大象传媒

I was five years old when the war started and I lived with my parents and a younger sister in Windsor Road which is in the Five Elms area of Dagenham. I have no recollection at all of the start of the war but as I was evacuated with my sister and mother at a very early stage I suppose I must have known that something different was happening. In any event we didn鈥檛 stay evacuated for very long as our mother brought us home again within a day or so. I never knew why she did this for in later years when I thought to ask there was nobody to ask as both of our parents had passed away at a relatively young age. My earliest memories therefore are either in the very early days of the war or in the last few months of peace. I can remember Walls and Dicky Birds men coming round the streets selling ice-cream from their tricycles and another man who toured the area with a small merry-go-round where the cost of a ride was an empty jam jar. My favourite place to buy sweets was a small shop in Five Elms which had a slot machine outside where you put in your halfpenny and got out a small coloured counter which looked like a tiddley-wink. A blue counter entitled you to a ha鈥檖enny worth of sweets but if you were lucky enough to get a red or yellow counter so your entitlement went up to a pennyworth or three ha鈥檖ence worth of sweets. Whatever you got you couldn鈥檛 lose. I well remember the boy next door telling me to ask my father what a certain four-lettered word meant and my father鈥� reaction when I did so.

I suppose that I would have finally realised that something out of the ordinary was going on with the start of the Battle of Britain but I don鈥檛 remember being frightened by seeing large numbers of aircraft in the skies. With the end of the Battle of Britain came the Blitz which was an altogether different experience and my memories of that period are much more vivid and have made a lasting impression on me just as it would have done to anyone who lived through it. It was impossible not to know what was going on and I was frightened, on some occasions very frightened. My father was a shift worker at Canning Town Glassworks and our reaction to air raids depended very much on whether he was at home or not. If he was at home then when the siren sounded we would be woken up, got out of bed and sat under the kitchen table whilst he weighed up what he thought we should do. I still remember sitting under that table one night and asking my parents why Hitler wanted to kill us and be told that Hitler didn鈥檛 want to kill children. I don鈥檛 think I found that answer very reassuring. If there didn鈥檛 appear to be any imminent danger we would stay under the table until the all-clear sounded when we would go back to bed again. If the raid appeared to be moving closer however we would know that we had to be ready to move quickly and it was usually the sound of the anti-aircraft guns opening up in nearby Parsloes Park that finally convinced Dad that it was time to take cover. What came next was the most terrifying of all for he would open the back door to a scene which I must have thought was hell. The noise of the gunfire and maybe bombs would be deafening whilst the black sky above would be illuminated by searchlights sweeping for targets and by the lightning-like flashes from the nearby guns. We didn鈥檛 view this nightmare for long as a word from Dad was enough to set us running for the shelter at the bottom of the garden although on occasions I suspect that we would have been carried. We stayed in that shelter until the all-clear sounded and then we would return to our beds for as with probably all Anderson shelters our one was cold, damp and uncomfortable. If my father was at work however we used a different system for my mother was terrified of the air raids and at the sound of the siren she would get us up and take us directly to the shelter. Once again we would only stay there whilst the raid was on though.

It was on one such occasion when my father was night work that there was an air raid but this time it was different for when I woke in the morning I was puzzled to find myself still in the shelter. I asked my mother why we weren't back indoors and she told me that we couldn't go back in as our house had been bombed. I had slept right through it. When my father came home from work he was stopped at the end of the road from where he could see that our house had been badly damaged and it was some time before he was able to get down the road and find out that we were safe. We were eventually led out of the shelter and through a relatively safe house back to the road where we walked to nearby Halbutt Street School along with others who had been 鈥渂ombed out鈥�. I overheard my parents talking and discovered that a family who lived opposite us had been killed for whilst they invariably used their shelter during air raids in this instance their baby had been unwell and they chose not to risk taking him into the cold and damp of an Anderson shelter. I didn鈥檛 know much about the family other than the little ginger haired girl who was about the same age as my sister. We were now homeless and our life consisted of days spent at the school and nights in a brick street shelter in Parsloes Avenue. I have no idea how long we lived like this be it days, weeks or even months but eventually we were rehoused in Valence Avenue, a couple of miles from where we had previously lived. It must have been a very sparsely furnished home as we had lost everything at Windsor Road.

We had one or two alarms over that winter, the most notable of which was when we got up one morning after yet another air raid and found a hole about a foot across in our front garden and just a couple of yards from the front of the house. The bomb disposal men evacuated us all from our homes whilst they tackled the bomb only to find that it wasn鈥檛 a bomb at all. In the raid of the previous night bombs had struck the area around Chadwell Heath railway station which was about a quarter mile away and what had made the hole in our garden was a piece of railway track uprooted by the explosion.

I don鈥檛 remember being frightened after the Blitz for whilst there were still air raids they were not as frequent or as severe and visits to the Anderson shelter became much rarer. I can even remember my father allowing me to stand with him in the porch and watch as the searchlights tracked a german plane with the local AA guns blazing away to try to shoot it down. Unlike my feelings during the blitz this was something which I found exciting.
Many people talk of the terror of the V weapons but they never affected me in that way and I found them far less frightening than the Blitz. With the doodlebug we always knew that we were OK as long as we could hear it and it was only when the engine stopped that we knew we needed to take cover fairly quickly. The V2 rockets worried me even less as there were no warnings and it was rather like being struck by lightning on a clear day. It was just a matter of luck as you could do nothing about it.

Like most people it was only in later life that I looked back and thought about some of the things which had happened to me but with the early loss of my parents there was nobody to answer my questions. All that I knew was that our house must have been bombed in 1940 and at around the 4th October as that was my father鈥檚 birthday and we had bought him a pair of slippers which had been lost. I also thought that I remembered the little ginger-haired girl as being named Sylvia Martin but I wasn鈥檛 sure whether I truly knew that or whether I knew the name from somewhere else.

I assumed that that was all I would ever know for even if records had been kept of the results of air raids they had probably been lost, mislaid or destroyed within a few years of the end of the war. How surprised I was to find out recently that not only had these records been kept but that details of Essex civilian casualties in air raids had been published just a few years ago, nearly sixty years after the event. I borrowed the document from Essex Libraries and sure enough it was there, Windsor Road bombed on 5th October 1940 and the tragedy of the family opposite, the Martins, mother, father and children Sylvia aged 3 years and Ronald aged 3 months all killed. There were other tragedies that night which I hadn鈥檛 known about, visitors from the more dangerous area of Hackney had been killed in Windsor Road and a whole family killed whilst in their shelter in nearby Halbutt Street as were their visitors from West Ham.

How unlucky that a small baby鈥檚 illness had led to the death of a whole family and how fortunate that my father being on night work may well have saved the lives of our family.

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