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My husband Jim, born on the outskirts of London, was a child of four when WW 2 was declared and a boy of ten when it ended and during that time led a life of deprivation and fear, never realizing that there could be a better way. When things did get back to some sort of normality several years after the war ended; he could not believe the wonder of it. Surprisingly enough he remembers his childhood, as being a happy one, possibly due to the fact that he was so lucky to have such a superb being for a mother.
As the stories of his childhood have slowly enfolded, over the last twenty-seven years of our marriage, the differences between my childhood spent living on a dairy farm in South -Eastern Australia and his on the outskirts of London at that same time have never ceased to amaze me.
When war was declared Jim was living a peaceful existence with his younger brother Douglas and his parents Florrie and Ernie in a rented house in St. Mary's Road, in Surbiton. His father was working at a local brewery and his mother was quite happily playing the role of housewife and mother to them all.
Jim can remember the day that his father received his ‘Call up Papers’ from the Admiralty and recalls that he appeared quite excited at the prospect of joining the Royal Navy. He would not have been so happy then if he had known that he was to serve on some of the most dangerous missions of the war. He was to sail on two of the cruisers that escorted the Russian Convoys taking supplies and fighting equipment through the freezing waters of the Baltic to the fighting forces of Russia. The cold on these trips was so intense that if any members of the crew ever fell overboard they were almost sure to be dead before they even hit the water. Hot steam had to be played on to the guns to keep them from freezing over and on the sides of the ship to keep it from toppling over with the weight of the ice that would form there. The chances of them being torpedoed in those highly charged seas was very high and most members of the crew did not survive many voyages, but Jim’s father survived for thirteen of these and lived to finish out his war service in the Mediterranean.
He would tell Jim and Douglas of one very cold night when he was on his watch and spied a nice cake within his reach through the window of the bake house. Upon stabbing it, his bayonet came off in the cake and he had to get a couple of his mates to help him rescue the bayonet and the cake, before he was found out the next day and put on a charge.
Jim recalls that when his father went back to sea after being on leave, he usually waited until he and Douglas were fast asleep before he left. Florrie would then tell them in the morning that a man had arrived in the night to take their father back to his ship. He remembers his brother Douglas crying and collapsing on the stairs and being in a state of exhaustion for days. After Ernie returned to sea, his navy pay would sometimes take weeks to arrive and Florrie would find it difficult to feed her family as she did not have any reserves of money or food and was too proud to ask for help. Jim and Douglas had school lunches each day and as the family lived near the school, she helped with these and was also given a hot meal. By the time that the pay did arrive - sometimes two weeks late - Jim can remember his mother looking very ill and gaunt. When an air raid siren sounded during school hours, Florrie would hang nervously over her back fence watching as the teachers marshalled the children into the two huge concrete shelters, which had been built next to the school. Women working for the war effort in a nearby factory were permitted to use these shelters, but others had to go to the one provided some distance away. Florrie was always in fear that the children would not make it into the shelters in time as German planes had, on occasions, machine-gunned the school ground during school hours.
Most days Florrie had to stand in a long queue to buy bread and other foodstuffs and if the shops ever did manage to get in a supply of sweets, they would sell out very quickly. Poor little Douglas, who so loved his sweets, once managed to earn a half a crown and on taking it to his local sweet shop bought what he thought was chocolate. The poor sweet starved child quickly ate the lot; not realizing that it was a chocolate laxative called Exlax and spent the next few days making loads of washing for his poor mother.
Florrie’s father took on the roll of father figure to Jim and Douglas after Ernie joined up. He was a very stern upright man who had served at the Boer War and again at Gallipoli during WW1. After his wife died suddenly in 1942, he became very close to Florrie and her family and kept them well supplied with vegetables from his allotment, which he had beside a railway line, quite a long distance from his house. This is where he spent most of his days, walking there and back each day. When she was able, Florrie also spent time there working, while her boys played around and amused themselves. Subsequently most of their meals consisted of cabbage, carrots and potatoes and their meat consisted of offal or breast of sheep, which would smell most unappetizing whilst being boiled for their consumption. Mr. Shilling the butcher would always be amused when Jim, after being sent for their meat, would ask for his ‘mother’s breasts’. Jim often wondered what the white liquid was that he saw Americans drinking from glass tumblers in films and did not find out until much later that it was milk. While Ernie was later serving in the Mediterranean he bought back some bananas and as they had turned black by the time that he had arrived, until after the war ended, Jim thought that all bananas were black.
On a lighter note, a Mr. Dodd (Doddy to the children) was the caretaker of the St.Andrews Church and lived in the church hall nearby. A flying bomb crashed into the hall blowing it to pieces and Doddy, who was very deaf, had to be woken up to be told that his place of residence had gone, much to the amusement of all the children in the street.
Jim’s family was the only one in the street to be provided with an air raid shelter. The scouts arrived and dug in this Anderson Shelter, which was only curved tin in concrete. It had a sack hanging down over the doorway and space for four people with wooden bunk beds and sacking mattresses. When the siren sounded poor Florrie sometimes had great difficulty in waking her two small boys so as to enable her to guide them sleepily down the stairs and into their backyard shelter. Jim can remember his mother virtually pleading with them to wake up and move more quickly. They found their nights in the shelter pretty cold and damp especially after being dragged from their warm beds but it was in this shelter that they endured the sixty consecutive days and nights of the bombing of London. As they lived near the Thames they seemed to get the worst of it as the German pilots used the river as a guide, sometimes unloading their unspent bombs there before flying back across the English Channel. They were very intent on targeting a nearby water works, which supplied water to a large area, and the local railway station.
Halfway through the war they were given a new shelter called a Morrison, which they then had in their lounge room. This was a steel table with mesh around the sides to protect them from flying debris. Douglas, who fancied himself as a tap dancer, gave performances on that table and was given the nickname of ‘Enoch’ by his family because of a radio program at the time called ‘Enoch, Ramsbottom and Me’, which featured tap dancing. They were never the victims of a direct hit but their house suffered structural damage to one wall, which had to be repaired after the war.
Jim and Douglas still played on the streets with the other children and enjoyed picking up the shrapnel, but had to take great care as some of the bombs looked like toys. They mostly played war games and did a good deal of plane spotting by standing on the walls in their street. Later on when the Germans sent over the doodlebugs (flying bombs), they would all run for their homes like rats into holes, when they heard their engines cut out, as they never knew where they were going to land.
At this time Florrie contracted yellow jaundice, but she went on trying to look after her children with her bright yellow face and yellow eyes until quite late in her illness. She was then admitted to their local hospital and it was whilst she was there that she contracted Infantile Paralysis or Polio, from what was said to be a dirty needle. Jim and Douglas were devastated when their mother’s sister Lily moved in to look after them as not having any children of her own; she did not have very much patience or an understanding of small boys. She would take them to the hospital to see their mother, but as they were not allowed inside she would wave from the window and pretend that she was Florrie, who was by this time was too sick to leave her bed. One fateful night her family members were called in to the hospital to be told that she was not expected to live through the night and on that same night Florrie could remember having an out of body experience, where she seemed to float above her bed and witness her own funeral. This, fortunately for her two sons, was not to happen and one day when Jim was playing in the street, someone told him that there was strange woman in his house and when on rushing home, he found that it was his mother, he was ecstatic. She had very little use of her limbs and walked like a drunken person. After his aunt went home Jim was to care for his mother and this included dressing and undressing her and taking her to the toilet. He has since said that his most difficult job for the day was getting her into her corsets, A very strong bond was forged between mother and son during that time. When she was able to go to the shops she was so weak she would fall into the gutter and people would look at her with disgust as they thought she was drunk. Ernie got compassionate leave to supposedly look after her, but she was to say later that he was just another body to take care of in her weakened state and that he spent more time at his local pub than he did helping her. After he eventually did go back to sea she found that she was expecting another child.
As the bombing had started again in earnest, the authorities then advised her that her children would have to be evacuated, and that Florrie, because of her pregnancy, would be allowed to go with them. Ernie, without knowing it, had done them all a very great favour.
The three of them boarded a train for the north with many other children evacuees. Jim can remember having big luggage labels attached to their chests showing their names and destination. After alighting from the train they were herded into a hall where they sat around the walls waiting for someone to come and select them. Foster parents came and went all day, taking with them the children of their choice and as the day progressed into evening Florrie and her sons found that they were the only ones left in the hall. Feeling very tired and hungry by this time they were very relieved when a well-dressed lady arrived in a car and said that she was prepared to take all three of them. Can you imagine their joy when they found that they were to live in a gracious three-storey brick house with a beautiful garden of about six acres with a golf course at the rear of the house? The garden in itself was a delight to two small boys who were only accustomed to playing in the street, and around the narrow perimeters of an air raid shelter. Their hosts Olive and Louis had three sons, one in the Army and two at boarding school and owned a factory in Nottingham, which was involved in war work.
Florrie and her boys slept in the attic room which had probably been servant’s quarters before the war and had the use of a small kitchen downstairs. I suppose this situation suited their host family well, because taking children with their own mother saved them a lot of work and trauma and kept the children from getting the dreaded homesickness, a disease that must have been very prevalent amongst many evacuees. Jim and Douglas attended the local school by walking there and back each day and played in the wonderful garden. One day while Jim was picking strawberries in the vegetable patch he cut his knee badly on a glass frame. It was a very bad wound and took many months to heal, which meant that he was an invalid for a long time. Olive was very kind to him at that time and between her and Florrie he was superbly nursed back to health. Jim still has a lot of respect for his wonderful evacuee family.
Ernie, who now went there on his leave would whistle ‘Pedro the Fisherman’ as he approached the house as a sign to let them know he was coming. Olive had a lot of respect for Florrie but this did not always extend to Ernie as he once arrived with food, which he had obtained on the black market. Upon finding this out she voiced her strong disapproval but treated the situation with great dignity and never stopped him from visiting. Very often there was a military major on recreational leave staying at the house with Olive and Louis, whom they had known before the war as he had taught geography to one of their sons. As he spoke fluent Dutch he was frequently dropped behind enemy lines on secret missions and Jim, even then as a small child, had a great admiration for his bravery.
As the bombing in London had temporarily ceased and Florrie became nearer to having her child, she decided to take her boys back to London. Another reason for returning was that Ernie found it easier to see them there when he was on leave. She delivered in the very same hospital in which she had nearly died the previous year, but by this time the roof had partly gone and had been replaced with a huge tarpaulin. Florrie went into labor very quickly and as there was a raid on at the time she was told by the nurses to hold back until it was all over. She found this to be impossible, so her baby Mary was born into a world of air raid sirens. After the birth Florrie contracted an infection and had to be moved to another floor of the hospital away from her baby. When the raids came over she was frantic as she could hear babies crying and could not get to her own so after several days of this trauma she decided that they would be safer at home, so she collected Mary and discharged herself.
Jim was told by his mother to kiss the baby and welcome her home, but he was too embarrassed and said that Douglas had to go first. Douglas kissed her and Jim followed suit and after they had both had a nurse and a cuddle she was accepted with much love into their family. She was provided with a special capsule like a bubble to act as a gas mask and as they all had to practice getting into their gas masks she had to be included as well, even though she voiced her very strong disapproval. The bombing over London had again commenced, so Olive contacted Florrie and suggested that she should return north, so with her newborn child in her arms, two small boys and a huge suitcase she went to the local railway station to catch the train. Finding that she could not get everything and everyone down the escalator, she stood helplessly waiting until a couple of young soldiers came along, and delivered them onto their train to the north again, where they stayed until the war was nearly over. Jim made contact with his evacuee family recently for the first time in fifty-five years and found all three sons are still very well and living active lives. They can remember the time that the two families spent together as being a very happy and enjoyable one and praised Florrie for her great diplomacy in handling the evacuation situation so well. They have commented on how astounded they were at the speed at which boys had come down the stairs when a siren had sounded.

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