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The First Day of the War

The first day of the war was, as I remember it, a bright and sunny one. I was aged 5 and spending the day at my granny’s house. My mother had gone out with her sister leaving me in my grandmother’s care.

When the air raid siren went off I ran across the room and jumped up on to my granny’s couch to look out into the street to see what was making the noise. But nothing was there and nothing happened, it was a false alarm. Later the siren started up again with what I would soon find out was the ‘All Clear’ signal.

Eventually my mother and her sister came back and both of them were crying their eyes out. When the siren went off they had been on a trolleybus in Willesden in north-west London. The police stopped all traffic and herded the passengers off the bus and into a shelter. They were not allowed to leave the shelter until the ‘All Clear’ had sounded.

Not long after that my mother agreed to take her youngest sister’s baby son for safety to his grand parents in South Wales and I was to go as well. We arrived by train in Swansea and moved into the grandparent’s terrace house near to St Helens Cricket ground. Luckily for me we were very close to the beach and as a London child it was a great treat to carry my bucket and spade over the railway level crossing and onto the sand.

After a while my mother decided that she and I would return to London and we went to Swansea Station to buy tickets. On the way she asked a policeman for directions. My mother’s accent was obviously not local and in conversation the policeman said he was surprised that she was going back to London. He advised her to stay in Swansea, which was then well beyond the range of enemy bombers, and not go back to the dangerous city of London. However we went home and moved back into our house in Paddington, in west London, with my father. The ironic thing was that once France fell Swansea did come into range of the bombers and in February 1941 the centre of the city was devastated by a three night blitz

My father, aged 36, was a London taxi driver and a ‘conscientious objector’ and so he did not attend the army medical when he was called up to join the Royal Army Service Corps, the RASC. Eventually two policeman arrived at our house to arrest him. The police did not want to cause any bother in the street and they allowed him to walk in front of them to the local police station. I was at home and saw him go and remember seeing my teardrops on the metal top of the indoor Morrison shelter which had been fitted in our front room

He was tried in a magistrates court and was sentenced to three months imprisonment. He served his time in Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth Prisons. One of our neighbours gave my mother a newspaper clipping in which a report of the case showed that he stated in his defence “I cannot kill my fellow man.”

When he was released he joined the London Ambulance Service as a driver. He was stationed in the East-end of London during the very heavy bombing of that part of London and he stayed there for the rest of the war.

We grew used to nightly air-raids and the sound of the anti-aircraft guns. There was a permanent battery nearby at Wormwood Scrubs Park and mobile guns moved around the streets. Strangely enough people were more afraid of falling shells than they were of falling bombs. In the morning we would search for shrapnel on our way to school and count ourselves very lucky if we came across the nose cap of a shell. One night friends of my parents were in the house when an air raid was in progress. My father and the other man were heading out to the pub when his wife said it was too dangerous for him to go out with the shrapnel dropping down but she relented when he agreed to wear his cloth cap.

One very large bomb dropped not too far away from our house, in fact it was a sea-mine suspended on a parachute, and caused a great amount of damage. We lived on the Queen’s Park Estate in London, where all the streets were named alphabetically, and Peach Street and part of Ilbert Street disappeared. In their place was a huge heap of rubble which we called ‘The Debris’ and it, and the shattered houses nearby, became an ‘adventure play ground’ for local children. The Ilbert Street side was dug out to become an emergency water supply tank for the Fire Brigade. The sides of the tank were very steep and although a wall was built around it, boys climbed over the wall and some were said to have been drowned. Later in the war smaller concrete tanks, holding maybe a couple of hundred gallons of water, were dotted around the streets to help cope with the incendiary bombs that were dropped.

At night when my father was at work my mother and I slept in our Morrison shelter. This was a large metal plate, about the size of a bed, supported at the corners by steel uprights. The sides were filled in by a metal mesh. Outside in the street brick air raid shelters were built which were of very little use if struck by a ‘direct hit’. Later in the war they were replaced by stronger concrete shelters. Small lights were placed at the corners for the sake of the almost non-existent traffic. These were soon broken and the bigger boys were dared to stick their fingers into the bulb sockets. In the rush to provide bomb shelters early in the war deep trenches were dug in open spaces. These were then roofed over and steps were built leading down into the shelter. An uncle of mine was in such a shelter in Neasden but had to leave whilst the raid was still in progress. Soon after that a bomb fell very close to the shelter and exploded. He heard the blast and ran back to the shelter to help but to no avail. The bomb exploded underground and the shock wave squashed the earth walls together. Nobody was brought out alive.

I was a pupil at the nearby Droop Street School, where the infant school Headmistress was Miss Ongley and the Headmaster of the junior school was Mr Parker. Many of my friends in school had been evacuated to Leighton Buzzard, which was then a fair distance from London, so the numbers at school were reduced. One of our teachers in the junior school was very keen on the children bringing salvageable materials to school, ‘to help the war effort’. The collection point, a series of large sacks hanging on the wall, was situated in the playground and every morning we would drop our salvage into them. A few keen children went around knocking on doors to pick up extra salvage and were rewarded when on Fridays we had to report on the amount we had brought to school. Woe betide any pupil who had brought none at all!

Of course food was rationed but I don’t remember ever going hungry. Many ‘fiddles’ existed where people could obtain more than the ration. Technically I suppose these were ‘Black Market’ dealings but one had to exist. My wife’s grandmother was a pub landlord and as such was guaranteed a supply of spirits and cigarettes. She looked after the local shopkeepers and they looked after her. So my wife remembers that there were always sweets to be had at granny’s house. My own mother worked in a grocer’s shop and she too brought home some extra food.

Bread was ‘off ration’, as was fish if I recollect correctly. One meat that was ‘off ration’ was rabbit and butchers shops had them hanging in the windows in rows. I was going on an errand to a shop for my mother later in the war at the time when the ‘V1s’, or ‘Buzzbombs’ as we knew them, were being sent over daily. As I came out of the shop people were staring up at a one of them going across the sky. We stopped and watched until the engine cut-out and it started to fall and there was an explosion. Luckily it was nowhere near us so we carried on with our lives as normal.

The ‘V2’ rockets were another matter. Nobody heard them arrive, just the loud bang as they went off. One day we were at home eating our meal when I heard a very loud whistle outside. Quick as a flash I was underneath the table. My parents hadn’t moved and were amused by my instinctive reaction. It wasn’t a rocket that I had heard but one of the very first British jet planes flying overhead.

More than twenty years after the war had ended I was living, once again, in South Wales. Recently married my wife and I had moved to a small market town near Cardiff. I was home alone one day when all of a sudden the hair stood up on the back of neck and I went cold, once again I was a small boy in wartime London. I could hear the air-raid siren echoing across the fields. A very nasty shock indeed.

Later I found out that the siren was still in use in that town to alert the volunteer firemen to report to the station to deal with a fire. Granted it wasn’t the wailing of the ‘Alert’ but the steady tone of the ‘All Clear’. But I was surprised by how it affected me and brought back many memories of the second World War.

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