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15a — Mike Gerrard was born in 1935 in London, but now lives in Bidford. He was a schoolboy during the War:

Mike Gerrard: Yes. My memories of the war begin when it absolutely started you know, so I remember Chamberlain’s announcement on the radio, my parents listening to it and at that time, their first anxiety was that there was going to be an immediate German invasion of the UK. And they were anxious as to how they should protect us and protect themselves in the event of this taking place, but of course it didn’t materialize.
So we moved into the next stage of the war, where people began to be equipped for looking after themselves. There was a piece of waste land opposite us where they put up a table top which had a special material paint on it, which would identify a gas attack, and my sister and I used to go across and look at that every day to see if there had been any gas attack, but there never was.

We lived on an estate which had been started to be developed in about 1937 and they’d built quite a lot of houses, but there were still a lot more still to do, and a lot of the waste land was turned immediately into allotments. My father used to have an allotment and grow cabbages and runner beans and potatoes and onions and that sort of thing, before he eventually was called up and went into the RAF. He used to do firewatching and he used to be an air raid warden as well, but he went into the RAF about a year after the war started. And from that time we were on our own.

Now the first things that happened to us was the issue of gas masks that I can remember. My sister who was a little baby girl at that time was issued a Micky Mouse gas mask, and I was issued an ordinary gas mask and I wasn’t too thrilled about that. But she got that, and when in 1940 we were issued with ration books she
got a green ration book which entitled her to orange juice and cod liver oil, and I had got an ordinary brown ration book which didn’t entitle me to anything so I was piqued about that too.
But it’s rather curious isn’t it that as a child, you want as much as you can get out of the situation, and I suppose human nature doesn’t change.

Neville Usher: What did you do about a shelter, an air raid shelter?

Mike Gerrard: Yes, my parents were not keen on having Anderson shelters, so the first sort of shelter we were offered was an Anderson Shelter. We dug a hole in the garden about 6ft square, perhaps a bit more, and you put this corrugated iron shelter down into the ground and then you covered it over with the soil that you had dug out, and you went in there in the evenings. My parents were of the opinion that if we were going to die we might as well die in our beds, and they set their faces against an Anderson shelter. The people next door had an Anderson shelter and we did go into it from time to time, but later as the war went on we used to use it as a place to play, but it got very smelly and very unpleasant so we didn’t use it for very long, but we did go into their Anderson shelter once or twice during the early stages of the war when there were a lot of night time raids.

Neville Usher: Was there a lot of bombing in your part of London?

Mike Gerrard: We weren’t in the worst hit part of London, no. But yes there was a lot of bombing, there was …, two streets away from us and four streets away from us in the line of streets, there were quite serious bomb damage, bombs fell in the street or fell on houses and destroyed them.
We had the problem not just of bombs but of parachute borne land mines which used to come, and once they hit a house or they hit a road or they hit a telegraph pole they used to explode, and so we had those as well as bombing raids. But there was a lot of incendiary bombing and the house next door to ours was hit by an incendiary bomb and its roof and its loft were damaged as a result (that’s one that had the Anderson shelter!)

As the war went on of course, the Morrison shelter came in which was a steel construction and we used to have one of those in the dining room, in which my sister and I used to sleep in there at nights, and my mother used to sleep in there as well so it would be a bit crowded, but that was the kind of thing you put up with.

What we did have also was quite a lot of aerial combat take place above our house, and we used to like, again, going out in the garden and watching the aeroplanes flying about and shooting at one another, and from time to time, you could see a red glow in the sky where parts of central London were on fire, particularly obviously at night time, but also sometimes in the afternoon and day time you could see this glow in the sky which wasn’t the setting sun! It was south of us anyway rather than west.
And we were conscious of the fact that worse things were going on not very far away, but as far as we were concerned we first of all enjoyed the spectacle of planes chasing each other around the sky, and secondly we very much liked going out and searching for shrapnel, now that’s a dangerous thing to do but we thought shrapnel was rather romantic.

Neville Usher: I used to do that, my first job every morning!

Mike Gerrard: We used to do that every morning, too. We thought it was rather romantic and sometimes you would find a cartridge case from a small shell, but mostly it was just fragments of some sort of ordnance. And we had great collections of shrapnel which we used to keep in our bedroom, so that was my first impression of military warfare.
We were strictly enjoined not to touch anything (shrapnel we didn’t bother about), but we were not to touch anything that looked peculiar, because there were things called butterfly bombs, and there were notices in shop windows and post offices and places like that which said “don’t go near them”, they were designed to attract children and they exploded when touched a bit like land mines, and so we never saw a butterfly bomb at all; we were very much aware of what they were, but I say were strictly instructed not to go near them, but we never saw them anyway, so it didn’t work out.
So that was the first bombardment experience. When we got to about 1943 of course then the Germans started sending over the so-called pilotless planes or doodlebugs, the V1 Rockets and those you could see. We had quite a number of those they were indiscriminate in where they fell, so that it wasn’t a question of central London catching a packet, they might fall anywhere. And we had quite a number of incidents locally where V1s had come down, we didn’t really have so much of the V2 experience which I suppose was very fortunate, but we were very much familiar with the shape, the size, and the behaviour of the V1 rocket, and I mean I could draw them when I was about 7, and we’d seen them going over and we always were relieved if the engine was still running when they came over us, because it meant that wherever they were going to land it wasn’t there. So we had first hand experience of those as well.

Neville Usher: When you started school were there any precautions for air raids, did you have shelters in school?

Mike Gerrard: Yes there were shelters at school, and the school sent a letter to all the parents, saying what instructions to you want to give us? They said there was three options: One was that the children continued their normal routine at school, two was that they were dispatched to the air raid shelters, and three was that they were sent home. Now my ambition was to have a mother who said send him home, but she wasn’t like that at all, and she sent back a paper saying he continues his normal school routine, if he’s going to get blasted to bits it might just as well be in the middle of a lesson!

Neville Usher: And I suppose your mother wasn’t called up because of your sister?

Mike Gerrard: No, my mother wasn’t called up at all because she had the two of us as children, she was also on her own, and she had long-drawn out illnesses after my sister was born, I didn’t understand then but she was anaemic, she was often in bed, and taking medication and that kind of thing; I didn’t really understand what was wrong with her or why, but I just accepted that was the case, and I don’t think she would have been fit enough to serve if she had been.
What she used to do, she used to make clothes, and she used to make toys, soft toys and things like that, and she sold them through what was then the WVS, and I don’t know what …, that helped of course to bring in a little bit of extra income to our household, but I think the toys probably went to children who were separated from their parents, or bombed out, that sort of thing yes.

So, evacuated, we were never evacuated, we lived in London the whole time except just for the 6 month period in 1943, when my father was sent, transferred/posted to Scotland and he managed to get a married location in Scotland and we went up to stay for the 6 months at Prestwick.

Neville Usher: Did you enjoy that?

Mike Gerrard: Oh very much, yes, yes, because we were at a seaside place.

Neville Usher: Did you go to school there?

Mike Gerrard: Yes, we went to school in Troon in Scotland, but they had a long summer holiday between the middle of June and the middle of August, and so of the six months we spent there, two of them were certainly spent on holiday.

Neville Usher: Did you find the schooling much different?

Mike Gerrard: Yes, I think so. I think the Scots were …, it depends on who you talk about, but I think the Scots were both tougher and firmer about teaching us than our teachers in England, although God knows I had many a set-to with them.

Neville Usher: And did you have a lot of the children from your school, your class being evacuated, were you working a normal school day.?

Mike Gerrard: No I don’t think so. We worked a normal school day really. When I was at school, I had started in the class with about 25 to 30 boys in it, it was a boys school, and of those boys I would guess nearly all of them (some of them came and went), but nearly all of them, the core of them say 20 out of the 25 to 30 were with me right through my school life, and after school I still remain friends with one or two of them.

Neville Usher: And as the war drew to a close, what about VE day, do you remember that.

Mike Gerrard: I do remember VE day, it was a day of huge celebrations but before that, about 1944 (I haven’t mentioned the blackout, I really haven’t mentioned the blitz), and the blackout was very strange to us, because obviously we were in complete darkness, and outside you couldn’t see anything, inside of course we had lights on but they weren’t lightness of the brightness and intensity that we have today. Everything was dark, you know people driving around in cars had the headlights masked, when you went on a bus or on the tube train the windows were covered with a kind of a Hessian type fabric which had two purposes: one was to keep the interior light from getting out, and the other one was to hold the windows in place if they were shattered by blast or something like that. So on tube trains and on the buses, there was this very peculiar thing that you had lights inside but the light didn’t get out except through tiny little diamond shapes in the window. The cars …, and there were no street lights, and traffic lights were all covered with masking as well, so obviously to limit visibility from the air, that was very much a part of our lives until about …,
again towards the end of 1944 when they switched from a blackout to what they called a dim out, and obviously at that time our own forces were making progress across Europe, and the amount of raiding that the Germans did on Great Britain was very much limited, they confined themselves to unmanned aircraft. So that you could put lights on, and it didn’t really matter so much, so gradually cars began to have partial headlights and the street lights; and that was a great excitement for me and my sister because street lights suddenly appeared, you know, all through the war we had had these posts, but no lamps in them, and the lamp standards suddenly had lamps in them, and were actually lit up, and that was a huge …, I can’t tell you what kind of excitement that was for us, I was about 8 at that time, and she would have been ...

Neville Usher: How did you get to school, did you walk, or …?

Mike Gerrard: No, we took the bus, we took the bus. And so there was regular bus services, they weren’t brilliant and the buses were all pre-war buses, pretty ancient type of buses, but they got us to school alright.

Neville Usher: Without any great diversions because of raids?

Mike Gerrard: Yes, sometimes that happened. We were always waiting for the buses to come up the street that we lived in, ‘cos we thought that would be exciting too, but they never did. When I told you about two incidents with land mines and with high explosive bombs a couple of streets away from us, and when that happened, one of those streets was on a bus route, and the buses were diverted up another street which happened to be the one that also got hit, so they were then diverted up a third street which was the one next door to ours and we were waiting for that street to be hit, but it never was!

I am not sure what kind of attitude a child has to the carnage that’s going on, but we found things that disrupted the normal way of life quite exciting, and something of an adventure but I suppose in a way it’s the only way that you can get through a war, that you see it as an exciting adventure and something peculiar, and when you hear that eight houses have been destroyed and fifteen people have been killed, it doesn’t register to a small child, no.

[This interview in continued in Part Two]

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