大象传媒

London Blitz, 39 to 45

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War Site by Three Counties Action, on behalf of James Ireson, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

My name is James Ireson, I was born in 1935 at 303 City Road London EC1, about half a mile from the city of London. I lived in a four storey Victorian House with my Mother, Father, older Brother and my Gran. We had an Anderson shelter built into the front garden, as it was larger than the back garden.
My Dad worked at Coans Aluminium Foundry at the Angel, they made parts for Spitfire engines and other aluminium parts for aircraft.
The first I remember of the war was watching dogfights in the sky in the summer of 1940. I stayed at home, as did lots of other children where I lived, we never evacuated. I remember a bus conductor telling me off one day because I said I did not want to be evacuated.
Our house was situated at a crossroad. At night an anti-aircraft gun and searchlight were positioned outside our house, what with bombs falling and the anti-aircraft gun firing at the bombers and the generator running to supply the searchlight it was impossible to sleep when air raids were in progress. One night during a heavy incendiary bomb raid we heard a thump on the roof of our shelter, in the morning my Dad found an unexploded incendiary bomb on the roof. My dada called the Police and the called the Army Bomb Disposal Unit to defuse it and take it away.
The windows in our house were blasted out three times by different bombs the last one being the most serious by a V2 rocket that landed on the British Drug Houses Company in the early evening, luckily most employees had gone home so their weren鈥檛 too many people killed. I had a lucky escape that evening, our house had a basement below ground level; we had no warning of the V2 rocket coming, as they were silent and very fast. My Gran was sitting in the front room of the basement when a blast threw her across the room. She was shaken but uninjured. I was sitting in the kitchen at the back of the house, the blast, luckily for me sucked the windows and glass away from me into the back-yard. My Mum was upstairs making the beds and part of the ceiling came down on her but she wasn鈥檛 badly hurt
One day in 1944 I was playing in City Road with some friends. We could hear a V1 doodlebug in the sky, the sound of a V1 Rocket was very distinctive, we looked up it was heading North towards the Angel Underground station, suddenly the engine cut out it started to fall. We ran for the nearest air raid shelter, after it exploded we came out of the shelter. We looked toward the Angel to see a cloud of dust. We ran to see where the Rocket came down; it was opposite and to the right of the Saddlers Wells Ballet Theatre on a group of houses where a distant relation of mine lived. About a dozen houses were demolished. I don鈥檛 know about casualties.
My Mum and Dad must have had a very tough time during the war; my Dad was an A.R.P Warden at night. He was based in the City of London on office roofs for outbreaks of fires due to incendiary bombs falling. My Mum had two jobs, one was office cleaning in the City of London very early in the morning, and the other job was tea lady in the afternoon. She must have had a hard time trying to feed us with rationing at the tome. We used to have a rabbit fairly often, one of my favourites that I enjoyed was whale meat but it could be a bit tough sometimes. I did not see or taste and orange or banana till I was about twelve years old. I remember sweet rationing coming to an end after the war had been over for quite some time; but the government had to put sweets back on ration as everyone went mad and emptied the sweet shops.
If the air raid went off while we were in school we were taken down into the playground underneath the school until the all-clear siren went then we would go back to our lessons. I must have lost quite a lot of my education due to air raids, but thankfully as a family together in the blitz we all survived.

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