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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of David Rees, and has been added to the site with the author’s permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions

A WARTIME CHILDHOOD — Part 2
By
David Rees

Evacuations:
At the start of the heavy bombing, because we lived between the London docks and some important railways sidings/junctions my parents thought we were in an area of high risk, therefore I was taken to stay with my mother's sister, Marjorie at Thornton Heath, which they considered to be safe. I don't know how long I stayed with my Aunt and Uncle but later my parents took me back home.

My second evacuation was after the V1 incident. One of my mother's brothers, who had fought in WW1, had been moved by his company, Meredith and Drew, to Brighouse in West Yorkshire. He had a very large stone house and my mother and I went to stay there. The house was full of women and children. As well as my three cousins, my Aunt had her sisters and their children. I don't know how many people were there but my mother and I shared a small bedroom with another mother and son. I think we moved to Brighouse in the early summer. I do know that as a result of the V1, the local doctors confirmed that I should not go to school. So I remember playing in the local park until my cousins came out of school. Having lived in East London all my life, a park that had a stream with fish in it was another wonderful world.

I think I was off school for three months and I re-started school at the end of the summer holiday. The break from learning did not appear to do me any harm, as when the end of term results were announced, I was top of the (very large) class. The school must have been rather overcrowded because of the number of refugee children in the town. I remember that there were many `gang' fights between the local children and the evacuees, the latter being heavily outnumbered. However as I was with my cousins, I was regarded as a `local' and left alone.

My Father:
My father was born in 1905. Before the war he had been the manager of a large butcher's shop on Stratford Broadway (Green Bros.?). He has told me that it was a poor area and his shop did most of its business after the pubs closed on a Saturday night. The secret of success was to draw a large crowd and then `auction off joints of meat, street market style (the joints having been previously priced up). To get a large crowd, he needed entertainers. So the butchers in the shop were also expected to fulfill this role. They included singers; jugglers and I think the paper tearer referred to above. I think some of these men were with my father in the ARP and performed at the concerts

When war broke out, my father was too old to be called up. I remember at one time he was doing two jobs - in a laundry during the day and as an air raid warden at night. After a time, he stopped this, partly as it was too much work and partly because of the amount he was being taxed. He then joined the ARP and was a shift leader working as a "Light" team - their job was to "follow" the bombs and try to rescue people and/or recover bodies from damaged buildings. Like most soldiers who saw serious action, he seldom talked about what he saw or did, but my mother told me that his background as a butcher came in useful, he knew where the parts went. His brother Harry was also in the ARP, but he worked on a "Heavy" team. These went in after the "Light" teams had finished, pulling down dangerous buildings, dealing with unexploded bombs etc.

There are only two incidents I can remember him telling me about after the war was over. One was of a block of flats that had received a direct hit and it was known that the residents would have taken shelter in the basement. He said they dug in vain for 3 days but in the end, had to give up - after all the bombing was still going on and there were other people to rescue. The second incident was during the night the City of London burnt. It was towards the end of the night and they were leaving the city to return to the depot. The lorry was travelling along a long straight road — Whitechapel(?) when one of the men in the back called out that a plane was lining up and following them. My father was in the front of the lorry and yelled out to Ginger the driver to "get off the road". Ginger swung up a side street just in time as the plane strafed the road they had just left.

One very strong memory for me is of my father's catapult. My grandfather retired in 1940 and my father and his brothers had moved their parents and youngest sister to safety in the Essex countryside. I remember going to visit them with my parents. My father gave me a job - find all the round stones I could. These were for his catapult. He had made this, by sawing the "Y" shaped handle from his garden spade. It was fitted with a leather pouch and a quarter of an inch square elastic. I couldn't pull it back even when I was in my early teens. He told me that the members of the ARP had been asked to "arm themselves" for street to street fighting, and a catapult was ideal as it was a silent weapon. That weekend he spent hours practising "killing Germans" in the field behind my grandparents' home. I remember him telling me that other ARP men had made bows and arrows, again a silent weapon.

KEY POINT I have often seen references to the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard training with broom handles but never heard any examples of them being asked to make their own weapons.

Food:
As a small child, I have little recall of the food I ate. Food was limited, but I have no recall of ever going to bed "hungry", which I think is the real test. I do however remember some of the things my parents did to ensure we have adequate food. I'm sure we grew potatoes and other vegetables and I think my father had an allotment, but I can't recall going there. I do however remember that we had 4 hens in a pen in the garden. These were feed household scrapes etc., and we had a few eggs every week. We also bred rabbits. The house had an extended kitchen/scullery at the rear. Down the side of this, my father built a whole bank of hutches to house a buck and several does. The youngsters were fattened up for us to eat, my father doing the killing and dressing. My role was to help my mother get food for the rabbits; this was mostly grass and weeds from the numerous bombsites in the area.

On a very rare occasion we had a joint of pork. My father was part of a group that shared the raising of a pig, which when `ready' was slaughtered and shared out.

Towards the end of the war one of my uncles who was in the Merchant Navy, brought me an orange. Although I must have been 7 years old, I did not know what it was or how to eat it.

I was recently asked how we were fed during the period we 'lived' in the Underground. Sadly I have absolutely no recall of whether my mother fed me or if there was communal catering.

Victory:
I have very clear memories of both VE night and V.J. night. For the former the children in the road raided all the bombsites in our area - no shortage of these - and made a huge bonfire in the middle of the street. I imagine we must have had adult supervision. I have no idea how much notice we had but it all seemed to happen very suddenly. There were also fireworks; I can remember rockets and jumping jacks. Everyone had a wonderful time. As most of my hobbies had evolved around collecting things found in the street this gave the opportunity for a brand new tine - burnt out fireworks. My problem was that I was too keen and rushed into a group of women just after a jumping jack had been dropped at their feet. The final bang startled one of the group so much that she jumped round and caught me in the eye with her elbow - I had a wonderful shiner the next day.

For me VJ night was a complete disaster. My parents were visiting the Thornton Heath relatives when the end came. Instead of going home to join my friends we went to Croydon town centre and watched the formal fireworks display. I think I was a complete pain to my parents that night, as I didn't want to be there and cried most of the time. When we did go home, all my friends told me what a smashing time they had had - it didn't help.

Impacts that the War had on my Family:
A direct result of the war was that my parents, together with one of my father's brothers and his family moved into Essex to be near my grandparents. I think this was to escape to a safer environment and as they started a Market Garden, this may have reflected the `farming' they had done during the war. My mother's brother and his family stayed in Brighouse and we didn't see them again for many years. Whilst the `Rees' lineage had only moved to London circa 1830, other parts of my father's family can be traced back to living in London in the mid C18 and my mother's family had been in east London from at least the early C18. So what for generations had been close family links became stretched. With transport and communications being far more difficult than they are today, family ties and support grew much weaker.

Of more direct consequences to my immediate family is that my parents, who had intended to have 2 or 3 children, decided that it was too late to try for another child. I think the family photographs give some clues to the background behind their thinking. This is most noticeable in the difference between a picture of my mother and me at Southend in Sept 1939, and another taken outside our Anderson shelter late in the war. Whilst I am clearly about 5 years older, my mother appears to have aged by 20 years.

Pr-BR

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