ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

War Memories.

Selected from my mothers letters written by her about her incredible life for her grandchildren.

I was born in 1916 during an air raid when an aeroplane crashed down on the railway lines behind our house. I had vivid dreams of the ensuing fire, which I told my mother about when I was about four and then I never had those dreams again. My mother worked in an ammunitions factory, as this was during the First World War. Thankfully we survived and I was brought up happily with my sister 10 years older than me in South London. I trained as a teacher at St Charles and was immediately taken on at Bexley Hurst School in 1936 until I could take over as Deputy Head as the deputy would be leaving on medical grounds. My first day I had to take the new entrants in the Hall as there were so many children — 10,40, 60!! Tables, chairs, a blackboard, a piano, no books and a piece of chalk! My first introduction to paid work. I used all my acting ability and with my antics, nursery rhymes and stories, and a fabulous puppet theatre my father had made for me I learnt how to teach - all theory went out of the window. My salary - the princely sum of £14 per week.

By 1939 when the Second World War broke out I was not only teaching but also doing most of the head teachers work. My father had had a very painful experience as a child somersaulting into the nettles and so had refused to let us ride bicycles, however, he immediately went out and bought bicycles and told us (my sister and I) to get on those bicycles and run should the Germans come. I never learnt anything so quickly especially when all transport broke down with the bombing. So daily I rode many miles over hill and dale to school.

One dreadful day the warning sounded and the German Bombers came over in relays dropping bombs all over London. The brave British fighters, so few, fought bravely the Battle of Britain. I looked at my mother and father. They had both grown old in that terrible raid. We were all huddled outside the cellar wearing our tin helmets. Suddenly we heard, as we thought, the house falling about our ears, but it was some distance away. We all ducked at the same time and you could hear the crash of our tin helmets. How we prayed to every Saint in Heaven. After the raid we went out. The whole of London was ringed with fire and we thought that it was the end of the world. My sister’s husband was a fire warden in the Dock area, which had been badly hit. He came home black and dirty and completely deaf — a death knoll to his job. He worked in the tea trade prior to the war and knew many parts of the East End of London well. Incendiary bombs were dropped which must have separated as they hit the roof of each alternate house along the street — fortunately they fell in the baths leaving a hole in the roof but at least they did not set the houses on fire.

Teaching during the war was no easy task. We had to be alert at all times. Not only were we teaching but we had to act as air raid wardens as well. We had to feed the homeless affected by the bombings. Soon our school became bomb alley. They built long shelters underground with benches on either side for the children, and we had to walk up and down teaching the children while the air raids were on. I was appointed to be in charge of the evacuation of school children. The education authorities wanted children moved out of the London area to Kent. The people in Kent did not seem very happy to receive these poor children in their homes. We had to rush back overnight to start school in the morning for the children remaining. When the bombs started falling in Kent we started evacuating the children up North. I will never forget the hospitality of the Yorkshire folk. I had a handicapped child who was left after the others had been taken. This family came up to me and put her arms around the child and said they would love to have her. We never knew until after the war that my school was situated near an ammunitions dump. We ran the children by night and went straight to work the next day. The doodlebug bombs were the worst especially the one following us that we saw out of the window of the train. It hit the station just prior to our arrival.

I also became Commandant of the Girls Training Corps and got the co-operation of the army for training the girls in first aid and various other duties. With all the worry of looking after my poor mother and father who had become very old looking I too had gone grey. I was busy getting them to air raid shelters in the evening. The guns used to be on huge trailers, which ran up and down our road, scattering shrapnel right and left. We were rationed but my father enabled us to survive with his chickens and rabbits, which he kept in pens in the garden. The bombs rained down on us thick and fast, the ominous sound of the sirens heralded another sleepless night. My hair turned white. It was a great responsibility having the lives of so many children in our hands. One day a bomber crept in without warning and machine-gunned the children playing in the playground. Luckily the children had learnt to obey us and fell flat.

One dreadful afternoon the children from the Lewisham and Catford area were lining up at Torridon Road School to go to a show at the Lewisham Hippodrome. A bomber crept in unawares, flew low over the school - my father actually saw him dive over the playground and he dropped a bomb right in the middle of the children. About 600 were killed. You can imagine the wrath of the British Air Force. They got him down at Downham. He was interned with other German prisoners. When they heard about his dreadful deed they taunted him to such an extent that he committed suicide. One day Mum and I were shopping when an air raid siren sounded. Mum asked me to go down the nearest shelter but I wanted to go home. A bomb had a direct hit on that same shelter, so we had a lucky escape. Deo Gratias.

One day I took my father and mother to the Chislehurst caves, which had bunk beds and were practically bomb proof. After this I arranged to meet them there any night I was not on duty. One day I arrived and mother was very upset. She had left a light burning upstairs which would have guided the Germans over. I volunteered to go home. I arrived safely but the siren sounded as I ascended the stairs. I managed to turn out the light and with my knees knocking together went downstairs. Knowing Mum and Dad would be frightened if I did not return I started out. A piece of shrapnel hit my corduroy coat and fell off. I collected it as a souvenir. All traffic had stopped. A bus driver called out to me. ‘My wife and baby are alone. Come on ducks’. I’ll never forget that journey. I arrived safely to my parent’s relief.

Would you like to know why I have 4 very tight bracelets on my right wrist? One night I was at Chislehurst Caves with my parents. A lovely 20-month-old baby was on the top bunk. Boom! There was a terrific explosion. The baby was thrown up in the air and as it passed me I automatically put out one arm and caught his coat. The full weight caught my wrist and when I looked there was this ganglion jutting out of my wrist. I went to the doctor who tried to break it (very painful that was) but to no avail. He said,’you must wear a strap to keep it down. If it gets sore you will have to be operated on’.

Prior to the war I had started a Froebel Course and a Montissorri Course as well as pottery. These courses came to an abrupt end with the onset of the war and I then took a First Aid Advanced course and a Youth Training Course as soon as the war broke out.
My sister taught at Plumstead and when the war started it was decided that the schools at Plumstead and Woolwich should be evacuated. Her school was evacuated to Marden in Kent, which was a lovely place, and my sister rented a house there with a beautiful garden full of fruit trees and vegetables. We loved cycling there whenever we could. As the schools were bombed I moved to Brampton School not far from the others. I was in the seventh month of pregnancy. By 1944 the Germans started sending over rockets. They were terrifying. Whole streets were flattened without any warning and only after the terrible devastation had taken place could you hear the whine of the rocket coming down. Naturally we would get no warning. The gas filled balloons sent up by the British could give us no warnings. So we kept on teaching not knowing when our last moment would arrive. One morning God gave me the sense of imminent danger. I shouted to the class ‘Under desks!’ You can imagine with my size there was no question of my getting under a table. Suddenly all the houses around the school collapsed like a pack of cards. My classroom, which was built on pillars of bricks, tilted up off the bricks and gradually subsided sideways. The headmaster of the adjoining school rushed over as he had heard the whine of the rocket, which had already caused so much damage. Deo Gratias! None of the children were injured. I had received the full blast. I went to see the doctor. He said ‘your baby can be born any minute, it has slipped down into position. I had arranged for you to have the baby in the country away from the bombing but now you cannot travel and Lewisham hospital is bombed. You will have to have the baby at home’.

So I continued at School and on the correct day, the pains started. No doctor was available and a midwife volunteered to see me through the birth. I could not give birth in the Anderson Shelter in the garden, so she volunteered to stay with me in the house in spite of the fact that the sirens had sounded and an air raid was imminent. There was a lovely vase of yellow daffodils on the dressing table. Between the shelling and the sounds of the falling bombs I could hear the midwife praying to every Saint in Heaven. Just as you saw the light of day there was a terrific explosion, the house shook and the yellow daffodils flew across the room. The midwife started an act of Contrition; the cord was twice round your neck. She quickly unwound it and after cleaning the baby put it on the other single bed. My mother rushed up and said that the bomb had hit the cemetery. There were dead bodies flung up on the roofs but no one had been injured. The dead had risen from their graves when my daughter was born. What a lovely omen!! I gazed round on the most beautiful creature I have ever seen chubby not wrinkled, with deep blue eyes and downy fair hair. What a good baby — slept from one feed to the next and definitely not the mass of nerves as expected - fortunate as I immediately had to get back to school. No time for relaxing and my mother looked after you in-between feeds!

When you were a few months old peace was declared. The Church bells, which had been silent for 5 years, suddenly broke out into joyous peals, we were delirious with excitement. We carried you in the carrycot right up to Buckingham Palace. We stood on the statue fronting the Palace and shouted ourselves hoarse with cries for the King and Queen. The Royal family appeared. Oh what joyous shouts. As dusk fell the fireworks lit up the sky. Everyone was crazy with joy. What a gigantic display. Peace at last! no more teaching in trenches, no more bombs, no more terror from the skies. The years fell away from my shoulders, the best years of my life had vanished with the war but I was alive and I had my baby. How we thanked God for his mercy in sparing the whole family, but my mother and father never regained their youthful looks. We had gathered from the garden long silver strips of foil - why they were dropped I don’t know but they made a lovely decoration for the house for Christmas. That was the best Christmas ever, the family were altogether, and we were no longer rationed and were able to eat again a proper meal. Little did I know what experiences I had in store with the aftermath of the Japanese occupation in Singapore where you and I found ourselves living in 1946, after a very traumatic sea voyage but that is another story.

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