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SEPTEMBER 1939

When the Second World War started I was thirteen years old. The announcement on that Sunday morning came as something of a relief from the tension of the past weeks as the crisis built up. Our family was on a camping holiday at Rhyl in North Wales for the week leading up to the outbreak of the war, and there was much speculation there about what the coming hostilities were going to mean for us personally. Reports in the newspapers about what was happening in Poland during that week were both harrowing and very worrying. There were pictures in all the papers of Stuka dive bombers turning Warsaw into a heap of rubble. We wondered whether the same treatment would be meted out to us. Rumours had already started to circulate. German spies, what else could they be, had been observed flashing signals at night to U-boats standing offshore.
The family were due to be returning home on that fateful Sunday anyway. My mother and the younger children were to travel home by train. John and I with Dad were to travel home in style in the back of an open coal lorry specially cleaned up for the holiday. So after seeing off half the family on the train we three were taking a last walk along the road to the nearby village of Towyn when we passed a newsvendor’s stall which had a doomladen placard which said ‘Ultimatum set for 11am’. It was now past 11am and so we gathered from passers by that war had in fact been declared. On the way home in the lorry loaded up with camping gear, we passed other lorries freshly painted in unfamiliar drab green loaded up with tin-hatted troops with rifles at the ready. Probably, we worked out, they were the part-time soldiers, the Yeomanry, recently called up.
Despite all that had happened that day, or because of it, we all went to the evening service at a small church we attended as a family. That evening the church was full and the atmosphere heavy with a sense of impending catastrophe. I remember clearly being very affected by this feeling of dread hanging over all of us but at the same time the feeling of excitment at the same time. I cannot remember much of the sermon that evening except that prophecy about the ‘last days’ featured prominently. At that time those words had a force which I have not come across since. At the end of the service people who would normally have left promptly stood around talking, unusually reluctant to leave.

MAY/JUNE 1940

In the event nothing much happened until the following May when the German armies over-ran the Netherlands, Belgium and France and the remnants of the BEF got back to England via Dunkirk. From Dunkirk everal of the boys from our street returned to a heroes’ welcome with banners and bunting hung out over the roadway. As kids at school we got to hear about the troop trains bringing home the veterans of Dunkirk. Several of these trains stopped at Shrewsbury station to drop off returning troops. and that they were likely to be halting at the station to allow the Red Cross to hand out refreshments to troops remaining on the train.. We had heard about the state of the soldiers with their ragged uniforms and unkempt appearance and of the possibility of souvenirs being available. It was rumoured that German insignia, badges, medals, foreign coins, etc. were to be had if you were in the right place at the right time. I remember going after school to the rail station to see if we could get access to the platforms but of course school-children were banned and police were there to enforce the rule. Driven by the thought of trophies and undeterred by police warnings we got to a gateway to one of the platforms which was a goods entrance guarded by a metal grille sliding gate. We knew it was possible to climb up the gate to be seen by the soldiers when the train came in. I cannot remember how long we had to wait or how many times we had to go there, but eventually our patience was rewarded by seeing the trains coming in with men who were barely recognisable as soldiers. But they were all in high spirits and waved and shouted greetings to us, giving us the ‘V’ sign. At least that is how we interpreted what we saw. In the event we had to make do with a few French coins for our trouble but felt that our patience had been amply rewarded. Even at that time I think we realised that we were witnessing something of historic importance. And foreign coins were prized possessions in those far off days.
The following summer was a tense time with the threat of the expected invasion hanging over us. It could have happened any day and it was never very far from our thoughts. What would it be like living in a country ruled by the hated enemy ? At school the teachers, those who were left, seemed uninterested in teaching, only in keeping us occupied. I was in the final year by this time and was taught by a middle aged teacher named Mr Johnson, nicknamed ‘Chandy’. His daily routine during this uneasy time was to devour the contents of his daily newspaper and then escape to the headmaster’s office to discuss the current situation, leaving the class in the charge of a prefect. No doubt he was looking for crumbs of comfort for the news was invariably very bad. I cannot remember his ever communicating to us his thoughts on what was happening.

AUTUMN 1940

The Battle of Britain was being fought in the skies over southern Britain during the late summer of that year. There was great excitement especially during the months of August and september at the news of so many German aircraft being shot down by our Hurricanes and Spitfires. There were also thrilling eyewitness accounts of what was going on in the newspapers and on the wireless. The following winter saw the start of night bombing raids on London and other cities in turn. There was the horrendous raid on the city of Coventry in November when the heart of the city was pulverised into rubble in one night and hundreds of civilians were killed. These raids touched our lives in a personal way when Dad was sent to Birmingham on several occasions to help with the rescue operations, and with clearing the rubble from the blocked streets. About ten days after the Coventry raid we heard that my mother’s younger sister Sue and her husband Fred had been killed in an air raid on Birmingham. Sue had written a sad letter to my mother only the day before she was killed saying how terrifying the raids were and how little information was given to the people outside the cities about what was going on. It so happened that after this particular raid Dad was sent to the Canon Hill area with a gang of rescue workers and was working on the very house belonging to my uncle and aunt. During the raid they were in the shelter in the garden and this had received a direct hit and they were killed outright. The ironic thing about this was that had they stayed in the house they might not have been killed because the front of the house was intact. The back of the house of course was a ruin. Their pet dog was the only survivor and spent his remaining years at the home of Fred’s parents. From our house in Shrewsbury we could see the sky to the east lit up with the glow of fires and the flashes from bombs and gunfire when the bombers were over Birmingham.
Soon after this my dad was fortunate in being able to join the newly formed National Fire Service which was just then in the process of being organised from the largely part-time Auxiliary Fire Service. This was necessary to deal with the greater incidence of serious fires. This new job changed our lives for the better in many ways. Dad was more contented in his work, he at last had found a job which was interesting and fulfilling. He now had the opportunity to learn new skills and to drive motor vehicles, something he had always wanted to do. Working shifts also meant that there was more food for the rest of the family, an important consideration in those days of rationing. And of course the money was much better too. So for the first time in our lives we were able to consider ourselves comfortably placed.

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