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Personal Account of Francis John Wallace (68)

I was two years old when WW2 began in September 1939.The family home was at Brockley in SE London I have a fleeting recollection of a seaside holiday in that summer — I especially recall the smell of the seaweed. I think I have quite a good fund of fairly early memories. However, I include two photographs of our back garden. One was taken in 1938 the other a year later. Both are of me but their interest lies in the background. One shows an small unexceptional garden whilst the later one from 1939 shows the addition of the Anderson shelter. My mother availed herself of the evacuation scheme which enabled mothers of children up to the age of 5 years to accompany their offspring to evacuation venues. We were sent to Dormansland near Lingfield in Surrey. The first billet was with a family who would not permit us to remain in the house during the daytime. Irrespective of the weather my mother had to mooch the locality with her two-year old child. There was a building called ‘the parish rooms’ in which the Mother’s Union held its meetings. My mother was a regular church-goer in London however she was refused admission to these meetings because she had not been ‘confirmed’. Even many years after the war, she retained a sense of grievance over the reception she received in this locality. Eventually we were accommodated in the delightful setting of what was known as ‘The homes of St Barnabas’ that was a retirement home for C of E clergy. The premises are still there in 2005 and look much as they did in 1940.

Nearby there must have been an army camp of some kind for it was common to see columns of light tanks and Brengun carriers. They had names painted on them and I recall one was named ‘Satan’. Its occupants whistled and my mother!.

I certainly recall seeing vapour trails and tiny silver aircraft in the bright summer skies. I also recall my mother’s terror when we were walking in some woodland and she realized that machinegun bullets were falling nearby. We sheltered in a disused cottage. My mother had put her savings into the post-office because she though that if there was an invasion she would be able to move around the country and still be able to draw funds.

We returned to London in 1942 for me to attend school. Our nearest school, Mantle Road, situated near a small marshalling yard, had been bombed and in the winter of 1942 we had lessons in a tent-like structure in the playground. It was made of wooden planks up to a height of about three feet and the rest was tarpaulin. It was cold, damp accommodation, especially miserable in the fog and many children became unwell and parents — mine included, complained.

As time went by schooling seemed to become very disrupted. This was not only because schools themselves were bomb-damaged but they were used to provide temporary accommodation to people rendered homeless. I had eight different schools from the time I was five in 1942 until I sat the 11+ exam in 1948. Sometimes we would have lessons only in the mornings or in the afternoons and we were moved from one school to another quite often. The teachers must have had a most difficult job keeping track of us all and the resources they needed for their work. Often we would find ourselves with completely new classmates or with an unfamiliar teacher. Sometimes I felt the school work was simply a repetition of what I had already done. At other times I felt that the teachers were taking it for granted that we had already covered work that was in fact strange to us. It was hard to get a sense of whether one was ‘good’ at school work or not.

The London school playgrounds were a rather harsh environment. When I went to Hertfordshire, for a short while as an evacuee later in the war I somehow felt the children were much more friendly and far less aggressive. Whatever reason there may have been for this, the country children did not have the constant anxiety of the bombing — or coping with parents similarly anxious. For many London families anxiety must have been very considerable. Perhaps with dad in the army at risk of his life, mum at home struggling to manage financially and emotionally with the children and the practicalities of frequent air-raid damage to the home and all the other urban civil disruption of the times.

I recall at school having to write to a classmate, his name I think was Brian Day. He had been hurt in a bomb incident and was in hospital. Instead of having to write a story our ‘composition’ for that week was a ‘get well soon’ letter to our friend.
I also recall having special sessions at school conducted by local Civil Defence Wardens about using gasmasks and about not picking up any strange looking objects. We had a session about ‘Butterfly Bombs’ These were devices about the size of a pigeon. They had steel ‘wings’ rather like sycamore seeds and would explode if disturbed.

There were of course many bombed sites. These made the most wonderful play areas. We had ‘camps’ and there were great quantities of timber for bonfires. Particularly risky perhaps were the explosions that resulted when we (eagerly) threw sheets of asbestos cement on to hot embers! Some bombed sites were cleared and walls erected round concrete rectangles. The resulting ‘tanks’ were filled with water for use by the fire service in the event that bombs severed the regular water mains. These EWS (Emergency Water Supply) water tanks gave us some more opportunities for hazardous play. I believe there were occasional drownings but I certainly enjoyed floating little boats and shying pieces of rubble at floating bottles. More reckless companions made and sailed on rafts!

I recall occasions when as a member of a small gang of children we set about pulling down the front of a damaged house In Avignon Road Brockley. We learned a great deal about levers but I cannot imagine in our current risk averse society what would have been made of such activities — but there were surprisingly few injuries and we had a whale of a time.

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