大象传媒

A few recollections of the war

In 1939 I was seven years old and I remember coming back home from the allotment with my Dad on 3rd September to listen to the radio when Mr Chamberlain announced the declaration of War against Germany. Naturally my parents were quite upset but it all seemed rather exciting to me. My father had served in the army during WW1, mainly in the Middle East and knew what real war was like. Luckily for us he was now too old for active service so at least we would all remain together as a family.
As almost every family at the time, we got a fairly large map of Europe so that we could follow the progress of the fighting that was about to begin; but as the 鈥減honey war鈥� continued we had very little to change on our map.
That summer I had just completed Nursery School and was moving up to the juniors. Unfortunately, this coincided with the junior school being converted into a First Aid post and our transfer to what had been the old Grammar School Site, as that had opened in a new location. Also, for me it coincided with a bout of illness which meant that I did not physically transfer with the rest of the school and I was left to find my own way into the new, and for me, forbidding school. I used to go to the school entrance every day but I was too frightened to actually go in to find my class and I was apparently not missed. This carried on for about ten days until I was eventually spotted by a teacher and persuaded to rejoin the educational system. I only mention this because whilst hanging around I found the Air raid shelter of one of the factories which was across the road from the school fields. This was a long tunnel like structure, but its greatest feature was that it had an observation man hole in the roof which could be lifted from inside. The whole thing was a perfect play submarine with a conning tower!
Very little happened for the rest of the winter and frankly it all became a bit of a bore.
Eventually the war started and France was overun; Churchill became Prime Minister and Dunkirk happened . At school we were prepared for Air raids, when we went into the school shelters accompanied by teachers who took up guard at the entrances so that we couldn鈥檛 see anything which might go on. Not a very pleasant time just sitting there and certainly not what I considered the way to run a war. Then the Battle of Britain started in earnest and we could count on the sirens going off at precisely Nine-o-clock almost every morning just as we were due to be in school. This was too good to be true! By being a minute late we could avoid the school shelters and use the factory one. The factory workers would stay at work unless they received a special danger warning, so the shelter was unoccupied and available for our use. About three or four of us would use this shelter every time we could and so we were able to watch what was going on through our conning tower. We would watch the contrails of the aircraft and hear the guns firing and it was perfect bliss for young excitable kids.
I remember vividly one day when whole squadrons of german aircraft flew in perfect formation straight overhead going north. They were very low, probably not above five thousand feet so a very exciting sight for us. About an hour later they returned going south, still in perfect formation. From an airfield just south of the River Thames, possibly Fairoaks or Wisley, we saw a single hurricane taking off to try to give battle to this overwhelming force. It had barely got above about five hundred to a thousand feet when we heard the rattle of machine guns and the Hurricane plunged straight down into the ground. It was then that I really felt the pride in the heroism of 鈥淭he Few鈥�. That poor pilot had absolutely no chance at all against such odds and yet he flew to certain death to try to fight them.
We saw quite a few more dogfights but nothing as poignant as that!
Eventually the Battle of Britain was won and the bombing changed to night time attacks. The blitz on London, although twenty odd miles away, was still visible to us by the fires which lit up the sky. We received a few bombs in our area, one of which destroyed the house we lived in just before the war started. I remember looking at the remains of the house which appeared to have been plucked out like a tooth from the rest of the row. All the family living in our old house were killed and so we felt really lucky that we had moved. The family next door were in their Anderson shelter when the bomb dropped, and although their house was also destroyed, they were not harmed. This also reinforced our habit of using our Anderson shelter at night.
Living in the shelter was pretty dismal as it was always fairly damp as soon as we went in due to the condensation on the metal walls. We children all learnt to knit during this time. We would knit squares with old wool, which we then sewed together to make blankets. It was also incredibly boring because we often went into the shelter fairly early in the evening before there was even an air raid warning as we knew that the syren would inevitably go at sometime during the late evening, and it was much more difficult to get in and sorted if we left it until then. My dad used to stay at the entrance and wouldn鈥檛 let us kids out, so we didn鈥檛 see a great deal of what was going on. If the all clear was sounded early we would all pack up and go back into the house as it was pretty certain that there would not be another raid that same night.
This brings me to the subject of shrapnel. After the very first raid in our area we all went around looking for shrapnel souvenirs. We found a very few pieces of metal, probably not really shrapnel at all, and felt very proud of our collection. It was of course rubbish at first but as the war progressed we ended up with a shed absolutely full of real shrapnel including unexploded incendiaries which we would find in the street after particularly heavy raids. How we managed to collect them I really don鈥檛 know, but in those days we didn鈥檛 seem to worry about things at all.

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