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Chapter 1:
Evacuee and Blitzee

On Sunday morning, 3rd September 1939 at 11am. I was in church with my parents when war was declared. I was eight years old. The service was cut short and we all went home as quickly as possible.

The people of London had expected an immediate attack from Germany if war was declared so soon started sending their children out of the city. Very shortly I, too, found myself on a train as an evacuee. My destination was Edinburgh where a missionary aunt had arranged for me to go to a home for missionaries’ children. It was called ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ House and was in a village just outside Edinburgh on the way to the Firth of Forth. About twelve children lived there and we all went to school in Edinburgh.

Very soon an air-raid shelter was built in the back garden and a grassy area where the children used to play was soon dug up and planted with vegetables in case we ran out of food. For some strange reason the vegetables chosen were artichokes which we all loathed so they were allowed to go to seed creating a wonderful ’forest’ in which we could play a variety of exciting games.

The girls’ school I was enrolled at was in the centre of town and was taken over by the Red Cross and the girls were moved to share the boys’ school. A canvas partition was erected down the length of the corridors, the girls having to walk down one side of the partition and the boys on the other so that there were no distractions!

Meanwhile the expected raids on London never materialised - at least not yet. For six to seven months after the declaration of war very little seemed to happen there. The 'phoney war' one American journalist called it. Ironically, what action there was occurred in our part of Britain rather than over London as German planes made for the shipbuilding yards on the Clyde to destroy our ships which were being built there. They also apparently wanted to bomb the Forth Bridge. Also, if they had been unable to drop all their bombs on the Clyde they would off-load their unused bombs quite near us, aiming for the ships in the Firth of Forth. Sometimes we children would stop on the way to our air-raid shelter to watch a dog fight between one of our fighters and a German bomber taking place in the sky right over our heads while the staff who looked after us went frantic trying to get us into the air-raid shelter.

Generally speaking schools in Scotland broke up for the summer holidays in June and returned in August. My school must have broken up especially early for the summer holidays in 1940, for replete with label, suitcase and gas mask, I found myself being put on 'The Flying Scotsman' for the journey south and was met at King's Cross by my parents some time towards the end of May or the beginning of June.

My mother and father were now living in North Finchley where they were looking for a furnished house to rent. My father was working for the Air Ministry in London which was a reserved occupation so he was not called up. However, as things in the country were uncertain my parents had decided to put all our belongings: furniture, family photographs, family heirlooms (except for one or two items given to friends for safe-keeping), wedding and other presents, everything we possessed in fact except our current clothes, into storage in London where they were assured they would be very safe because they were in the sub, sub-basement. They would take all our belongings out when they and the situation were more settled and they had a settled home. Meantime, until we moved into the rented house, we lived with a family who had two-year-old twin daughters. The twins' father had been called up and was now in the army and my mother was able to help with the children. My parents told me that they missed me very much and had decided that, as we had had some air raids in Scotland and they had not had any in London, and that there was no way of knowing what place was safe and what was not they felt that we might as well all be together. I would, therefore, not be going back to Edinburgh but would stay with them and go to the local school in Finchley which was within walking distance.

My father pointed out to me a queer contraption on the roof of the police station and told me that this was an air raid siren and that it would make the most peculiar wailing noise if there was an air raid and one long note for the 'All Clear' but that it would probably never have to go off. (I was to hear it frequently in the months to come while Britain fought for her life in the skies in the Battle of Britain and during the blitz. The wailing sound of an air raid siren still chills me, even today.)

It was wonderful to be with my parents again and for a short time life, from my point of view, seemed pleasant and tranquil. Then one summer evening an extraordinary thing happened. I was sitting in the bathroom with my mother and the twins whom my mother was getting ready to bath. One was already in the bath and the other was undressed with nothing on except her little red shoes. Suddenly the door flew open and the twins’ mother dashed in very agitated and blurted out something to my mother which had obviously alarmed her.

'Oh, no!' gasped my mother and popped the little girl into the bath, red shoes and all.
'How odd,' I thought, 'whatever made her do that?'

'What's the matter?' I asked.

'Paris has fallen, ' my mother replied.

The air raids started very soon after the fall of France.
Despite my father's optimism, I was to hear the air raid sirens day and night for a very long time. Public shelters were built in the park and many people erected an Anderson shelter in their gardens, as did our friends. To begin with we just went out to the shelter when there was an air raid but when it became obvious that these raids were going to be very frequent on a nightly basis, we went out there every evening as a matter of course and went to bed in the shelter in the knowledge that if the raid had not started it would surely come, and it always did. Before we had got into this routine, one night there was a knock on the front door and an air raid warden informed us that there was an unexploded bomb in the road in front of the house and that they were evacuating us, and everyone else in the vicinity, to a nearby church hall until the bomb had been dealt with. Another night when we were in the shelter a powerful landmine struck in the main shopping street half a mile away from our house. The explosion was deafening, the ground shook and the glass in all the windows in a mile-wide radius was shattered and was still falling the next morning as I walked to school.

Then some good news came: my parents had found a furnished house to let nearby. As the house was furnished and the general situation was obviously very unsettled my mum and dad decided to leave our furniture and all our precious belongings in storage meantime. Although we had none of our own things at least we were together.

It was a large house overlooking the park. There was no air raid shelter in the garden so we tried the public shelter one night but my parents then decided, as did many other people, to set up a 'do-it-yourself' shelter in the house. My father had been advised that we should only use the downstairs rooms because, if a bomb dropped nearby, the blast would blow the glass from the windows inwards upstairs but tended to blow it outwards downstairs. A direct hit would, of course, have been the end of us but that would also have been the case in the public air raid shelter had we decided to go there instead. For about nine months we lived solely in the downstairs rooms and when, nervously, I ever ventured upstairs - only ever in the daytime and in between raids - the upper storey felt very spooky: I was sure it was haunted! To be doubly sure about the windows, we taped up all the downstairs window panes making large diagonal crosses with wide strips of thick brown sticky paper as we had been instructed. We then had to make sure that the curtains were lined with heavy black material so that no light was showing after dark. Even the smallest chink of light in the 'blackout' ensured a visit from a roaming 'air-raid warden' and a substantial fine. During the ‘blackout’ there were no street lights, of course, and anyone having to go out at night had to navigate with a torch which also had to be largely blacked out, allowing only a minute strip of light to show which had to be directed towards the ground. The same applied to buses, ambulances (a slightly wider strip of light was allowed for them) and anyone lucky enough to have a car and a petrol ration (probably for essential users only).

For the night raids, my parents constructed a little shelter for us in the downstairs front room. They placed the base of their divan bed on its side, facing the window. The base of my divan bed was similarly placed on its side facing the door of the room which fortunately was well away from the window. Thus we were in a little fortified square in a corner of the room furthest away from the windows. The mattresses were put on the floor, side by side, for us to sleep on. We put a large table, covered with pillows, above our heads to protect us from the ceiling, said our prayers and hoped for the best. My dad reckoned that, unless we had a direct hit, we would be as safe in our 'shelter' as we would be in a more conventional one. He seemed to be right as we survived all the raids including several very close shaves. One night I was in bed in our 'shelter', my mother was washing in the downstairs bathroom and my father was turning off the gas in the cupboard under the stairs when an enormous blast violently shook the house, shattered a few windows and blew the heavy oak front door off its hinges. The noise was unbelievable. The next thing I knew was that both my parents were running as fast as they could towards our 'shelter'. They reached it simultaneously. My father picked my mother up and tossed her over the barricade and onto the mattress, following her as fast as he could. All I could do was laugh hysterically. Seeing my parents that scared was terrifying. Another night a stick of incendiary bombs landed in the road behind us and turned the entire street, houses, trees, plants, grass, the lot, a sticky oily black. Each morning there was a different landscape as new rubble and scenes of devastation confronted us. The bombardments lasted day and night, then nightly, for many months. At first I was terrified of the noise and cried bitterly but my parents assured me that the noise was only our guns firing back and protecting us. Where were these guns I asked and was told they were in the park opposite our house. I could never understand why, if that were the case, I could never find them in the morning as I walked to school. I used to look for them every time I was in the park but to no avail! Eventually, I slept through most of racket until one night, after about ten months of nightly raids, there was nothing - not a plane, not a bomb, not a sound. I found the eerie silence as terrifying as the noise had been and as a result could not sleep at all.

At school in 1940 for the first week or two, if there was a raid we all marched to the air raid shelters where we sang songs and played word games. Soon the staff realised that, the way things were going, we were never going to get educated and that we must, therefore, have lessons in the shelters. Accordingly, we were all issued with 'tidy boxes': flat rectangular boxes in which we could keep our books, pens and pencils, stationery etc. and on which we could write if necessary. As soon as the siren went we would quickly put whatever we were working with in the box , line up at the classroom door and armed with 'tidy box' and gas masks would, in an orderly fashion make our way into the shelter where, perched on narrow wooden benches, we would continue with our work. In addition, practising our arithmetic tables and oral spelling tests seemed popular with the teachers but not with us. We longed nostalgically for the earlier sing-songs.

One school rule which pleased me a lot was the instruction that, if the siren went in the morning between leaving home and reaching the school we were to go quickly to the school if that was nearer but if home was nearer we were to turn round and go home. I lived at the top of the street, a fair walk from the school but fortunately for me, I had made a good friend in my class who lived just round the corner from the school. I used to collect her on my way to school so if the siren went near her house, or even near the school, we would turn round and run back to her house and play until the All Clear went.
Each morning on the way to school and after a daytime raid we would scour the ground with our eyes to see if we could find any shrapnel. If we were successful we would then vie with our classmates to see who had found the largest piece. The boys were always very annoyed if it was a girl who won the contest.

When it was thought in September 1940 that a German invasion was imminent we children were given some 'very important' instructions at school:
1. If we had a bicycle (which I did not), we were to take the tyres off it and destroy them.
2. All the road signs were going to be taken down so if anyone asked us where they were or how to get to any place, we were not to tell them.
3. We were not to pick up any strange objects in the street, even if they looked like pens or toys. They might be booby-trapped.

'The Germans are coming!' yelled one of the boys. 'They'll come down from planes by parachute and will probably land in the park.'

'Then we must all get pitchforks,' said another, 'and catch them before they land!'

We all laughed uproariously at this wonderful idea. (Never mind that half of us did not even know what a pitchfork was.) The whole school would be out in the playground or the park with pitchforks catching German parachutists before they landed. We would win the war!

A much more sobering picture presented itself several months later in November. A new boy came to our school. He was a little older than me so was not in my class. We all were aware of him though. There was something very strange about him. He had a strange glazed look and kept very much to himself. He would not join in any of the games with the other boys but preferred to wander round the park or playground by himself, not speaking to anyone. All the children were a little in awe of him. One day some friends and I were playing in the park when we saw this boy on his solitary round of the park and I must have remarked on his strange behaviour.

' Didn't you know?' said one of my friends, ' There was a terrible raid on Coventry a few weeks ago. His family was in their house at the time but he wasn't. When he returned home, he found the house had been flattened, and he saw his mother's arm sticking out of the rubble.'

I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. How do you ever begin to reach a person's pain when they have suffered like that? We all grew up a lot after that experience. There did not seem to be much about war to laugh about now. After that, every time there was a raid while I was at school I would walk home in a state of apprehension in case I were to find my home flattened and my mother's arm sticking out of the rubble. If my father was late home after working in central London all day, I wondered if he would ever come home or had he been blown up somewhere in between his office and home. We also became gradually aware of the losses people were experiencing with family in the Forces or civilians at home.

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