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SOME WARTIME REMINISCENCS (more or less in chronological order) by Keith Davidson, born 12 September 1932, then living at 111 The Avenue, West Wickham, Kent, but now of The Poplars, Sandy Lane, Church Brampton, Northampton, NN6 8AX (01604 845489)

My father (who had fought with London Scottish Regiment in Flanders in the First World War and having been dug out when his trench had been blown up had been wounded in the wrist and sent to a military hospital near Timsbury, Wiltshire) and was known as ‘Jock’ commuted daily to his work, Westminster Bank, Lombard Street, London, and had from time to time do night time fire watch duty at work. My Mother hated being only with me on those occasions.

I remember clearly the excitement at home and with neighbours when Churchill was appointed Prime Minister. They were saying at last we had a leader who was not frightened of Hitler — wherever Hitler marched he had won and until that appointment everyone was afraid of him but not now with Churchill. The atmosphere changed. I went to a preparatory school up the hill called Barnhill School and we added to the opening words of the song ‘Whistle while you work’ ‘Hitler is a twerp’, etc. Moreover Hitler was referred to as ‘the plumber’ or ‘ the corporal’, referring to his former positions. All this was done to bring Hitler’s supremacy down in our thinking.

A brick shelter was built in the garden, half into the soil and half above ground, with the despoiled soil being thrown on top and grassed. I made routes for my toy cars, etc, along the grass. We used the shelter during the daylight raids in the Battle of Britain.
We had many raids, as Biggin Hill Aerodrome was not far away. On one occasion in the clear blue sky, I looked up from the entrance to the shelter at an enemy bomber formation overhead with 3 Spitfires attacking it. They got one bomber on its own and I saw it going through the sky in flames, hitting the ground and exploding with its bombs on board — I must admit that as a boy of nearly 8 years of age I found this incident exciting.

A landmine fell near school, did not explode and we were able to see its ‘inside’. The beautiful silk parachute was sometimes used for wedding dresses! On another occasion, a bomb dropped on a semi—detached house, some 20 houses away and demolished it, but did not explode. The police told all the houses around to evacuate and we stayed with some friends a few miles away. By this time we had 2 Rhode Island Red hens (whom oddly I named Buttercup and Daisy) to provide eggs to supplement the rations and Dad had to go back to feed them — the police said ‘At your own risk’! We had had a holiday on a farm at Semley in Dorset and bought these hens from him — they seemed to take days to come to West Wickham Station; Dad kept on phoning the Station. (Subsequently we had 2 White Leghorn hens (one of which had blue eyes!)

The ack ack guns would pound away, with the searchlights beaming, but never seem to hit a plane. I also remember clearly the bombing of the London docks. The roar of the bombers and the fires blazing along the southern skyline, lighting up the night sky.

During the night raids we slept in the shelter. I had a spinster schoolteacher aunt called Flo who had a flat in Lewisham as she taught at Pitmans Secretarial College there. (It was bombed and Pitmans moved her to their Croydon branch.) She often stayed with us. One night we were all asleep in the shelter (with a night light in the top right hand corner) and she said ‘Jock there is water in the bottom of the shelter’. ‘Don’t be silly, Flo, there can’t be, go to sleep’. A few moments later ‘Jock, there is water’. So, we all had to go into the house. The shelter had to be sealed by a cement called ‘Pudlo’.

On several occasions, we would wake up after a bad night of bombing to find the house in a mess, with doors hanging loose, windows out, ceilings down and tiles off the roof in abundance from the blast of nearby bombs. Italian prisoners of war were brought in to put tarpaulin on the roof to keep out the rain and brown paper over the windows. They were used as they had no desire to escape back to Italy and have to fight again (the Germans could not be so used for obvious reasons). These occasions were quite frightening. Just before the war, when his wife had died, my Father’ father came to live with us. He would not go into the shelter, saying ‘No Bosh (German) will drive me out of my room’. One morning, after a raid my father went into the house to see him and found the ceiling had collapsed onto grandpa!

At School long thin air raid shelters were built, but the ‘cement’ between the bricks seemed to us boys to be mainly sand. The school itself was an old Victorian/Edwardian 3 storey house. It had an immediate pre-war built separate single storey 4 classroom block
The old house had a single fireplace in each room, with central heating in the new block. Coal was hard to get — the rooms were so cold that often when I went home to lunch I could not go back to school in the afternoon, going to bed with a hot water bottle (the old stone one as all rubber available went to the war effort).
One night the school got a near hit. As we expected, the shelters collapsed (luckily nighttime raid as otherwise we would have been killed). The single storey block was badly damaged, but the old house stood up remarkable well. By the way, all the young teachers (all male in a boys prep school in those days) had gone to war except one, Mr. Crutwell (who taught Latin) — no one was sure whether he was a maligned conscientious objector or physically unfit to serve — he had bad breath. So, as their war effort many teachers came out of retirement; the gentle Mr. Brooks, for example, who taught music and singing.
By the time of the doodlebugs, I had gone to Whitgift School in Croydon. The first night of the bugs my Father was on firewatch duty at the Bank. I heard in my sleep the roar of the engines; my Mother dashed into my bedroom, looked out of the window and said ‘There is a plane going over on fire!’ We heard the engine cut out, the swished of the plane passing through the air and the nearby explosion as it hit the ground. Then, of course they were sent during the daytime. One hit the Elmers End bus station at lunchtime killing many drivers and conductors who were having lunch and a V2 similarly hit Woolworths in Hayes at lunchtime. A school friend, Myles Bunting, who lived down the road, and I played Monopoly in the shelter and one such game went on for 2 days! Presumably, because I was a child, bombing did not normally make me particularly frightened.
The bombing got so bad that the school closed down. I had an aunt, living in Ilfracombe. With her son, John, some 2 years younger than me. My uncle was a Major in the Royal Engineers, serving with the 8th Army, first at El Alamien then through Sicily and Italy. At the beginning of the war my parents decided not to break the family and send me away as an evacuee (‘if we are going to die we will all die together’ were their words). However, the decision was to send me to my aunt’s. My Mother took me to Waterloo Station for the train. It was packed with people. The corridors were full. People stood in the compartments. Oddly I had my school uniform on. A Mother on the train with her son also from Whitgift and similarly dressed saw my cap and I was pushed in with them.
The train set off. It had to keep on stopping to let military trains go by. It sopped frequently at stations. We pulled into, I think, Templecombe station which is on an uphill gradient. We heard the engine puffing away but nothing happened. It had to reverse down the gradient and take a run at the hill to get going! It virtually emptied at Exeter and continued on via Barnstable to Ilfracombe. It arrived some 5 hours late! Initially, I was very homesick — my aunt saw the tearful letter I wrote home and she advised me most sensibly to re-word it otherwise my Mother would have been distressed.
As D day drew near, The Avenue had armoured vehicles parked on both sides of the road waiting to move off to the coast. The night before the invasion the sky was so full of planes that we guessed that the invasion was near. At School, as the allied armies advanced, both from the west and the east, maps of Europe appeared and we used paper arrows to mark the course of the advancing armies — all very exciting.
On VE night, my parents and I joined the hundreds enjoying the streetlights being on again after so many years and went to Woolwich. It was great fun, the crowds singing and dancing happily. On VJ night we were on holiday in Bournemouth and here again I had a whale of a time, banging the sides of buses with our hands, singing and dancing joyfully.
Shortly after the war finished, we had a holiday at East Wittering in Sussex, staying in a bungalow. The whole of the south coast had been a forbidden area, with barbed wire everywhere. Staying in the bungalow as guests was another family with a daughter slightly older than I. The beach had been cleared of the barbed wire, but unfortunately a piece had been left behind under sand. She trod on it and the wire became impaled in her foot — a doctor was called, first cutting short the length, which was sticking out, before removing the rest!

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