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A War Memoir — the Beginning

We lived in grandma’s house in Bexley, then north Kent, and I was five in 1939. I missed my first term at the Maypole Council School while I had whooping cough, so I started in the summer. On my first day, the child next to me wet his chair, so I didn’t think much of the place! Only vague memories of that early time in school remain and the coming war made no impression on me at the time until one day in early September mother started packing. We were going to Wales, to dad’s cousin May’s house. I had to carry the kitten. Someone must have fed its mother, Timmy, who stayed at home!

We often travelled by train, as dad worked for the railways at Broad Street in London, but this was new, an all-night journey to North Wales for the whole family, but you don’t question things much at five. We went up to Charing Cross on the Dartford Loop Line. It was all shiny, wet cobbles under lamplight and we took the underground to Euston, accompanied by occasional plaintive mews from the kitten, its tail or a paw poking through the basketwork for extra sympathy. We both must have slept most of the journey north. Change at Crewe, I suppose, and then change at Bangor. I can see it now, the dark, cold platform, no fire in the waiting room, no fresh milk in the tea room. The kitten and I sulked for hours, it seemed. Then at last the slow, stopping train for Portmadoc chuffed in. Around 8am cousin May carried us off in a taxi to the hotel where she worked, gave us breakfast and took us to her cottage in Penmorfa. What horror! There was only one bedroom for four of us, my grandma, mum and dad and me and where was the lav? Out the back! But — it had big mountains across the bay from the back window and its own little mountain, Moel Hebog, out front — my very first mountains! Dad went back to work in London after a couple of weeks, but mum, granny and I stayed almost two months, then decided invasion wasn’t going to happen and we went back to Kent.

Early Days
The next year or three are full of memories, but the order of events is not very clear. I remember the men coming to dig a hole in the back garden to erect the Anderson shelter. The corrugated sheets of iron were bolted together and earth mounded on top of it. Grass soon grew to camouflage it, but it was of very little use as a shelter since we only one field away from the River Cray and within a short time it held two feet of water and a lot of frogs.

The first aerial activity I remember, presumably part of the Battle of Britain, was a dogfight directly over our garden in a brilliant blue sky, the aircraft ducking and weaving like so many gnats high above. We stood in the doorway of the shed, watching. It would have provided no protection at all, as subsequent finds of shrapnel in the garden went to prove. What a pity my collection was left behind when we moved. Another notable action was the shooting down of an aircraft in full view from the front bedroom, the pilot parachuting safely and a plume of black smoke rising from the crash site. Of course we thought it was one of theirs, but were ashamed to discover we had been cheering the wrong side. Fortunately our pilot landed safely, though tangled in a tree for a time and the plane was neatly parked in someone’s front garden on the way to school, with minimal damage to the house.

Our nights began to be disturbed regularly by the wail of the siren, followed by the short wait for the chugging sounds of German engines we rapidly came to recognise. Anti aircraft fire thudded from nearby gun emplacements, but most nights (and days, for that matter) the planes were heading for London and ignored us. Our sheltering arrangements were simple. My bed was made downstairs like a sandwich between two leaves of the heavy kitchen table. My grandmother slept in the cupboard under the stairs, while my parents sometimes slept under the rest of the table or were taking it in turns in the armchairs as Fire Watchers. If things became really unpleasant we all joined grandma in the cupboard. I never really got used to the noise and hated missing sleep as I sat with my fingers in my ears.

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