ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

It's Sunday, Mum and Dad are home, the weather is very
hot, a really lovely day. I'm playing in the garden
with my sister Betty. My other sister Jean is
somewhere in the house. Last week we all went to the
church hall of the Annunication Church down in
Chislehurst Village and got fitted for gas masks. We
brought them home and they sat on the sideboard in
their cardboard boxes with a string shoulder strap. I
didn't really know what they were for. Mum and Dad
whispered a lot. On Sundays we normally had a drink
and maybe a sandwich around 11 o'clock, so when Dad
called for us to come in I thought this was what he
wanted. I saw Alf Filby next door go indoors in a
hurry. In the dining room Dad had the round, black
Echo radio tuned into The ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Service. He called for
quiet and then told us to listen carefully. A voice I
now know to be Neville Chamberlain's came out of the
speaker. He said we were now at war with Germany.
Mum said "No! Not again." Dad said, "We have no
choice. The Poles need us." Suddenly there was a
scream from outside and we went out through the
conservatory into the back garden. A woman over the
back in Greenway was running up and down her garden
screaming at the top of her voice.. Other voices joined
in from the immediate neighbourhood. "Take cover!"
"Get the gas masks out." Dad called out and told them
to "Shut up." It all went quiet and we went back inside
for a cup of tea. Back to school on Monday, nothing
was happening. The next weekend Dad dug a hole in the
garden, he put an old bed spring over it and covered
it with wood and the clay that he had dug out. There
was a gap to one side and I climbed in the hole,it
smelled of damp and was quite cold.. Dad called it
our shelter.. Two days later the shelter was full of
water.. Cutting into the clay had created a sump.
Dad and Alf soon filled it in. Barrage balloons
stared to appear in the sky, just practising. I kept
hearing the grown ups wondering, "Where are they?",
"What's going on?" In the next few weeks children
were disappearing from Mrs Rawlins class in the
Wesleyan School in Willow Grove. We were told they had
been evacuated.I didn't know what that meant. Mum
started putting tinned food into the big blanket
drawers under her wardrobe as well as dried fruit and
sugar. One day she had a letter that told her she had
to help with the war. My sister Jean was 13 and was
considered old enough to look after Betty and me. My
Dad was 43 and was too old for the Army , so he had to
build Army huts. I was 6 years old and I suddenly
found myself getting up in the morning and having to
get myself to school with maybe only a bit of bread
for breakfast, there were no school meals, and I
remember a time when I only had a 1/3 of a pint of
milk all day. When I got home I raided what was in
the kitchen. A German plane came over one day and
dropped a bomb on Edgebury School but it fell in the
field. The grown ups said that it was most likely a
target because it looked like a factory. Everything
seemed very quiet and normal for a long time and then
suddenly there were hundreds of German planes heading
for London 10 miles away. The guns were going crazy,
our fighters left so many vapour trails from their
cannon fire at the bombers that the sky became like a
patchwork of cloud.
The sirens were wailing and the nose was overwhelming.
No bombs landed near us, but Mum said she thought
that the city and the West End had been hit. She
worked in London and she was worried about getting
there. By the next Autumn the raids had become
endless day and night. Some days the all-clear didn't
go off at all. By now I was only going to school for
one hour a day from 9 am - 10 am. This was to keep
the school as empty as possible while the shelters
were being built. Our school had brick and concrete
shelters, being erected in the playground, when they
were finished we went back to a regular day. Two old
ladies set up a soup kitchen in an empty shop in the
village. I went there for a while but the soup wasn't
nice, so I told my Mum I would go home every day. We
had chickens and rabbits in the back garden by then,
so I could always have egg and tomato on fried bread.
I was seven years old and taught myself to cook at
this time. I also learnt about the Ration Books as I
was left to do the shopping with my barrow Dad made me
on some pram wheels. Time became very muddled, this
was probably because we were always tired. After the
horrendous weekend when London was on fire from
horizon to horizon. (We watched it from White Horse
Hill Chislehurst, the air raids were ongoing). Most
people settled down into a routine, during air raids I
read 'Winnie The Pooh" books to the class by the
light of low wattage bulbs, the class sitting on
wooden forms. The noise of aircraft and gunfire kept
interrupting us. There were nights when my parents
didn't get home until midnight because the railway
lines had been bombed. My sisters and I painted and
played to while away the time. There were no phones
so we didn't know where our parents were. We had an
Anderson Shelter in the garden by now and there were
times when we all slept in it. One in particular,
when a bread basket of incendiaries fell directly
onto our road. the men were all running about with
ladders and rakes pulling the flaming phosphorous
bombs out of gutters and of roofs. With the daily and
nightly bombings people became very blasŽ. We started
sleeping in our beds again even going to the pictures.
In fact it looked like we got used to the war.
Collecting shrapnel and putting in the box in the
corner of the classroom. When it was full it was
picked up by the salvage people. One year we
collected conkers for medicine. Everything was for
the War Effort. our clothes were wearing out so it
was "make do and mend". Slogans appeared everywhere,
"Dig for Victory", "Loose Lips Sink Ships", "Careless
Talk Costs Lives". My two sisters and I were supposed
to go and stay with my aunt in the U.S. We had been
to the U.S. Embassy in London and everything was ready
for us to leave, but a Cable from my aunt stopped it
all, because she lived on the west cost and the Japs
were thought to be a threat, so it was put on hold,
luckily so, because the ship we were to sail on was
sunk off Ireland.The Battle of Britain was coming to
an end and we were winning in the skies. We still had
air raids; 3 years now with hardly a let up. Quite a
few houses round us had been hit . A whole row in
Westhurst Drive had been hit by a stick of six.I saw
them falling and thought they were meant for me but
they fell 300-400 yards away, taking out about 18
houses. Land mines, air bombs personnel bombs
(butterflies), high explosive incendiaries, were all
words kids knew by heart as we had experienced them
all. Everybody was in uniform and the rations were
getting smaller. The radio, the one that had told us
about the war now told us how to cook potato pastry
and marrow jam amongst other recipes. The radio
doctor kept telling us to use the "golden throne"
regularly and stay healthy. Tommy Handley did his
best with ITMA to make us laugh and we followed the
news (Stuart Hibbert reading).
The Americans arrived and the Italians gave in, I was
still doing the family shopping. Ten pence worth of
meat a week, a bit of offal if you were lucky. So
many points for this and so many for that. We had no
cheese for 3 months. Then we had the joy of the first
cheese and onion sandwich with some freshly made
coffee and milkone Sunday morning. Mum came home
from work with a machine needle broken in pieces in
her left index finger. Shehad beenmaking tents and
mattresses for the Forces and she had stitched her
finger, she didn't even go to the Doctor. She pulled
the pieces out herself and still went to work the next
day. Very few people had time off sick. I had changed
schools and was now at Edgebury Central. School
dinners had started, not very good but filled you up.
My sisters spent less time at home after school, but
it was expected that the fire was lit and the house
was cleaned. The rabbits and chickens were fed and
cleaned out, and if this wasn't done I'd get knocked
about by my sister Betty who was bigger than me and
three years older. I was expected to collect food for
the rabbits from nearby fields, collect hay straw and
carrots and anything else that was going from the
rabbit and poultry club hut. There were times that my
father had promised a rabbit to one of my neighbours
for the Sunday roast and it became my job at the age
of nine to slaughter, skin and prepare the rabbit.
There was a time that including babies in litters we
had in excess of 100 rabbits and 40-50 hens. We
didn't intend to go hungry. One night during an air
raid Dad came in and said that the German pilots were
becoming suicidal,he'd just seen a plane with the
tail on fire and it would stop. We learnt the next
day that this was the first of the Doodlebugs or V1s
that he had seen. Three days later I stepped out of
our front door, walked to the middle of the road and
looked up, I counted 40 Doodlebugs going across the
sky towards London. It was announced on the news that
no more warnings would sound, nor would the all-clear,
this was another phase in the bombing, the bombs kept
flying overhead. We just happened to live in "Bomb
Alley" the most direct route from the launch ramps in
Europe to London. Those that were damaged fell around
us. That word evacuate came back and it was decided
to get as many kids out of the area as possible. By
now I was 10 and because I was born in October I took
the school scholarship early. Mum woke me one morning
to tell me that I had passed, but that the evacuation
had been arranged. Betty and I and hundreds of other
kids went to Sidcup railway station where we all had
labels tied to us. We were put on trains, nobody told
us where we were going. Hours later we finished up in
a school and we slept on small mattresses on the
floor. The next day the W.V.S. arrived and we were
put into cars and buses and I finished up in Audlem,
Cheshire. We stopped outside a row of 4 houses, and
went into the end one next door to a field. I was
introduced to Mr + Mrs Myers who lived there. The
house was nice and clean, I was shown into the
smallest of the three bedrooms. This had been their
son's who was in the Army in India. He was in the
Royal Engineers. Mrs Myers laid down some ground
rules and it was then that I found out that one of my
friends George was staying at a farm on the other side
of the village. She didn't want him or his brother at
the house, but she would be pleased for me to spend
time at the farm. Arrangements were being made for me
to attend the Grammar school in Nantwich, but first I
had to attend the local school in the village. That
first morning I met up with George and it was lucky we
were together because the local boys had decided they
wanted to fight the dirty Cockneys, they soon learnt
we weren't like the Liverpool evacuees who had been
there two years before. Life settled down as an
evacuee, I was made to attend church every Sunday
evening with Mr + Mrs Myers. I met Mr Cliffe and his
housekeeper at the farm. George and Eddie thought
they were in heaven. At home in Chislehurst their Mum
was a widow and there were very few luxuries. First
thing Cliffe did was to buy them new boots and clogs
towear around the farm. They had chores to do and I
helped when I went over to 'play'. Miss Blackburn the
housekeeper was just like every-body's idea of Mum. I
learned to milk, feed and clean-out the cows.The
Grammar school was six miles away. The other kids in
my class had already been there a few weeks before I
arrived, so I was the outsider once again and behind
with the new subjects. I got regular letters with
small postal orders from my parents, but I rarely saw
Betty who was staying at the lodge of a big house in
the village with Mr + Mrs Holmes. I was too busy to
be homesick but my parents wanted us to come home for
Christmas. A few days before Christmas I was put on a
train at Crewe and I was met by my Dad. The trains
were all blacked out and the lighting in them was
blue. Soon I was back in the battlefield. Going from
Charing Cross to Mottingham there was a loud bang and
somebody lifted the blackout. The sky was red and
there was a lot of smoke and somebody said it was a V2
rocket. No warning - just the explosion, this was so
different to Audlem. When I got home I realised that
our house had been blasted. A V1 Doodlebug had struck
one street away after scraping our chimney on its way
down. My parents had kept this from me. It happened
two days after I left for Cheshire. My older sister
Jean had left school and had had enough. She had gone
to a farm camp to help the Land girls, away from both
V1s and V2s. I had to go back to Mrs Myers but by
Easter the bombing had almost stopped so I came home
for good. I took up my place in the local Grammar
school. Once again I was the odd one out, as I had
missed two terms there. I never did catch up with
certain subjects. Our school was on the A20 at
Crittles Corner and we had an unimpaired view of the
road from our classrooms. Convoys of trucks and tanks
as well as columns of marching soldiers passed us on
their way to the coast for the invasion of Europe.
The finish of my wartime experience came with the
news, (over the same radio) that the shooting was
going to stop on May 8th. We raided the local bomb
sites for wood and burnable material and piled it in
the middle of Greenway, blocking the road. The
residents around the bonfire brought their radios out
into their front gardens and all tuned to the same
station. The fire was lit and people danced and sang.
Bottles of wine were brought out of hiding and the
merriment went on into the small hours of May 9th.
One of the older boys from my school had made quite a
lot of gunpowder and was letting off bangs - for the
last time hopefully. The next day the fire was still
burning as were the others in nearby streets and all
over London. When war started I was 5, but I grew up
in a hurry and had to learn to be as independent as I
could. It was a time I couldn't forget, and I hope
one that the children of today never have to
experience. I have skated over the 4 years of
continual bombardment as it would be boring to others
to hear of the day by day assault on us in that region
of Britain. The survivors were thankful it was over.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.