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NEAR MISSES
In the late summer of 1939, as a seven year old boy, I was one of the thousands of evacuees moved from the anticipated dangers of north London to safety in the country. Edmonton station had probably never before seen such numbers of children all at once, even at school holiday time. Now a small army of us, suitably name-labelled and carrying an assortment of attaché cases or brown paper parcels full of clothes, bags of sandwiches and gas masks in cardboard boxes on string necklaces, crowded onto the platform supervised by a small group of parent volunteers, of which my mother was one. Our destination was “unknown” to most that day.
After journeying through what seemed endless countryside, we arrived at Braintree station in the heart of Essex, there to be segregated, inspected, selected and haggled over by often unwilling ‘foster parents’ before being finally taken off to a new home for an unspecified length of time. It was a time of heartache and tears for many families during this episode of the war.
My mother rejected my first billet as being quite unsuitable for me and this led to a great deal of arguing and I realise now that those children who arrived without a mum or dad to guard their best interests may not have been as lucky as I was. My next billet was a temporary one with the local bank manager and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Pocock and their Cocker spaniel ‘Future’. Their house was much more luxurious than ours at home except that it was opposite a small Calor gas depot and that characteristic mustardy smell of the gas stays with me still.
My final home was with a Mrs. and Mrs. Cornell who lived almost at the far end of Cressing Road and there I stayed with them and their son Noel and daughter Gwen, engaged to a man called Larry. That winter and spring were memorable in many ways; my first time away from home, collecting conkers and enormous red hips from the wild roses, walking through snowbound lanes to school, playing in the snow in Berry’s field with it all getting into our Wellington boots, straddling the invisible line in the road which theoretically divided the two towns — ‘look, one foot in Braintree and the other in Coggeshall’, the open air Lido and its high-diving ‘Tarzan’ and unscrewing winkles from their shells with a pin when Larry came to tea on Sundays. I was happy there and felt one of the family. So much so that when Mum and Dad came to see me, I called them Uncle and Auntie…
But after months of the phoney war and not a single enemy aircraft seen over London, many children were brought back home, me included, only to find themselves faced with the fascination and horrors of the Blitz. Day after day and night after night we hurried to the Anderson shelter in the garden and hoped that the terrible explosions would not get to us. Early mornings were spent collecting bits of shrapnel to swap at school, some from AA shells and some from damaged planes. We had our very near misses. We were among the lucky ones. One night, the noise seemed different and crawling out of the shelter we entered an orange twilight night, bright enough for mother to see the time by her tiny wristwatch. It was the London Docks going up in flames, as they did for several successive nights. Those bombers which overshot their target simply unloaded their bombs indiscriminately, some falling around us with disastrous consequences.
A year or two later, the Blitz was followed by evil, snorting V.Is, the Doodlebugs, which weren’t too bad so long as you could hear their rasping exhaust. It was when the engines cut out and the silent, downward glide began — that was the worrying part. But it was in the early spring of 1945 that my first real near miss took place.

It was a bright, sunny day and instead of joining in the after-lunch football match in the playground of my school, Tottenham Grammar, I decided to settle down with a comic in a sheltered corner the other side of the building. A few yards away to my right stood the old ‘Tiger Moth’ plane which the ATC cadets used for elementary training of some sort while to my left was our small flower garden. Beyond the Moth was a rugby field with a row of houses at the far end. Suddenly there was a huge gust of wind and a deafening, mind-bludgeoning crash. Ages later, it seemed, I came to my senses and found myself on my hands and knees hearing the sound of falling glass. Looking around I saw the window panes in the distant houses disappear and curtains of various colours billowing violently in their empty frames. A few yards away, the flowers had all been flattened and the Tiger Moth was a heap of tangled metal and fabric.
I was choking with dust and the grey, acrid smoke was making my eyes stream with tears. As the clanging in my head subsided, I could hear shouts and cried for help coming from just around the end corner of the building which had saved me from the direct blast. Stumbling over rubble and broken glass I went to see what had happened and found several of my footballing friends lying unconscious or injured, some obviously dead, others wandering in a daze. Masters, still in their black gowns already crouching over the injured like mother hens doing their best to staunch the blood with handkerchiefs. Mr. Mitchell, our English master was using his as a tourniquet on the stump of Burns’s arm, probably saving his life in the process.
Shortly after that V2 had fallen so silently and unexpectedly, and our lives had returned to something approaching normality, on the 8th. of May, VE Day was celebrated with enormous street parties. It also marked the safe return of Uncle Walter from Stalag VIIIB and Stalag 344 after four long years of captivity, having been taken prisoner in Crete early on in the War.
The amazing corollary to this story is that after I had left Braintree, I heard that a lone raider had dropped a landmine which fell on some houses in Cressing Road. Fifty years later, when passing through, I drove along that road looking for my old Cornell billet but failed to find it. In its place was what appeared to be a small group of more modern houses. Maybe my first piece of luck was being taken back to London in time for the Blitz there instead.
My third time lucky was when I was attached to the Gurkhas in Brunei in 1963… But that’s another, even more incredible, story.

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