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Margaret’s War

I was three and a half years old when War was declared so my memories are limited but very specific. My first memory was moving (in 1939) from our home in Barden Drive, Darley Abbey, Derby to be nearer to the rest of our family in London. I learned later that my parents, Leslie Evelyn and Mabel Edith Sharp, neé Buckley, moved because they had been worried that Derby would be a target because of The Rolls Royce Factory! In fact Derby turned out to be much safer than London during the War.

We were soon established at 102 Pickhurst Lane, Hayes, Bromley, Kent and then I remember the air raid ‘Warnings’ and the ‘All Clears’. I soon became used to taking shelter when the former sounded and used to the relief with the latter. Even now, all these years later, I still get chills up my spine when I hear recordings of sirens on radio, TV etc. That seems to have been the major emotion of the War for me — fear and then the wonderful relief when it was ‘all over’.

At first we had a communal shelter purchased and shared by three households built underground in the back gardens of numbers 104 and 106. It was quite a special one with a toilet at one end and a small kitchen at the other, in between were rows of bunks where we slept. It was disguised with a rockery and pretty plants on top of it. This shelter (which still existed in 2001) was of course quite noisy and oppressive and after some time my Father decided that he would prefer not to go there so we had another shelter built, this time above ground. It was a large solid brick building with a reinforced thick concrete roof about the size of a single garage, no windows of course but a small opening (adults had to bend to enter) with a strong blast wall in front. It had two full size bunks inside and I slept (until I grew too big) on a folding camp bed.

Once this shelter was built we slept in it every night until War’s end. Later in the War, when I returned from boarding school for the holidays my Father gave me his bunk and he slept in a folding deck chair which I still have. He must have been very uncomfortable. Because it was such a solid structure the shelter was expensive to demolish and it still existed until after 1985 when I last saw it. It was used as a dark room for years after the War. My Grandmother, who lived just around the next corner, had a very similar shelter in her back garden also.

We lived very close to Biggin Hill Aerodrome at Westerham and so we saw planes overhead regularly and as children we quickly became used to recognising the different types. One night during The Battle of Britain the Germans dropped over one thousand incendiary bombs aimed at the Airfield. Fortunately they missed and mostly landed instead on Hayes and Keston Commons. As a result most of the Common was burnt and destroyed for the rest of summer and the following morning the area was shrouded in thick smoke with greatly reduced visibility.

A couple of strays bombs landed in our garden that night. That was when I learned about fear and could actually feel fear in another person. Our above-ground, brick shelter was not yet completed so we were sleeping downstairs for safety. My parents’ bed was in the back room, which was in normal times called the parlour. My Father was blind (a veteran of the Royal Naval Division in World War I - the Dardanelles and the trenches) and must have felt really frustrated that he could not help my Mother put out the bombs, so instead he put me on cushions under the double bed with more cushions on top of me (the big sofa ones) then he lay on top of everything as a buffer to try to protect me from any blast. I remember spending the whole night lying there, I am sure that I must have been to sleep for some of the time but my memory is of FEAR and crying — where was my Mother? When was she going to come inside? Where was she?

When she did return I remember my Father asking her why she had been gone for so long? She replied that she had been putting out incendiary bombs with the sandbags which were always stored around the house for emergencies. We had quite a large, long, narrow garden and she had had to put out one incendiary in the vegetable garden at the back and then she discovered another one burning in the front under the almond tree. She had stayed out until after the ‘All Clear’ to make sure there were not any more and that we were safe.

My maternal Grandfather died at Bromley Hospital on 20th. August 1940, during The Battle of Britain, A few days later when all the family came back to our house after the funeral there was another air raid. An indication of the feeling at that time was that no one took shelter, instead they all stayed in the garden (it was a lovely sunny afternoon) drinking their tea and eating their biscuits watching a ‘dog fight’ going on immediately overhead. The feeling among the adults was that if they were going to ‘go’ (i.e. be killed) they would rather all ‘go’ together. I have photographs of that ‘dog fight’ where brave young men were risking and some losing their lives as we drank tea. I remember being totally frightened and wanting to go into the shelter and trying to persuade them all to go too! I have never felt that afternoon tea was so important that you should risk your life for it!

There was also a similar feeling when we had our weekly rations, for example when we had our very small butter ration my Mother would put it all on one slice of bread each, which we would eat and thoroughly enjoy. For the rest of the week we ate dry bread! My Mother’s reasoning was that we could all be dead tomorrow, so we might as well enjoy it now. Food was always paramount, always a major shortage and we were always hungry. I have never been able to face ‘bread with warm milk’ for breakfast or bread and dripping since!

Women, my mother included, learned to do wonderful things with extremely little. The best food we had during the War was the dried egg powder which could be used instead of fresh eggs. It was really tasty and adaptable to all recipes (except boiled egg of course!) and I wish we could buy it now. Towards the end of the War and afterwards we also were able to buy whale ‘meat’. I believe that it was ‘off ration’. Apparently in its natural state it is pretty oily and not very tasty so butchers used to mince it and add herbs and spices. It really was delicious and made a welcome change from rationed gristly meat.

The garden was turned over to growing vegetables and fruits of all kinds and we all lent a hand at the digging and weeding. My Mother was a smoker, as most people were during the War. The Government encouraged smoking to relax the nerves! (Women were encouraged to be sparing, so as to leave more for the troops.) Cigarettes were rationed and hard to find so our local tobacconist used to save some, when they came in, for his regular customers. They were ‘under the counter’ and my Mother used to send me down the road to buy them — that would never be allowed now. One summer when cigarettes were very scarce my Mother even grew tobacco. It grew very well but when she tried to cure it herself she was not very successful.

Towards the end of the War when our dog, a cocker spaniel, walked in with a live chicken in her mouth we were very happy and did not try to find which farm it had come from - instead it became a most welcome DINNER! “Doodles” born during an air raid and named after the “Doodle Bugs”, was especially rewarded that day.

Everything possible was re-used. My Aunt, who lived with us for a time with her son, was an excellent dressmaker and she used to cut down old clothes to make new. All my dresses were cut down from adults discards and after I went to boarding school my unfortunate cousin Richard had to model them for size during their manufacture in my absence! He really hated this as he was seven months older and taller than me! Anyone who could knitted scarves, socks, gloves and balaclavas for the Troops and many old jumpers were unpicked to re-use the wool. That’s when I learned to knit.

One morning we woke up to find a strange piece of metal outside the parlour and phoned the ARP Wardens — they were down in a flash, examined the metal for safety, found it was a part of a bomb bay (probably German as Biggin Hill was a fighter base) and asked if they could take it for scrap metal. My Father told them they could take it with pleasure as long as they came as quickly if we were ever bombed! I can remember the men coming round to collect our fence railings, aluminium saucepans and any scrap metal to build aeroplanes etc. Regarding bomb damage in the War — we were very lucky as we only had broken windows and some roof damage from blast vibration. My Grandmother round the corner had more blast damage than us, with many broken windows.

Improvisation was certainly the order of the day and I remember the number of horses which were put back into ‘service’. The Express Dairy always came round with a horse and cart to deliver the milk. I sometimes used to give carrots to the horse. If one of the horses left a deposit on the road, which seemed to happen often, I was sent out with a bucket to collect it for the garden as it was valuable compost for the vegetables! After the War the Express Dairy used electric vehicles which were very quiet — all you heard was the rattling of the milk bottles as the van went from house to house. I missed the clip clop of the horses’ hooves.

One night ‘The New Inn’ at Hayes took a direct hit and the publican, Fred Mallows, was seriously injured and severely burnt. He was eventually taken to The Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead, Sussex to be treated by the eminent New Zealand plastic surgeon Dr. Archibald McIndoe, who had achieved such wonderful results when treating the badly burnt and injured pilots who later became members of the famous Guinea Pig Club. Fred was a close friend and once he was conscious he kept asking for my Father, so my parents went down to East Grinstead to see him. Fred was worried about the Inn’s security during his absence. He wanted to give my Father the keys for safety as he did not trust any one else with them. He did not realise that the Inn had been completely flattened by the bomb, there was nothing left to secure. It was early days in his recovery, he was very sick and so they could not tell him that there was nothing left to lock up, so they took the keys for him until he recovered.

Civilians were at the far end of the ward and my poor Mother had to walk the length of the ward past all the extremely injured and pain-ridden airmen doing her utmost to smile encouragingly at them as she walked by their beds at the same time describing the scene to my Father sotto voce. Eventually Fred was released from Hospital but managing a rebuilt ‘New Inn’ proved too arduous a task for him and so he then moved to ‘The Royal Oak’ at Charmouth in Dorset where he remained as publican for several years. We visited him there in the early fifties. When I revisited the pub in 2001 some of the locals still remembered him, which is either an indication of his memorable personality or of their drinking habits over the last fifty years!

Mr (Ron?) Frewer, our next-door neighbour, was on duty at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London on the night when it was bombed. He was later awarded The George Medal for his bravery at that time and we all went up to Buckingham Palace for the award. Of course, only his wife and daughters, Deirdre and Sheila, were allowed into the Palace but we waited outside and took the photographs of the occasion. It was a highlighted day which gave us much joy and relief in desperate times. I also felt important to be so near The King!

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