´óÏó´«Ã½

Transcription of an interview with Nancy Heap (nee. Simpson).
(My grandmother who died in 2002)

Her experiences growing up during World War II.

Interviewed 13 Feb 1999 (by Gordon Napier).

GN- We are coming up to the 60th anniversary of the start of the war, how did you first hear of its beginnings?

NH- People were prepared for it, to start off with. They didn’t want it. But a lot of people did relive the previous war. The older generation. I was only 12 but the older generation started to talk about the First World War in front of me, and I learnt about the horrors of that then. And I didn’t know what to expect, when war was declared. But it was a Sunday Morning, and we were all gathered in 60 George Road… which was my grandmother’s house… and she was a sick woman and sat in a chair all her adult life… and my father and mother, and my two uncles grandfather, were there. And all of a sudden, of course, it was announced that war had been declared. And the sirens went, so immediately everyone didn’t know what to think. They didn’t know whether they personally were going to have an air raid or not, so they prepared for it. Grandfather put a screen in front of the bay windows, just in case there was flying glass… we sat and waited and eventually of course the ‘all clear’ went. But I was too young to really, sort of, be terribly depressed about it, because, you know, it was my grandparents and my parents who were more worried about it than I was. So life went on for me, I stood in awe; I didn’t know what was going to happen. Life carried on… I took the dog out… it was the same for me you know, everything was all right. And then, two or three days later, came the evacuation day, and we all had to gather in the school yard, their parents were there, and all the children were equipped with a carrier bag and a tag to say who they were. They didn’t know where they were going… the parents were worried to death, because they didn’t know where their children were going, and you can imagine the trauma that was in that schoolyard, at that particular time.
Anyway, the kids had to get themselves off, and the parents went home. We were crocodiled down to the railway station, and hadn’t a clue where we were going, and some of the children on that train had never been out of walls end. It was an adventure to them. They didn’t know what the countryside looked like. They had been brought up in an industrial, terraced environment and they didn’t know what was going to happen to them, but the delight on their faces when they saw the fields and the cows and things like that, they’d never ever seen before.

It was a mixed emotion. I didn’t want to leave my mum and dad, but they thought it was best at that particular time that we should clear out.

GN- This was before any bombing?

NH- Before any bombing, and only two or three days after war had been declared. A lot of parents went with their children. I was sort of attached to a friend of my mums. Er, I was left in her care, more or less; my mum thought I’d be alright. My own aunt was there in another carriage with her children but I didn’t go with them. Anyway we sat in this train for a while and off we went. There was no- all the signs from the stations had been taken off so you didn’t know where you were, particularly the children. And then we stopped, and we finished up at a sea side place, which was Allenmouth. And we were all crocodlied once again to a gym in a small school. And we were given something to drink and eat, and then… it was very, very degrading, really, because the people who lived in Allenmouth came in and decided who they were going to have as evacuees. So it was a cattle market. Not a very pleasant one. Not for a person like me who was an only one, who had been nurtured all my life, and all of a sudden all these people saying we’ll have you, we’ll have you, we’ll have you… Anyway, I was with this woman who was a friend of mam’s, who were called Auntie Kittie (and she had two daughters, so therefore I wasn’t picked out just as a single child. And at the finish we were left behind, everybody else had gone except us. And Auntie Kittie and her two daughters were sent to a boarding house, and I was sent temporarily to the local grocers, a village grocers, and they were super. They treat me absolutely lovely, for the time I was there. Then I was eventually put into this boarding house, with this aunt, well, would-be aunt, and two children. It wasn’t very satisfactory, because, I’m afraid, Auntie Kittie thought her children were Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth, and I was the little Cinderella, left behind. She dressed me in my school clothes, my playing clothes, but never dressed me up to go anywhere. She really treat me like dirt. It took her quite a while before my mum realized, and then there wad a great big barmy about it. But, there weren’t…I mean, I was happy enough there, I was in an attic room, and the thing I remember most about it was… the church… striking the hour… and the quarters of the hour. That was very, very satisfactory for me, I liked that… Anyway things got from bad to worse, I got a poisoned toe, and eventually there was a big row between my mum and my aunt. And them my grandmother died, which was the biggest shock I ever had in my whole life, because I loved her so much. And after that I couldn’t really be happy away from home; and I wanted to come home.
Because, I suppose, really, as a child, you think, well, if one of your loved ones has gone, the others could go and you wouldn’t be there. So I had to come home. So I did, after about twelve weeks, I came home, and came back to the wartime… area, shall we say, the working class area, which was very much in the throws of the war. And when we went to school, that was only part time. We didn’t have any education, virtually, there was only mornings or afternoons, you didn’t do a full day’s schooling. So you got right behind at twelve year old, which was dangerous. Anyway, It was quite pleasant, only just going to school part time. Then everything gradually got… teachers started to come back, from being evacuated and school started to take over again. And then of course the bombing started.
Opposite from where we lived they built the (nakak?) factory which was very noisy. And of course the sirens would go, and all the ships’ pompoms used to be firing away. These akak guns used to go. Windows used to be rattling, and you used to have to dash for the shelter most evenings. And of course there were bunks there for the little ones, and we had ‘siren suits’ (soups?), as they called them, made, to keep us warm so as we got out of bed and straight down into the streets, you know, into the shelters.
Then… Life as an early teenager was a bit tough, there wasn’t much to do, and there were dark night, you had to have, sort of, black outs all the time. If you went… my mother wouldn’t let me out until I was about fifteen… you know, we didn’t go out in blackout. Then you had little torches, and had to take a gas mask. Anyway, things went on from there, and it got to be a regular habit, the sirens going and that sort of thing. You got used to it. As a child, you didn’t take it as badly as the adults did. It was a bit of an adventure, sometimes, really. If you saw a German plane going over during the day, you thought it was great. And picking up bits of shrapnel and stuff like that. I used to go quite a lot down to the river onto a pit heap, a slag heap, and you used to be able to see right up and down the river, watching the ships going up and down. My friend and I spent a lot of time on top of that hill, watching what was coming in and going out. The one thing I did see, which struck me most was a tanker coming in in half. The front end of the tanker was towed in by a tug, and the other half brought itself in because the engine, of course, in an oil tanker is at the back.

GN- This had been torpedoed by a U-Boat?

NH- It had been torpedoed and it wasn’t loaded, so it didn’t blow up. It was an empty one, so they were lucky, and managed to bring that ship in. They went into Swan Hunters dry dock. It was welded and riveted and put together in about a week, and back out it went again. But we saw a lot of damaged ships coming in, with masts down, holes in the sides, that sort of thing. Because most of the ships that came into the Tyne were empty, because they came in for repair. On occasions, when my dad had petrol to put in the car, we used to go down to Tynemouth, and watch the convoys being prepared, all these ships nicely placed and the destroyers and the frigates there, tooting away and putting them in the right spot, just sort of… like a collie with a load of sheep. Got them in the right place and off they’d go. But it was very impressive to watch it. You might have about forty ships, and then two or three frigates, and a destroyer or two, and they were all hustled into the right place, and the commodore’s boat was at the front, and off they’d go. My life was built up of ships and I loved that. Anything that had… you know, on water, I loved as a child, because my life was surrounded by ships and I loved them.

Then they decided that the Tyne was vulnerable, because it reflected on nights that had no clouds, and of course the Germans just knew where to put the bombs, right. Then they decided on smoke screens. And these were like green house heaters, only about five foot tall. Ant they put all the dirty oil and sludge they could find in these heaters and lit them at night, and it caused so much… I mean now, in this day and age it would have been atrocious! It would have killed everybody! But we had to put up with that for quite a long time. The only thing was that when they did light these oil heaters and all this smoke came up in the sky, and it came in the house, you breathed it and you ate it and you lived it. It only helped the Germans to come in with their aircraft because wherever the smog was, they knew it was somewhere to hit under that. I mean it was a direction, really, more than anything else, it wasn’t a deterrent it just showed the Germans- there’s smoke down there, there must be something they wanted to hide, so down came the bombs. It didn’t really work, but they still kept on at it.

GN- Same with those Barrage balloons

NH- The Barrage balloons, yes, they were placed pretty frequently. They did do their job, they kept the bombers high. They couldn’t come in too low. But apart from that I don’t know… they could still drop bombs in the right place when they wanted to.

Then I went to a private school in Newcastle, so I had further to travel. I remember one day going to school, and it was difficult going to school and when I got into Newcastle there had been an incendiary raid on the area, and the bus (goods?) station in Newcastle was on fire. And that stopped all traffic, so it was a case of walking to school. And when I got into school, it had bombs up there, and it had no windows in. All my schoolbooks were all scattered all over and I had to try and get them home. Which was quite a feat, really, because I had a lot of books to carry. The school was pretty well damaged and we were off for about a fortnight, three weeks, before it was all put together again.

And then, when I was coming back, I decided to go to an aunt who lived in Wall’s End, because my mother wasn’t around, and when I got to her house I couldn’t get by because there was an unexploded bomb on the road. So that was a pretty hectic day I had. I was pretty tired by the time I did finally get back home.

But on the whole, the main thing, I think, was that people helped each other. Something that you can’t imagine these days. People became friends and they spoke to each other, and they looked after each other. If you went out and left the door open, nobody would come in, you felt safe with the people that you lived with. That’s community spiritships, shall we say.

GN- What did the ordinary people think or know about the enemy, Nazi Germany?

NH- Well it was an enemy; we were told we had to fight it. I suppose. It’s not like today, we were taught to believe in the Union Jack. We were taught to believe that this country was right, regardless of whether it was wrong or right. We weren’t brainwashed as such but we had been brought up to believe that. And now, young people, they question that. But young people in those days didn’t. We had a war to fight. We knew that it was them or us.

We didn’t have a very good leader in Chamberlain, but once Winston Churchill came about, he did stir people up. And he got them to realize that they had to do something about them. One of my uncles was away before war was declared because he was in RNVR, and the other uncle was away in about three weeks, into the army. We believed that they had something to fight. I don’t know whether they though about the ordinary German, but they knew they had something to fight in Germany, and I suppose it was Hitler, really, it wasn’t the ordinary people. I don’t think people had malice against the German people as much as they had malice against what they stood for.

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