away. I would watch wide-eyed from my bedroom window, which looked out on the back of that parade. He seemed to be aiming straight for me until he pulled back the stick.
Finally, it all went quiet about May 1941, and my parents started trying to get me into St Marylebone Grammar School, which my brother attended and which had been evacuated to Cornwall two days before hostilities started. I had flunked the 11-plus, but the Head, always keen to have brothers together in the school, set me a special entrance exam and wangled me a place. So In October 1941 I was put on what was still called the Cornish Riviera Express at Paddington and sent nearly 300 miles to Redruth. To a young lad travelling further than he ever had before, it seemed the other end of the earth. There I was billeted with total strangers, surrounded by a town I didn’t know, in a new school, with only my slightly disdainful brother (he was over four years older — a huge generation gap) whose face I recognised. The wrench was made worse by wartime conditions: slow trains made the distance seem vast, letters to and from home often went astray and telephone calls were expensive and massively delayed. Only to be used in real emergency, please.
In Redruth, the working day began with assembly in the big room beneath the main chapel of the old Methodist meeting place in Fore Street. Then various classes dispersed to their rooms — some in the corners of that circular big room, some in the annex to one side of the main building (I always remember that in the Third Form we occupied what was marked on the door as the Ladies’ Parlour.) Those doing science or art scuttled out to Clinton Road to the laboratories and lecture rooms above the Mining Museum; those doing gym went to the badminton hall by St Andrew’s Church and those doing woodwork made the long trek down Fore Street and up the other side to Redruth Grammar School, where we shared the use of the woodwork shop.
So there were streams of boys going through the streets of Redruth at various times of the day, but the schedule was usually arranged so that, for example, you did woodwork last thing in the afternoon and dispersed home from there. The timetable had to be flexible to allow for the five to ten minute walks between these various locations.
But if you got into trouble and were called to the Headmaster’s Office (possibly for ‘The Whack,’ as a beating was always known), you arrived all too quickly — the School Office was above a shop bang opposite the Chapel.
Sport was even more complicated. We played cricket and some Soccer on the precipitously sloping pitches at Trewirgie, a good ten minutes cycle ride out of town. But sometimes we used the Redruth Grammar School’s ground, too. And Rugby was often played on the County Ground — it seems odd to think of 12-year-old London lads playing their very first games of Rugby in that hallowed arena.
I am often nostalgic about my two years in Redruth, despite the ever-changing billets and the enforced distance away from my parents. It has to be remembered that being that far away in war-time, when trains were so slow and irregular, and telephone calls were unheard-of, (because it took hours to get through on a ‘Trunk call’) really did feel like being at the other end of the world. We wrote weekly letters to our families, but we didn’t see them from the time the term started until we staggered back into Paddington after another day-long marathon journey three months later.
But at least the sirens stopped, except when the odd raider missed Plymouth and somehow wandered west. And in the summer there were beaches within cycling distance, even if you had to pick a marked path through a barbed-wire-surrounded minefield to get to the sea. We were at the lovely beach at Porthtowan one day when a soldier on guard duty thought he could get through the minefield without staying on the path. We heard the bang, saw the smoke drift away up the cove and saw, in horror, the squaddy stretched out on the sand. As we watched them carry him to the ambulance, our jaws dropped to see a foot hanging detached in his sock. He died later. The war seemed close that day.
No television then, obviously, but we did have newsreels at the cinema to give some moving pictures of the war. Plus those wartime films intended to stiffen our sinews. No, we didn’t call them propaganda - only the Germans did that. But look at them now and you have to agree they were clearly aimed to boost the war effort. ‘Target for Tonight’, ‘One of our Aircraft is Missing’, ‘Desert Victory’, ‘The Way Ahead’ and ‘In Which we Serve’ — they were all designed to show that the British were superior and bound to triumph in the long run. We believed it, too. (Three years after the war ended, when I was called up for National Service and sent to an officer cadet school, they were still showing us ‘The Way Ahead’ to demonstrate how a subaltern should be a leader of men).
Looking back now, I don’t think I was much troubled by the privations of the war. During my first year in Cornwall, my life was far from sttled. I shifted billets several times for a variety of reasons, and one temporary home was spartan, to say the least. It was the end cottage of what must have been homes built for miners during the nineteenth century tin mining boom in the county. The only running water was a single tap in the primitive kitchen, the chemical loo was outside in the back yard, and the lighting was by paraffin lamps. I slept on a straw palliasse in a cold and dank bedroom. But I survived it without any great drama. Fortunately I was there for only one school term.
Of course, we schoolboys resented the meagre sweet rations, and I certainly missed the fruit from overseas, like bananas and coconuts, which simply disappeared from the shops for years. I know I ate a lot of fish when I was in Cornwall, because that was usually available down there, when meat wasn’t. At home in Middlesex, my keen gardener father produced lots of vegetables. He also built a chicken run across the back end of our garden, and his flock of Rhode Island Reds kept us well provided with eggs. They even produced enough for the family to do a bit of innocent bartering with the local grocery shop for ‘extras’. Photographs of me at that time show a growing lad who was certainly not over-weight, but fit and healthy.
The worst privation was being separated from my family during my evacuation. I missed my lovely Mum desperately, but developed a sort of philosophical outlook which enabled me to recognise that a war meant lots of people were missing out on the good things in life, so I had to make the best of it, like everyone else. A favourite line at that time, used to anyone who complained about the hardships of life, was ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ Even as an 11-year-old, far from home, I knew only too well there was a war on, and its rigours had to be accepted.
By the summer of 1943, when I had been in Cornwall for two years, things were very quiet in the London area and the school had split into two parts — one in the old buildings on Marylebone Road and the other still in Redruth. It was decided that London was safe enough for a reunion, and from that Autumn term on I was back in Pinner, going up to Baker Street on the rattly old pre-war Metropolitan trains.
Then came June 1944. It’s remembered now mainly for the D-Day invasions of France. By now, at 14, I was much more conscious of the horrors of war and recall vividly buying a newspaper as I went to school on June 7th and reading about the carnage on the beaches the day before. Then, just a week later, the first V-1 bomb — the infamous ‘Doodlebug’ — dropped on Britain and the sirens were wailing again. I began to think that Fate had me numbered: kept in the London area during the blitz, sent away when it had all gone quiet, then brought back just when Hitler’s latest weapon of mass destruction threatened to flatten us all.
The trains from Pinner to Baker Street were mostly on time, surprisingly, so I couldn’t use the ‘bugs as an excuse to miss school. But I had to get used to every student being herded into the gymnasium — the only area with some blast protection — every time the flying bombs were sighted. It disrupted the school routine and hugely frustrated the masters.
The V-1s got to Pinner, too. We soon learned that as long as you could hear its distinctive engine note, the bug was unlikely to do you any damage, because it only dropped to earth when the engine cut out. I was at home having tea with my mother when we heard the unmistakeable sound of a V-1 engine and listened, heads cocked, until it suddenly stopped. ‘Under the table’ yelled my Mum, and down I went. She quickly joined me, and I noticed, astonished, that she still had her tea cup delicately balanced in her hand. Not a drop was spilt. That particular bug passed us by, but landed just the other side of the Pinner and Northwood Cottage Hospital, causing a lot of damage and quite a few casualties.
Then, as the allied armies swept across France, the V-2 rockets started to crash down. No sirens to indicate their arrival; they fell out of the stratosphere with no warning. And when one dropped in Pinner Road on the way into North Harrow, there was an uncomfortable feeling running through all of us that the next minute could be our last. Once again I had that suspicion that the Gods had fingered me for particular dangerous intention — but, clearly, many others faced hazards just as threatening as I did. And millions would have thought a wartime existence split between Pinner and Cornwall really ‘cushy’. So when the V-2s proved to be a menace that couldn’t be foreseen or dodged, life had to go on, dangers were taken for granted and people were remarkably resilient (as they were right through from 1940 to VE-Day, I realise now in retrospect).
But at last the war in Europe ended, and I was able to go with my brother — by then called up into the RAF - to see crowds dancing in the London streets on 8th May, 1945, with a swing band playing on the balcony of the Rainbow Club in Shaftesbury Avenue and huge gatherings round the palace. It was a joyous day, but still slightly overshadowed by the continued fight against Japan.
That all ended while I was at Harvest Camp, organised by the school, in August 1945. We had cycled to Whitchurch, north of Aylesbury, to live under canvas and help with the harvest. Now right through the war there was always talk of ‘secret weapons’ that would swing the balance of power. Hitler’s V-weapons were prime examples, but they came too late to save him. Most of the rumours were dismissed with a snort — because most of the technology hinted at seemed beyond belief.
So when we were busy ‘stooking’ sheaves of corn and one of our class-mates rode up and said ‘We’re all going home - they’ve dropped a secret weapon and Japan has capitulated’, we were sure he was playing a joke on us. But it was true. The secret weapon beyond the realms of any of our imaginations was the atomic bomb.
So I cycled home to Pinner again to that much-loved corner of Middlesex in the grateful knowledge that the world was once more at peace.

(2,890 words)
end

For contact purposes:
Frank Page, Shene House, Longtown, Herefordshire HR2 0LS. Email: frankpage@tesco.net. Tel/fax:01873 860213.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.