ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

A CHILD'S VIEW OF THE WAR FROM AN ESSEX VILLAGE
In the Beginning

I was born in 1934. Every summer my parents, who lived in a small village about 13 miles North East of Aldgate Pump in Essex, went to Cornwall on holiday. I remember hearing them talk about "war" and wondered what it was. For some reason I equated "war" with "fire" and my earliest nightmares involved fire, so that I would stand on my bed and look through the window at night to reassure myself that the house or the land round it was not on fire.

We were returning from holiday in September 1939. Our return journey was broken at Honiton, where my father stopped to buy cigarettes. As he came out of the shop I saw him talking to a policeman and when he got back into the car he said, "War has been declared".

The light and the dark

My father was an Architect and Surveyor and joined the Ministry of Works. I didn't know at the time what he did, but I found out later that he travelled all over Britain, looking for likely places for munitions storage places, many of them underground, and advising on the construction of them. Usually he would go by car, as these places were necessarily out of the way, and this must have been very difficult, as there were no signposts (these had all been removed to make it difficult for the enemy to find their bearings in case of invasion) and no lights (everyone had to put up blackout curtains made of heavy dark brown material and lead weights were sewn into the hems to hold the material down: air raid wardens would go round to make sure that no chink of light showed). Car headlights were rendered next to useless as they had to be covered with masks like a black louvre which directed a small pool of light down on to the road ahead. When he was not travelling, he would take his turn fire-watching on the roof of the Ministry of Works building - my mother would be very nervous on these nights.

Our house was built on an acre of land so mother spent a lot of time "digging for victory". There was a large vegetable garden and an orchard with apple, pear, plum and cherry trees. The confectionery ration could be taken a sweets or sugar. It was carefully divided up and husbanded by our mother: Most of it was taken as sugar so that the fruit harvest could be bottled or turned into jam, but a small amount was used to buy sweets (not all that readily available) and they were put into a tin and given out as a treat after Sunday dinner.

We had some very good summers as far as my memory serves and would help to gather up the hay in the neighbouring field and make it into stooks to dry. We would eat out in the garden in the summer; mother thought that we should get as much Vitamin A and D from the sunlight as possible. In the autumn we would be sent out to pick blackberries to flavour the apple puddings.

We lived close to two airfields, Stapleford Abbots and North Weald. We would watch the squadrons go out and count them as they came back, sometimes fearing for some of the aircraft which were obviously limping home. When things had gone well the pilots would do a "Victory Roll" and we would cheer from the ground below.

Many of the people in the village worked on the land. They had special rations of some things - the main one that I remember was cheese (this meant Cheddar cheese, no other kind was available or even heard of). There was some envy among those of us who were not eligible for these rations, but it never boiled over into anger, because we knew that their work was vital and that they deserved special consideration.

Because of our position, close to an anti-aircraft (ack-ack) battery, we believed that a lot of the bombs which fell near us or in the garden were jettisoned by bombers who had turned round in a panic to get home, but this seems unlikely because the range of the guns in the battery was probably not great enough to cause problems to the bombers. We spent many nights under the stairs, as we could see that in bombed out houses the stairs were the least vulnerable to collapse. We also had an underground shelter lined with wood, which regularly got flooded in wet weather and had to be emptied with a stirrup pump. Our neighbours, childless and more well-to-do, had a concrete-lined shelter which had an amazing refinement: the concrete at the entrance was painted with a special paint which would change colour in the event of an attack by poison gas and warn us to put on our gas-masks! This was never tested, to everyone's great relief.

One day an incendiary bomb fell in the garden. It fell in the middle of the large lawn and was thus no danger to any property. My memory of it is that it looked like a metal urn on a tripod with flames spitting out of the centre.

My mother became pregnant at the end of April 1940. Because she cared more about her family than herself, she diverted some of the rations to her husband and children and was fairly ill for the last months of her pregnancy. To take some of the burden from her, she and I and my sister went to stay with an second cousin of my father, who lived near Saffron Walden, which was not under so much attack. This lady had taken in others under her roof, a Dutch woman and her two daughters, and she also acted as a sort of foster mother to several American soldiers who were billeted nearby. We spent happy days there while my mother recuperated a little, but when we got back home there was a lot of work to do, as the grass in the orchard had grown up choking the trees and my father had to get to work with a scythe. The potatoes were dug up and dried out by being laid on the lawn. My mother had lost a lot of weight and we all had to search for her wedding ring, which had fallen off among the potatoes. Happily it was found and she bound some cotton round it so that it would not fall off again.

At the end of January came the time for our youngest sister to be born. There was the usual air raid and we cowered under the stairs, hearing the growl of bombers and the thump of bombs exploding. These sounds were interspersed with my mother's groans as she was helped by the midwife - the birth took place in a makeshift bedroom in m;y father's study, which was deemed most convenient as it was next to the kitchen and water could be boiled and it was downstairs. When the baby was born and washed we asked to see her and went in to the bedroom. I had a large china doll and I was allowed to go upstairs and fetch her down so that I could measure my sister against her. They were the same length.

We often stood at the window at night and saw the glow of fires over London and watched the tracer bullets and saw planes go down in flames. However, one night we were mystified because there were so many planes in flames and we thought that a great battle was going on in the air. A few days later, though, we learned that there was a new menace in the air, the V-ones or Buzz-bombs. We began to fear their menacing engines (one of their flight paths seemed to go right between our two chimney stacks) but we also would pray that the nasty sound would continue because, if the engine cut out, the explosion would not be long delayed and they were very unpredictable, sometimes the engine would start again and they would go on for miles, but sometimes they would turn back. The silence between the cut-out and the explosion was one of the most stressful things we had known. Our worst day was when that silence came just before the flaming engine had cleared the chimney stacks and, worst of all, our mother was washing after doing some heavy gardening and was up in the bathroom and we were out in the garden. She shouted "Lie down flat!" and we obeyed. The bomb fell in a field just beyond the river in the village and did very little damage to anything.

The plague of buzz-bombs lessened as fighter pilots sometimes managed to intercept them and turn them round over the sea and as the launch-pads were overrun. However, there was a new menace, the rockets or V2s. There was nothing anyone could do against them, so we became fatalistic. I had two routes to school. I could walk two miles to Theydon Bois station and catch a train to Loughton, or I could take a bus, walk down a lane and go to the next station along the line. One day I set out, only to find that the first road had a huge crater in the middle from one rocket. This meant that I must catch the bus, but the lane to the other station was also impassable because another rocket had fallen in the middle of it. No school that day.

The Bitter Sweet End

When the news was becoming daily more hopeful, my godfather appeared at the door one morning and asked my mother to sit down and made her a cup of tea, preparatory to telling her that my aunt and uncle (my father's brother and his wife) had been killed outright in Ilford by one of the last V2s to fall in the war. It seemed very cruel that our uncle (who had served in the cavalry in the First World War) should be killed so near the end of the second World War. Our cousin became our foster brother, because my mother and my aunt had made a pact that, should anything happen to either of them, the other would look after the children. My aunt would have had a hard time bringing up three extra daughters, whereas our cousin was an only child, being just fifteen at the end of the war.

When the war actually ended, I remember walking to school and back with a huge sense of relief. No more bombs, no more people killed and no more houses stripped naked to the view of passers-by.

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