High Explosive Bomb at Northborough Road

Infant on The Home Front

Prologue
Born the youngest of three boys, sons of a single parent, a mother who had lost a fourth son (from meningitis) and a husband (from tuberculosis), I was just eight when the war started.

We were what today might be described as a family with a ‘deprived background’. Early widowhood had driven the surviving family from home ownership at Oakhill Road Norbury into a terraced LCC council dwelling for a weekly rent of ten and fourpence receipted in a rent book with twopenny orange stamps. (Firstly, Edward VIII and then George VI)

Five of us slept in two rooms. An out of doors lavatory; the bath with a copper in the kitchen to heat the bath water weekly; and a ‘kitchener’ in the living-room for warmth. Those were the basic facilities of 3 Bavant Road, Norbury, London SW16 and the adjacent dwellings.

Mother worked as a telephonist in Saville Row for the SBAC (Society of British Aircraft — now Aerospace — Constructors-Telephone No: Regent 5215) and we three children were cared for by our resident grandmother who was then about sixty. She had experienced the horrors of the First World War and feared what the ‘Boche’ would do this time. My eldest brother was 19 and my elder brother 15 at the outbreak of war. Both started working in the City of London when they were about 14.

Wars and Rumours of Wars
Spain, Abyssinia, Nazism, Hitler, Munich, Poland and finally the 3rd September 1939 dawned.

Preparations included the issue of gasmasks (with a sour smell of rubber and a misting lens); making black-out blinds; taping-up the window panes; eldest brother called up as he was a TA volunteer; trees and gate-posts painted with broad black and white stripes, kerbs painted with yellow segments; vehicle head-lamps fitted with filters; the London Defence Volunteers emerged: a ‘Civic Restaurant’ opened in a disused cinema in the High Street; blackout rehearsals at night initiated by air-raid sirens wailing; the issue of identity cards (CLDD 110 3), ration books and arrival of ‘square’ scissors.

Funny Incidents
There was a demonstration at the top of Streatham Common in a corrugated iron ‘theatre’. Bales of straw were stacked on the stage and ignited by a man in a boiler suit. A very lively blaze ensued. Was there a fire engine to hand?

Not so. We were shown how one person would be able to extinguish the fire with a bucket of water and a stirrup pump. This taught us how we could deal with incendiary bombs if they pierced the roofs of our houses. We were urged to clear our lofts and attics of all combustible material.

Suddenly iron railings, gates and chain linked fencing were removed seemingly overnight from all public parks and buildings and schools.

Directional road signs were removed.

We were urged to ‘Dig for Victory’ and informed that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’

Bus and tram windows were sealed with a yellow mesh to prevent glass fragmentation during air-raids. This prevented passengers from seeing their progression along the route.

Before long passengers, to improve visibility, would peel off the corners of the mesh.

London Transport put up notices:
‘I trust you’ll pardon my correction but that stuff is there for your protection’

to which a wag had added:

‘Thank you for your information but I cannot see the ruddy station’

and another:

‘Face the driver, raise your hand, you’ll find that he will understand’

and modified:

‘I know he’ll understand, the cuss — but will he stop the ruddy bus?’

Personalities of people changed. The quiet and inconspicuous spinster next door in the corner house with Northborough Road suddenly emerged as an Air Raid Warden resplendent in a navy blue uniform, with gas mask, hand-rattle, white lanyard, whistle and steel helmet.

The First Air-Raid
And when the 3rd September arrived, Chamberlain’s broadcast brought the crisis to a head to anyone who could listen to a wireless set (some were still powered by an accumulator). For us, it was our family and the United Dairies milkman doing his morning delivery from his horse drawn cart.

Immediately after the announcement the first air raid sirens of the war sounded and, not knowing what was to happen, I panicked, put on my gas mask and rushed into the garden sunshine. I was re-assured by my eldest brother and his girl friend and relaxed when the ‘All-Clear’ sounded.

There were rumours soon that Croydon Airport had been attacked.

That was to be the first of many raids.

Our Air Raid Shelter
One morning there was a commotion in the road. A lorry had arrived with a gang of men. They were delivering the Anderson Shelters to our front gardens. Each terraced house received six curved sections of corrugated iron, six straight sections, four with angled corners, four large red girders, a few smaller girders, a canvas bag with nuts, bolts and fittings and printed instructions.

A bit like flat-pack furniture.

Watching the activity progress up the road towards our house, I noticed that a strong man in the gang could manage to carry simultaneously three curved sections on his back from the lorry to the gardens. Less able men managed only two such sections. It didn’t take very long to supply the components of a shelter to each house.

The following weekend my eldest brother (now a Corporal) was home from the army on a short leave having just been vaccinated. He and my elder brother dug out a large rectangular trench in the back garden. It was about four feet deep and six and a half feet square. The four red girders were placed at the perimeter of the trench, squared up with string across the diagonals and bolted together at the corners. The curved sections were slotted into the girders and bolted at the top. Finally the back and front sections of the shelter were assembled. The front sections provided access to the shelter through a small entrance hole.

I entered the newly erected shelter and smelled the dank atmosphere arising from the mud floor. This ‘dug-out’ was to be our family’s protection during air raids. It occupied most of the little back garden.

The excavated soil was loaded onto the top of the sunken shelter until a great mound was all that could be seen of our refuge apart from the entrance hole.

Whenever it rained the shelter let in water. My elder brother, by mixing and laying a thick fillet of concrete onto the mud surface, solved this problem.

As time went by, neighbours competed for the best-cultivated garden on their shelters and the warmest degree of comfort within. This led to my elder brother painting the inside walls white and installing some means of illumination together with bunks and a small arm-chair just within the entrance.

It all became rather snug.

The Evacuation
The SBAC was evacuated to Harrogate but my mother was found a telephonist’s job for the duration of the war in London with the Finnish Legation.

We have all seen newsreels of large crowds of very young children at railway termini waiting to be transported to safer parts of the country with their luggage, gas masks and identity labels.

But what about the plight of any child left behind?

For a long time there was no school to attend. Similarly placed infants and I played in the streets, some of us collected horse manure in our wooden trolleys (converted from prams) for sale to neighbours and scrumped apples via the network of neighbourhood alleyways.

Friends and I frequently visited the Westminster Bank Sports Ground at Norbury. This had been taken over by the army and an anti-aircraft gun battery installed in the centre of the playing fields.

Armed sentries guarded the entrance gate and we would spend much time watching their routines of arms drill, marching up and down and changing guard each two hours.

At home, we copied the soldiers and mounted guard at our front garden entrances with our toy rifles. I am sure that we became just as smart as the soldiers in our arms drill and sentry duties.

We could see to the North that the sky above London was becoming infested with barrage balloons. There were hundreds of balloons with great tail fins glistening in the sunlight; wires to winches on lorries tethered them.

After a time some private schools opened. A lady with a hearing aid opened a class in the church hall of the Norbury Methodist Church. Mum paid a small fee for my attendance where a dozen or so children sat on the floor in a circle at teacher’s feet to receive lessons.

Later it was full time attendance at a private preparatory school where the standards of other children in the class were high. Suddenly, ‘joined-up’, writing, French lessons and homework presented insoluble problems. Still later I attended a convent school in Thornton Heath where nuns taught us.

Gradually the evacuees returned home and the demand for schools increased. This led to my brief attendance at Kensington Avenue School.

Finally, my school - Norbury Manor - re-opened under the superb leadership of the Headmaster Mr Harry Albon and his excellent teaching staff.

The period of this first evacuation of children had lasted from September 1939 until March 1940.

On my return to Norbury Manor I saw that the cloakrooms had been converted into windowless air-raid shelters and we were each instructed to bring in and store in the shelters an Oxo tin with ‘Iron Rations’ in case of an emergency.

Air Raids
News was bad. The Norwegian Campaign failed. Hitler’s forces advanced across Europe. The Russians defeated the Finns. Russia formed an alliance with Germany, France fell and then there was Dunkirk evacuation.

Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister and now we expected to be invaded by the German Armies from across the English Channel.

As children we might watch the Battle of Britain dogfights in the summer sky and hear the rattle of machine gun fire from the planes above. Sometimes we would see the Spitfires or Hurricanes fly the Victory Roll after a battle. We were near Croydon, Kenley and Biggin Hill Airports.

If we were at school during a daylight raid we would be led into the converted cloakroom air-raid shelters immediately the sirens sounded. The teachers were excellent in maintaining our morale and made us sing songs very loudly throughout the duration of the raids to drown the noise of the battles raging in the neighbourhood.

Then it was the Blitz. Air-raid sirens wailed every evening and into our Anderson shelter we would go. At first it was a novelty to watch the masses of searchlights piercing the dusk and darkness, criss-crossing in the sky in the search for intruders and sometimes illuminating the barrage balloons. A light would suddenly extinguish and then quickly re-light and a pencil of light thrust upwards into the darkness.

The characteristic throbbing of the invaders’ engines could be heard and sometimes an enemy plane would enter a searchlight’s beam, pass through it, and then several lights would quickly sweep over to concentrate on locating that plane that had at first avoided detection. If it were found three or more beams would lock onto the raider and hold it in view for the anti-aircraft guns to try and destroy it.

The noise from the guns was terrific especially when the battery about a mile away at the Westminster Bank Sports Club opened fire. It is not possible to describe the intensity and impact of the noise of an air raid. Sirens wailing, aeroplane engines throbbing purposely to worry the civilian population below, whistles blowing, guns firing and firing and firing, shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells striking the roofs of the neighbouring houses and sometimes the whistle of descending bombs and the explosions that followed.

And the raids became a nightly routine. Down we went into the dugout as soon as the sirens wailed. Sleeping in the bunks except grandmother who always sat every night in the chair within the entrance. She would leave the wooden door ajar and we could just see the flashes as the anti-aircraft guns fired. When the throbbing of the enemy planes came near she would close the door and we would wait for whatever was to happen.

Looking north from the shelter entrance, the sky sometimes glowed red as London, seven miles away, burned.

A keen interest of my friends and I after raids was to collect shrapnel from the roads and gardens. We gathered masses of it and competed for the best piece. This was the largest and shiniest bit. Sometimes it was still warm from the explosion of the shell; you could detect the pungent odour of the burned TNT. The very best and rarest piece was the remnant of a time-fuse, conical in shape with graduation marks around the surviving part of the circumference.

As I walked to school one morning I saw that a bomb had destroyed a house in my road. It was a heap of rubble but exposed the bedroom wallpaper and fireplaces in the party walls. Heavy Rescue men were clambering over the rubble to recover the occupants.

On another occasion there was a rumour of an interesting event near a factory on Mitcham Common. I biked there and saw that an enormous land-mine had fallen in the back garden of a house near the Common. The mine had not exploded and presumably had been made safe by the army. We were allowed to watch the soldiers who, with a large lorry, were trying to haul the mine out of the ground by ropes slung from the rear of the vehicle and around the mid-riff of the mine. The mine was stubborn and did not budge.

So, as a matter of routine, winter evening after winter evening my grandmother, mother, elder brother and I would leave the back door of our house for the dug-out and remain down there until dawn and the sirens sounding the ‘all-clear’.

Disaster
The bomb landed on our Anderson shelter on the night of Friday the 29th November 1940 during the 92nd raid on Croydon,

The bomb demolished the house beyond our air-raid shelter and wrecked the house next door to that — both in Northborough Road. My house and the house each side of it were rendered unstable. All the five other houses in the terrace were badly damaged at the back. And the roofs of four more houses in Northborough Road were damaged.

A profitable bomb.

It had rained heavily during daylight hours on that day and, exceptionally, the Anderson shelter was flooded. So, prevented by the flood from following our normal routine, the family slept on the ground floor of the house under the dining room table during the air raid.

In the night, there was the scream of bombs falling and a great thump very close to our house. My elder brother (now 16) investigated the situation together with wardens and discovered our bombed Anderson shelter.

After viewing the damage, the authorities pronounced that the bomb had exploded. Re-assured the four of us completed our slumbers until daylight.

In the morning I (now 9) went down the garden to look at the shelter. There was a hole about two feet in diameter that had been punched directly through the corner of the shelter where my head would have been had there been no rain. It was all very interesting. I started to throw stones and lumps of clay down into the hole. It was obviously very deep as there was a delay before the splash from my missiles hitting the surface of the water below.

I felt some personal pride in our having been so targeted and invited a few friends in to see the hole where the bomb had fallen. With me, they threw some more missiles down the shaft.

Later that morning, my eldest brother (now 20) quite by chance arrived at our house. He had recently returned from Norway and had been detailed to drive from Folkestone to Leeds in an old three-ton civilian lorry loaded with signal stores but called in at Bavant Road on the way.

In due course the police and wardens arrived and together with my two brothers re-examined the newly made hole in our shelter. It was then pronounced that the bomb had not, after all, exploded and the house was evacuated forthwith.

Bedding and some personal effects including my small bike and our black cat ‘Blackie’ were loaded onto the three-ton lorry and we were all transported to the home of the girl friend of my eldest brother. That was in Goldwell Road, Thornton Heath. There we were to stay for the time being.

By the following Monday morning, my eldest brother had left for Leeds, my mother and elder brother for work in London. I cycled to my school in Norbury.

On the way I passed by my home in Bavant Road. Everything seemed different. It soon became clear that the bomb had exploded over the weekend. Our house was still standing but the windows were blown out. Houses at the foot of the garden had collapsed. For the second time in the war I panicked. I turned my bike around, and sobbing, cycled back to Goldwell Road with the news.

What happened after that is unclear. Blackie was reported to have found his way back to Bavant Road but was never seen again. In a day or two I was taken by my grandmother to reside with her second daughter in Strood, Kent. It was again the habit to sleep downstairs during the German air raids, which appeared to have focussed on Chatham Dockyard and the Short Sunderland factory on the Medway at Rochester.

There was another period without attendance at a school.

The Aftermath
During this 92nd raid on Croydon seventeen high explosive bombs had dropped on the Borough. Seven of the bombs caused no damage five of them having fallen on golf courses and a farm. Our bomb was a delayed action bomb.

While I was not at school in Strood my excellent class teacher at Norbury Manor, Miss L M Scott (Scottie), wrote to me. She set up a procedure of sending to me books of exercises on arithmetic and intelligence tests. I had to post the exercises back to her for marking. This was her way of doing whatever she could to prepare me for entering for the ‘Scholarship’ examinations of which the first was to take place in a few months later in 1941.

Back in Surrey my mother and my elder brother were involved in finding a new home for us. They were introduced to various Requisitioned Properties and, on the basis of the rent she could afford to pay, she decided upon 50 Mayfield Road Thornton Heath.

After some weeks my grandmother and I returned to the new family home and what a home it was.

It was again a terraced house but with very large rooms, three bedrooms (one of my own), a bathroom with a lavatory upstairs, hot running water from the boiler behind the dining-room fire, ’French’ windows that led out to a very long garden with a lawn, strawberry bed, chrysanthemums and horseradish. Our furniture, some of it damaged, had been recovered from our Bavant Road house. In time, a Morrison indoor air-raid shelter was installed in the front room.

I continued my education at Norbury Manor School under the careful tuition of Scottie. I failed the ‘Scholarship’ examination that I sat in 1941 but was successful in 1942.

That gave me a grant-aided place at the Whitgift Middle School, North End, Croydon.

Epilogue

The heroine of this story is my mother who, in her thirties had in the space of a few years, suffered the loss of an infant son, a husband and two homes. The angels were our grandmother for looking after the family and my teachers and the headmaster of Norbury Manor for the outstanding support they gave to all the children particularly during the war years.

There is a note recorded by Mrs Rosemary Sharp a teacher at Norbury Manor in the souvenir booklet published to celebrate its Golden Jubilee in 1982:

‘ I remember too the shock of hearing of the death of a little girl in my class who was killed by the bombing one night and the awful feeling as I wrote ‘deceased’ by her name in the register.’

The SBAC returned to London and my mother worked for the Society until her retirement.

My eldest brother married his girl friend in 1942 before being transported to Egypt where he was baptised, confirmed and commissioned into the Indian Army. He returned home as a Major via El Alamein, Italy and Jubblepore. He and his wife celebrated their Diamond Wedding Anniversary last year.

My elder brother volunteered for the Royal Air Force and won his ‘Wings’ as a Sergeant Navigator having been trained in South Africa. Fortunately, the war ended before he had to fly on operations and he lives now in Surrey with his family

Mother and grandmother survived until their eighties.

In due course the properties in Bavant and Northborough Roads were rebuilt.

As for me at Whitgift Middle School from 1942, I was taught my Catechism and embarked on the mysterious road of adolescence, experienced the doodlebugs and, in due course, attended VE and VJ celebrations in London.

What happened to me after that is another story.

Anthony Mundy 8 December 2003

Infant on The Home Front

Prologue
Born the youngest of three boys, sons of a single parent, a mother who had lost a fourth son (from meningitis) and a husband (from tuberculosis), I was just eight when the war started.

We were what today might be described as a family with a ‘deprived background’. Early widowhood had driven the surviving family from home ownership at Oakhill Road Norbury into a terraced LCC council dwelling for a weekly rent of ten and fourpence receipted in a rent book with twopenny orange stamps. (Firstly, Edward VIII and then George VI)

Five of us slept in two rooms. An out of doors lavatory; the bath with a copper in the kitchen to heat the bath water weekly; and a ‘kitchener’ in the living-room for warmth. Those were the basic facilities of 3 Bavant Road, Norbury, London SW16 and the adjacent dwellings.

Mother worked as a telephonist in Saville Row for the SBAC (Society of British Aircraft — now Aerospace — Constructors-Telephone No: Regent 5215) and we three children were cared for by our resident grandmother who was then about sixty. She had experienced the horrors of the First World War and feared what the ‘Boche’ would do this time. My eldest brother was 19 and my elder brother 15 at the outbreak of war. Both started working in the City of London when they were about 14.

Wars and Rumours of Wars
Spain, Abyssinia, Nazism, Hitler, Munich, Poland and finally the 3rd September 1939 dawned.

Preparations included the issue of gasmasks (with a sour smell of rubber and a misting lens); making black-out blinds; taping-up the window panes; eldest brother called up as he was a TA volunteer; trees and gate-posts painted with broad black and white stripes, kerbs painted with yellow segments; vehicle head-lamps fitted with filters; the London Defence Volunteers emerged: a ‘Civic Restaurant’ opened in a disused cinema in the High Street; blackout rehearsals at night initiated by air-raid sirens wailing; the issue of identity cards (CLDD 110 3), ration books and arrival of ‘square’ scissors.

Funny Incidents
There was a demonstration at the top of Streatham Common in a corrugated iron ‘theatre’. Bales of straw were stacked on the stage and ignited by a man in a boiler suit. A very lively blaze ensued. Was there a fire engine to hand?

Not so. We were shown how one person would be able to extinguish the fire with a bucket of water and a stirrup pump. This taught us how we could deal with incendiary bombs if they pierced the roofs of our houses. We were urged to clear our lofts and attics of all combustible material.

Suddenly iron railings, gates and chain linked fencing were removed seemingly overnight from all public parks and buildings and schools.

Directional road signs were removed.

We were urged to ‘Dig for Victory’ and informed that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’

Bus and tram windows were sealed with a yellow mesh to prevent glass fragmentation during air-raids. This prevented passengers from seeing their progression along the route.

Before long passengers, to improve visibility, would peel off the corners of the mesh.

London Transport put up notices:
‘I trust you’ll pardon my correction but that stuff is there for your protection’

to which a wag had added:

‘Thank you for your information but I cannot see the ruddy station’

and another:

‘Face the driver, raise your hand, you’ll find that he will understand’

and modified:

‘I know he’ll understand, the cuss — but will he stop the ruddy bus?’

Personalities of people changed. The quiet and inconspicuous spinster next door in the corner house with Northborough Road suddenly emerged as an Air Raid Warden resplendent in a navy blue uniform, with gas mask, hand-rattle, white lanyard, whistle and steel helmet.

The First Air-Raid
And when the 3rd September arrived, Chamberlain’s broadcast brought the crisis to a head to anyone who could listen to a wireless set (some were still powered by an accumulator). For us, it was our family and the United Dairies milkman doing his morning delivery from his horse drawn cart.

Immediately after the announcement the first air raid sirens of the war sounded and, not knowing what was to happen, I panicked, put on my gas mask and rushed into the garden sunshine. I was re-assured by my eldest brother and his girl friend and relaxed when the ‘All-Clear’ sounded.

There were rumours soon that Croydon Airport had been attacked.

That was to be the first of many raids.

Our Air Raid Shelter
One morning there was a commotion in the road. A lorry had arrived with a gang of men. They were delivering the Anderson Shelters to our front gardens. Each terraced house received six curved sections of corrugated iron, six straight sections, four with angled corners, four large red girders, a few smaller girders, a canvas bag with nuts, bolts and fittings and printed instructions.

A bit like flat-pack furniture.

Watching the activity progress up the road towards our house, I noticed that a strong man in the gang could manage to carry simultaneously three curved sections on his back from the lorry to the gardens. Less able men managed only two such sections. It didn’t take very long to supply the components of a shelter to each house.

The following weekend my eldest brother (now a Corporal) was home from the army on a short leave having just been vaccinated. He and my elder brother dug out a large rectangular trench in the back garden. It was about four feet deep and six and a half feet square. The four red girders were placed at the perimeter of the trench, squared up with string across the diagonals and bolted together at the corners. The curved sections were slotted into the girders and bolted at the top. Finally the back and front sections of the shelter were assembled. The front sections provided access to the shelter through a small entrance hole.

I entered the newly erected shelter and smelled the dank atmosphere arising from the mud floor. This ‘dug-out’ was to be our family’s protection during air raids. It occupied most of the little back garden.

The excavated soil was loaded onto the top of the sunken shelter until a great mound was all that could be seen of our refuge apart from the entrance hole.

Whenever it rained the shelter let in water. My elder brother, by mixing and laying a thick fillet of concrete onto the mud surface, solved this problem.

As time went by, neighbours competed for the best-cultivated garden on their shelters and the warmest degree of comfort within. This led to my elder brother painting the inside walls white and installing some means of illumination together with bunks and a small arm-chair just within the entrance.

It all became rather snug.

The Evacuation
The SBAC was evacuated to Harrogate but my mother was found a telephonist’s job for the duration of the war in London with the Finnish Legation.

We have all seen newsreels of large crowds of very young children at railway termini waiting to be transported to safer parts of the country with their luggage, gas masks and identity labels.

But what about the plight of any child left behind?

For a long time there was no school to attend. Similarly placed infants and I played in the streets, some of us collected horse manure in our wooden trolleys (converted from prams) for sale to neighbours and scrumped apples via the network of neighbourhood alleyways.

Friends and I frequently visited the Westminster Bank Sports Ground at Norbury. This had been taken over by the army and an anti-aircraft gun battery installed in the centre of the playing fields.

Armed sentries guarded the entrance gate and we would spend much time watching their routines of arms drill, marching up and down and changing guard each two hours.

At home, we copied the soldiers and mounted guard at our front garden entrances with our toy rifles. I am sure that we became just as smart as the soldiers in our arms drill and sentry duties.

We could see to the North that the sky above London was becoming infested with barrage balloons. There were hundreds of balloons with great tail fins glistening in the sunlight; wires to winches on lorries tethered them.

After a time some private schools opened. A lady with a hearing aid opened a class in the church hall of the Norbury Methodist Church. Mum paid a small fee for my attendance where a dozen or so children sat on the floor in a circle at teacher’s feet to receive lessons.

Later it was full time attendance at a private preparatory school where the standards of other children in the class were high. Suddenly, ‘joined-up’, writing, French lessons and homework presented insoluble problems. Still later I attended a convent school in Thornton Heath where nuns taught us.

Gradually the evacuees returned home and the demand for schools increased. This led to my brief attendance at Kensington Avenue School.

Finally, my school - Norbury Manor - re-opened under the superb leadership of the Headmaster Mr Harry Albon and his excellent teaching staff.

The period of this first evacuation of children had lasted from September 1939 until March 1940.

On my return to Norbury Manor I saw that the cloakrooms had been converted into windowless air-raid shelters and we were each instructed to bring in and store in the shelters an Oxo tin with ‘Iron Rations’ in case of an emergency.

Air Raids
News was bad. The Norwegian Campaign failed. Hitler’s forces advanced across Europe. The Russians defeated the Finns. Russia formed an alliance with Germany, France fell and then there was Dunkirk evacuation.

Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister and now we expected to be invaded by the German Armies from across the English Channel.

As children we might watch the Battle of Britain dogfights in the summer sky and hear the rattle of machine gun fire from the planes above. Sometimes we would see the Spitfires or Hurricanes fly the Victory Roll after a battle. We were near Croydon, Kenley and Biggin Hill Airports.

If we were at school during a daylight raid we would be led into the converted cloakroom air-raid shelters immediately the sirens sounded. The teachers were excellent in maintaining our morale and made us sing songs very loudly throughout the duration of the raids to drown the noise of the battles raging in the neighbourhood.

Then it was the Blitz. Air-raid sirens wailed every evening and into our Anderson shelter we would go. At first it was a novelty to watch the masses of searchlights piercing the dusk and darkness, criss-crossing in the sky in the search for intruders and sometimes illuminating the barrage balloons. A light would suddenly extinguish and then quickly re-light and a pencil of light thrust upwards into the darkness.

The characteristic throbbing of the invaders’ engines could be heard and sometimes an enemy plane would enter a searchlight’s beam, pass through it, and then several lights would quickly sweep over to concentrate on locating that plane that had at first avoided detection. If it were found three or more beams would lock onto the raider and hold it in view for the anti-aircraft guns to try and destroy it.

The noise from the guns was terrific especially when the battery about a mile away at the Westminster Bank Sports Club opened fire. It is not possible to describe the intensity and impact of the noise of an air raid. Sirens wailing, aeroplane engines throbbing purposely to worry the civilian population below, whistles blowing, guns firing and firing and firing, shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells striking the roofs of the neighbouring houses and sometimes the whistle of descending bombs and the explosions that followed.

And the raids became a nightly routine. Down we went into the dugout as soon as the sirens wailed. Sleeping in the bunks except grandmother who always sat every night in the chair within the entrance. She would leave the wooden door ajar and we could just see the flashes as the anti-aircraft guns fired. When the throbbing of the enemy planes came near she would close the door and we would wait for whatever was to happen.

Looking north from the shelter entrance, the sky sometimes glowed red as London, seven miles away, burned.

A keen interest of my friends and I after raids was to collect shrapnel from the roads and gardens. We gathered masses of it and competed for the best piece. This was the largest and shiniest bit. Sometimes it was still warm from the explosion of the shell; you could detect the pungent odour of the burned TNT. The very best and rarest piece was the remnant of a time-fuse, conical in shape with graduation marks around the surviving part of the circumference.

As I walked to school one morning I saw that a bomb had destroyed a house in my road. It was a heap of rubble but exposed the bedroom wallpaper and fireplaces in the party walls. Heavy Rescue men were clambering over the rubble to recover the occupants.

On another occasion there was a rumour of an interesting event near a factory on Mitcham Common. I biked there and saw that an enormous land-mine had fallen in the back garden of a house near the Common. The mine had not exploded and presumably had been made safe by the army. We were allowed to watch the soldiers who, with a large lorry, were trying to haul the mine out of the ground by ropes slung from the rear of the vehicle and around the mid-riff of the mine. The mine was stubborn and did not budge.

So, as a matter of routine, winter evening after winter evening my grandmother, mother, elder brother and I would leave the back door of our house for the dug-out and remain down there until dawn and the sirens sounding the ‘all-clear’.

Disaster
The bomb landed on our Anderson shelter on the night of Friday the 29th November 1940 during the 92nd raid on Croydon,

The bomb demolished the house beyond our air-raid shelter and wrecked the house next door to that — both in Northborough Road. My house and the house each side of it were rendered unstable. All the five other houses in the terrace were badly damaged at the back. And the roofs of four more houses in Northborough Road were damaged.

A profitable bomb.

It had rained heavily during daylight hours on that day and, exceptionally, the Anderson shelter was flooded. So, prevented by the flood from following our normal routine, the family slept on the ground floor of the house under the dining room table during the air raid.

In the night, there was the scream of bombs falling and a great thump very close to our house. My elder brother (now 16) investigated the situation together with wardens and discovered our bombed Anderson shelter.

After viewing the damage, the authorities pronounced that the bomb had exploded. Re-assured the four of us completed our slumbers until daylight.

In the morning I (now 9) went down the garden to look at the shelter. There was a hole about two feet in diameter that had been punched directly through the corner of the shelter where my head would have been had there been no rain. It was all very interesting. I started to throw stones and lumps of clay down into the hole. It was obviously very deep as there was a delay before the splash from my missiles hitting the surface of the water below.

I felt some personal pride in our having been so targeted and invited a few friends in to see the hole where the bomb had fallen. With me, they threw some more missiles down the shaft.

Later that morning, my eldest brother (now 20) quite by chance arrived at our house. He had recently returned from Norway and had been detailed to drive from Folkestone to Leeds in an old three-ton civilian lorry loaded with signal stores but called in at Bavant Road on the way.

In due course the police and wardens arrived and together with my two brothers re-examined the newly made hole in our shelter. It was then pronounced that the bomb had not, after all, exploded and the house was evacuated forthwith.

Bedding and some personal effects including my small bike and our black cat ‘Blackie’ were loaded onto the three-ton lorry and we were all transported to the home of the girl friend of my eldest brother. That was in Goldwell Road, Thornton Heath. There we were to stay for the time being.

By the following Monday morning, my eldest brother had left for Leeds, my mother and elder brother for work in London. I cycled to my school in Norbury.

On the way I passed by my home in Bavant Road. Everything seemed different. It soon became clear that the bomb had exploded over the weekend. Our house was still standing but the windows were blown out. Houses at the foot of the garden had collapsed. For the second time in the war I panicked. I turned my bike around, and sobbing, cycled back to Goldwell Road with the news.

What happened after that is unclear. Blackie was reported to have found his way back to Bavant Road but was never seen again. In a day or two I was taken by my grandmother to reside with her second daughter in Strood, Kent. It was again the habit to sleep downstairs during the German air raids, which appeared to have focussed on Chatham Dockyard and the Short Sunderland factory on the Medway at Rochester.

There was another period without attendance at a school.

The Aftermath
During this 92nd raid on Croydon seventeen high explosive bombs had dropped on the Borough. Seven of the bombs caused no damage five of them having fallen on golf courses and a farm. Our bomb was a delayed action bomb.

While I was not at school in Strood my excellent class teacher at Norbury Manor, Miss L M Scott (Scottie), wrote to me. She set up a procedure of sending to me books of exercises on arithmetic and intelligence tests. I had to post the exercises back to her for marking. This was her way of doing whatever she could to prepare me for entering for the ‘Scholarship’ examinations of which the first was to take place in a few months later in 1941.

Back in Surrey my mother and my elder brother were involved in finding a new home for us. They were introduced to various Requisitioned Properties and, on the basis of the rent she could afford to pay, she decided upon 50 Mayfield Road Thornton Heath.

After some weeks my grandmother and I returned to the new family home and what a home it was.

It was again a terraced house but with very large rooms, three bedrooms (one of my own), a bathroom with a lavatory upstairs, hot running water from the boiler behind the dining-room fire, ’French’ windows that led out to a very long garden with a lawn, strawberry bed, chrysanthemums and horseradish. Our furniture, some of it damaged, had been recovered from our Bavant Road house. In time, a Morrison indoor air-raid shelter was installed in the front room.

I continued my education at Norbury Manor School under the careful tuition of Scottie. I failed the ‘Scholarship’ examination that I sat in 1941 but was successful in 1942.

That gave me a grant-aided place at the Whitgift Middle School, North End, Croydon.

Epilogue

The heroine of this story is my mother who, in her thirties had in the space of a few years, suffered the loss of an infant son, a husband and two homes. The angels were our grandmother for looking after the family and my teachers and the headmaster of Norbury Manor for the outstanding support they gave to all the children particularly during the war years.

There is a note recorded by Mrs Rosemary Sharp a teacher at Norbury Manor in the souvenir booklet published to celebrate its Golden Jubilee in 1982:

‘ I remember too the shock of hearing of the death of a little girl in my class who was killed by the bombing one night and the awful feeling as I wrote ‘deceased’ by her name in the register.’

The SBAC returned to London and my mother worked for the Society until her retirement.

My eldest brother married his girl friend in 1942 before being transported to Egypt where he was baptised, confirmed and commissioned into the Indian Army. He returned home as a Major via El Alamein, Italy and Jubblepore. He and his wife celebrated their Diamond Wedding Anniversary last year.

My elder brother volunteered for the Royal Air Force and won his ‘Wings’ as a Sergeant Navigator having been trained in South Africa. Fortunately, the war ended before he had to fly on operations and he lives now in Surrey with his family

Mother and grandmother survived until their eighties.

In due course the properties in Bavant and Northborough Roads were rebuilt.

As for me at Whitgift Middle School from 1942, I was taught my Catechism and embarked on the mysterious road of adolescence, experienced the doodlebugs and, in due course, attended VE and VJ celebrations in London.

What happened to me after that is another story.

Anthony Mundy 8 December 2003

We lived in Thornton Heath near Croydon after our marriage. Before our wedding we went to church to finalize the arrangements: my future husband was in the Fire Service and while we were there the sirens went and he had to report for duty and left me at the church.

My wedding dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses were at home and had to be moved for safety because a bomb had been dropped and was embedded in the next-door neighbour’s settee!

On our wedding day the Chief Fire Officer and fire service friends attended and, halfway through the service, the Air Raid sirens went the fire service crews had to leave, but my future husband was allowed to stay!

Due to the severity of the bombing we spent our wedding night in an air raid shelter with about eight other guests.

My husband and I later had the great honour of meeting the Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine who kindly autographed a photograph of us.
(See photograph above.)

My job to help towards the war effort was working in a factory with a large group of ladies making hypodermic needles for the hospitals and other medical organizations.
Due to the heavy bombing where we lived we spent a lot of our time in the air raid shelters, which were most of the time under water, and our furnished fiat was badly hit.

Then when 1 went to live near Upperton Rd a landmine was dropped across the road a direct hit killed nine people.

When my husband was in the front line with the Fire Service in Coventry he attended a fire at the Cathedral, and he fell when the roof collapsed.

After the war I visited Bertesgarten, Hitler’s retreat, with my second husband.
During the war my second husband designed underwater missiles for the Americans.

After the Easter holiday in 1938 I began my second year at Ensham Central School in Tooting in South London. The need for a bicycle to get to the school from Streatham had given me the opportunity to widen my little world. One of my expeditions the year before had been to find out where the great biplanes of Imperial Airways landed. So I found Croydon Aerodrome, there in front of me was a square brick building that was the terminal and control tower all in one. On top of the tower was a radio mast, which made it look really modern and up to date. I rode my bike up to the side of the building where there was an iron fire escape up to the flat roof, so I climbed up, there being no one about to say no. Once on the roof I could see the whole grass field. The huge biplanes Horatius and Scylla were parked right up to the building and I could see the people working in the control tower. I returned many times. So that when at the end of September I sat by the wireless in our kitchen, listening to the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain speaking on his return from talks with Hitler, I felt part of the event as he was standing just below my roof top position. His words are now history, ‘I believe it is peace in our time’ he said waving a piece of paper. Foolish people have ever since said that he was guilty of appeasing the Dictator, but it was quite clear, even to a thirteen year old schoolboy like me that he had bought us much needed time to prepare our forces. I explained to my Mother just what the scene was like after the broadcast, forgetting that my visits to the aerodrome had been part of my private life. She was not pleased, how dare I go to such a dangerous place. The PM’s message was forgotten.
I began my third year at Ensham after Easter in 1939, during the first term I was elected by my classmates to be their representative in the school elocution competition, they thought that I spoke BBC very well! Preparations for a war went on quietly all around us. At my school our parents were summoned to an ‘important’ meeting about evacuation in the event of war and were asked to say if they agreed that their child should go. My father said no. On his return home he gave no reason for the decision, but I was very grateful. A few weeks later there was a full scale dress rehearsal of the future evacuees. They had to bring all of the things that they would take with them including any smaller brothers and sisters. The inspection took hours with the school playgrounds covered with six hundred excited pupils. We no-goes looked on in amusement.
People busied themselves learning Civil Defence, First Aid, gas masks were distributed, future air raid wardens going from house to house fitting the strange devices. Another group of people went from door to door registering the occupants and issuing identity cards, my card was number AXGB/122/3.
At the end of the term we broke up for the summer holidays. I put away my green school blazer with its gold Viking ship badge and went off for the last golden summer of my childhood.
It was a blazing hot summer and I enjoyed making an outdoor model railway track in the garden of a friend. Near the end of August I was invited to stay with some of my cousins at the seaside bungalow that an Aunt and Uncle had taken for the last month of the summer holidays. I think that the bungalow was in Rustington, anyway it was right on the South sea coast in a lovely little sleepy town. There was a nice sandy beach, a stretch of grass, then a road and on the other side their bungalow. Off I went on the Southern Electric train and the next few days on the beach in the sun were idyllic, time stood still, we had no wireless, no newspapers, but the suddenly a week had passed and it was Friday and my Uncle would be arriving for the weekend. We went over to the beach as usual in the morning, it was to be the last ‘usual’ that we were to experience for many years.
Time for lunch said my cousin Joyce and we gathered up our things and walked back to the road. When we got there we just stood and stared. Parked all along the road were red London buses and they were full of children. We stared at them and they stared at us. We’re being evacuated they shouted. But, we said, evacuation was only supposed to happen if there was a war. There’s going to be a war they shouted back. We ran back to the bungalow to give the news to my Aunt, but of course she knew and had telephoned my Uncle, they had decided that I was to go home. So next morning, Saturday 2nd September 1939, I was put on the train back to Streatham. It was a nice green liveried train of three carriages which stopped at every station before reaching Victoria in London. I got off at Streatham Common station, 10 minutes walk from home. There were only a few people on the train and I was the only passenger that got off. I walked out of the station, it was quite eerie there were no children and the road was strangely quiet. I walked along carrying my small suitcase and didn’t see anyone. I went through the little tunnel under the railway and along the wide path next to the allotments where there would normally have been a dozen children playing, still no one. A few more solitary minutes and I was home to find my Mother rushing about in a state of excitement, this always set the dog rushing about. It may have been quiet outside but it wasn’t at home.
There had been a great deal of advice for householders from the government about air raid precautions or ARP as it soon became commonly known. One suggestion was to apply adhesive paper tape diagonally across all the panes of glass in the windows of your house. This was the basic task of the day in our house and in that of our neighbours. Everyone kept running out of the sticky paper and I was kept busy going up to the shop at the top of the road to keep them supplied. The idea behind taping the glass was to try to prevent pieces of broken glass flying about if a bomb should explode nearby. We also had advice on how to protect ourselves if there should be a poison gas attack. The men of our little group of houses were busy making blanket covered frames to fit the kitchen windows. The idea being that if gas was dropped, someone ran out and drenched the blanket with water, thus keeping the gas out! Looking back I wonder if some of the advice sent out was more to keep people occupied than useful.
Although there was plenty of information available from the events of the Spanish Civil War and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia it was either ignored or wrongly applied. All the advice given out was based on the havoc wrought by short range dive bombers attacking small towns in Spain from nearby bases. London all 400 square miles of it and a long way from Germany was thankfully rather different. But everyone was happily employed all day and we all went to bed exhausted.

Sunday the 3rd of September was a brilliant day, Mr.Yarnold our next door neighbour, who was a warden of my church, told me that as so many people had gone away and that all of the choir except me had been evacuated, our church had closed and I should now go to the Parish Church, but I didn't on that day as we all just stood around the wireless waiting for news. There had been an announcement by the BBC earlier that the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain would speak to the Nation at noon. When after what seemed like an age, we heard his voice, it was to say that Britain had delivered an ultimatum to Germany at 9am that morning, they were to cease the invasion of Poland by ll.00am, or a state of war would exist between us. His thin quavering voice went on "I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that accordingly a state of war now exists between us." Just a year before I had stood in the same place before our wireless and heard him say on arriving back at Croydon Airport from his visit to Hitler, "I believe this is peace in our time." I believed then, and still do that he had worked so that we had the means to defend ourselves. Now here he was declaring war on Germany on behalf of a nation we could not possibly defend. With the knowledge of time it is interesting to note, that Poland was not restored to its pre-invasion boundaries at the end of the war. So the initial object of the hostilities was never achieved.
Within minutes of Chamberlain's words the air raid warning sirens started their stomach churning undulating wail, both our neighbouring families were in our kitchen, the men rushed about getting the antigas blanket screen up over the window and my mother rushed about all over the place blindly, with the other ladies trying to calm her down. Our dog Scamp, ran all over the place bumping into everyone and everything, thankfully the all clear sounded after a little while. We were told later it was a false alert. I walked up the road after all this for some peace and quiet and to get more tape, halfway along the way I stopped abruptly, suppose we loose, no we can not possibly loose I assured myself. I'm glad that I did not know just how close we were to come to loosing and how soon. Monday brought more turmoil, my Mother declared that so much upset had been caused by the dog the day before, that he had to be `put down'. It never occurred to her that it was she who stirred him up and she was adamant. So my poor Father had to take the dog off to the vets. I should write that I am sorry to say that I caused quite a scene. But I'm still not. In the way that young boys', do I loved my dog, I had seen him born, helping his mother when she was uncertain how to break the bag that he was in, we played for hours together once he was grown. I just stayed in my room rejecting all blandishments, doing nothing for several days, until I realised that I could not bring him back, but I made up my mind that `when I grew up' I would not use a pet as a possession.
Once we were at war a transformation took place in daily life. Everyone you met had a brown box hanging from a shoulder on a piece of cord. This held their gas mask. Such was the danger of a poison gas attack, we were told, we were never to be without our gas masks, as such an event, we were solemnly instructed, could happen at any time. The tops of pillar boxes had been coated with a greeny paint, which, so we were told, would turn red if there was poison gas about. Small comfort if you did not live near a post box and as we were used to seeing red tops on pillar boxes not likely to be noticed anyway. Soon the shops were filled with covers of all types and prices to embellish your gas mask box. Later as the boxes and their covers fell apart more sturdy containers were on sale. I acquired a metal cylinder, which was much more practical.
The mask itself was an unpleasant thing, a small metal cylinder that contained the material alleged to filter out the poison gas, to which was attached a thin sheet rubber face mask, within which was a celluloid sheet vision panel. The contraption was held onto your head by a rubber harness. As you breathed in air came through the filter but, when you breathed out it had to be with sufficient puff so as to move the rubber sheet next to your cheeks, away from your face. There was no other air exit. There were also Mickey Mouse gas masks for small children, all enveloping bags with a small air pump, to be worked by their mothers, for babies, ARP Wardens had a stronger version in a canvas sack and soldiers had a totally different arrangement that allegedly allowed running and jumping about. The gas mask industry really excelled itself, quite a feat really when no one was going to use the repulsive things
Cars at first took on a strange appearance, being required to have their front mudguards painted white and have light deflectors on their headlamp's and the reflector's within them painted black, which meant that they were useless. This did not matter because soon there was no petrol to be had. The papers carried long articles on how to lay up your car for the duration of the war. Little did owners know that it was to be at least Seven years before they could again use their cars. Traffic lights had masks that showed a semicircle of light during the day, by nightfall the beat policeman had flipped over the other part of the mask so that during darkness only a small cross of light showed. Very effective, I was amazed how brilliantly they shined out into the overall consuming blackness. A bit pointless really there wasn't any traffic.
Odd patches of ground all over London, almost overnight, became home to groups of earnest young ladies in WAAF uniforms. They had a Nissen hut to live in, beside which stood a trailer with about Thirty long gas cylinders with an octopus of tubes leading off to the object of their care, a barrage balloon. It sat within a circle of mooring points next to a firmly secured winch. The balloon itself was a smaller but plump version of the ill-fated airships of previous years. Made out of a silver coloured fabric it had built in fins at one end to keep it pointed into the wind. As they rode in place in the sky the wind blew in the rounded nose of the balloon giving the appearance of it having a face. There were hundreds of them over the whole built up area of the Capital and at an unheard command they all rose into the air, up and up until they looked like characterised children’s’ playthings. The object, of course, was to raise a barrier of wires and so force hostile aircraft to fly higher than they wanted to.
More secluded pieces of ground became home to a few anti-aircraft guns or a searchlight whose operators became very skilled at illuminating a marauding bomber. Later I often sneaked up into a freezing bedroom to view the night sky to see if the searchlights had found an aircraft. Their crews were in a very dangerous situation. They were the only people on the ground whose position was exactly defined to the bomb aimers. We were all keyed up for the promised air raids. Each night when I went to bed as I took off my clothes I laid them out carefully so that when the sirens howled I could dress quickly in the dark. I could not put the light on as we had no blackout screens or curtains in the bedrooms, my Mother declared that we could not afford them. We waited and waited but no air raids and everyone slowly fell back to their old routines. The ever vigilant ARP Wardens kept up their patrols of he streets and instead of the street traders cries there was a new one to be heard and obeyed `Put that light out'. The darkness was unbelievable, instead of a glowing sky over London there was just the moon. On moonless nights the blackness seemed to possess you. We soon learned the techniques that blind people use to protect us as we moved about.
Our cosy wireless programmes changed radically. There were no more broadcasts from France or Luxembourg and the BBC woke up from its slumber, no more National and Regional, but Home and Forces. Broadcasting now started at six in the morning and went on to eleven in the evening. Announcers and news readers were no longer anonymous, but named themselves at the start of each pronouncement. This, we were told, was so that the crafty Germans could be recognised if they broadcast imitation BBC programmes and as a great innovation, regional accents began to be heard coming from our loudspeakers.
The summer spread from September into October, I had no school to go to and no friends to play with. Although, fed up with my moaning my Mother had agreed that I could accept an offer from the greengrocers of a dog, a young black and tan terrier named Dusty. I busied myself model making and reading and in sign of a future life, I measured our house and made drawings of it. The middle of October was my fourteenth birthday and I became one of the last generation to be subjected to a strange ritual. Most schoolboys of my day wore a school blazer on top of a grey shirt, grey flannel short trousers, long wrinkled down grey socks and scrubby black shoes. Oh yes and a school tie, a stripy thing of basic colours. But, on your fourteenth birthday and thereafter you wore long grey flannel trousers.
During the first week of October I was taken by my Father to Gamages, a shop in High Holborn that seemed to sell everything. We went upstairs to the men's department, it was completely panelled in mahogany and the atmosphere was like being in church. I was put into and out of several pairs of trousers while my father and the tailor discussed the problem of fitting me, while allowing for my future growth, in sepulchral tones. At last they were satisfied and we carried off the carefully wrapped box containing the important garment. Once home, I had to go through the fitting process again for my Mothers benefit. This all successfully achieved I thought that was it. Not at all, you take those trousers off and hang them up, there are still 10 days before your birthday, on with the shorts! My 14th birthday came and went, I can't remember it at all, so I suppose the change into long trousers came as an anti-climax.

My memories of the war start when as an eight year old boy we went on holiday in late August 1939. This was in the days when annual leave was not a common privilege. In those days private cars were few and far between, father did own one however, a bull-nosed Morris that took us on day trips and holidays. We could not afford a hotel, but with one of his colleagues from work jointly rented a beach-house.
It was a long journey from Croydon, South London where we lived, particularly for a young boy and cars were much slower than today especially as there were few trunk roads and no motorways then.
Night fell when we were still some distance away. Petrol filling stations were not as common then, nor did they open the hours that they do today either. I remember the atmosphere in the car becoming more and more tense as, with the fuel gauge bumping on zero we made our way in the dark to the depths of the West Country. Our destination was the beach at Dunster in Somerset. We must have
found an open filling station somewhere because we arrived without mishap.
You can imagine our disappointment, disbelief even horror on arriving late at night, in the dark and rain to discover our beach-house which was advertised as having three bedrooms, a kitchen and a large dining area, was no more than a large single-roomed wooden hut with no running water, indeed apart from electricity, no facilities at all!
It had also claimed it was right on the sea front. That last at least, was truthful, there was nothing but sand between us and the waves! What about the advertised bedrooms, living room, kitchen etc.? Well at night curtains pulled across the single room divided the large dining area into the three bedrooms. The kitchen was an alcove off the main room and there were no toilets or washing facilities, these were situated in a communal block with showers and the tap which supplied our kettles
and cooking pots!
I seem to remember that I had a bunk bed, but privacy was almost non-existent. It was far from the standard we had been led to expect. After some discussion it was agreed than rather than pack up and go home then and then (It was very late at night), we would stay until the morning.
However next morning was bright and sunny, the ocean lapped at the front door and the prospects
seemed much brighter. After some discussion (in which I took no part!) it was decided we would stay after all. It was a memorably time, apparently I and the children of the other couple spent all our time on the beach, coming in only to eat and sleep. It was memorable for another reason too, it was during our holiday that the second world war was declared.
I vaguely remember adults clustering round a radio with long faces shushing any children making any noise, but the importance of the announcement was lost on me. The news must have thrown a shadow over our holiday, but I can not say it had much impression on me or the other children. When our holiday was up father and the other family returned home but mother and I stayed on in rented rooms in Dunster village, some two miles from the sea. Being away from Croydon meant I missed the general evacuation of children from Croydon.
Mother and I had our bicycles there (this seems odd to me now, I can not believe we had taken
them down on holiday with us. Perhaps father sent them on by rail, much used for nuaccompanied parcels in those days). We used them to go all over the county, in particular down to the sea, reached by a shallow, but very long hill. Marvellous when going to the sea, murder when returning, too long to walk, too steep to ride, at least all the way back.
Dunster was, and from what I remember the last time we went back many years later, probably
still is, a picture-postcard village with pink and cream washed cottages and blessed with a church with a clock that possessed a peal of bells that not only chimed the hours and quarters but also played a selection of tunes, day and night. One that affected my mother more than I, was “There is no place
like home”!
The house did not have electricity but was equipped with gas lighting, which was operated by a switch, using a battery in each switch. I have never seen this system before or since. Whether the battery was used to control a gas-valve, or merely light the gas flame (or both) I do not know.
I remember that whereas our garden at home was lawn and flowers, the garden at Dunster was
used exclusively for food. Chickens, fruit, potatoes and other vegetables. This usage was well established long before we came there, not as a result of the governments “Dig for Victory” campaign, a slogan later used to encourage such self-sufficiency. It was a true “cottage garden” and not one as
idealised in gardening programmes of recent years. It was strictly functional.
I particularly remember cabbages, and black-currants. The cabbages because one of my jobs was to collect the caterpillars that otherwise shredded the leaves, and the black-currants because they were used to make jam. I was also urged to weed too, and not only at home, the school garden seemed to take up a disproportionate amount of the school day (but then what else we were being prepared for?) I
remember groundsel was valued for the chickens (as were the caterpillars!) I did not mind feeding the chickens, it was a bonus.
Like all her contemporaries, the housewife with whom we were staying made her own jam,
mainly from fruit from the garden and the hoarded supplies of sugar. Everyone seemed to buy up as much as they could get. When the jam was put hot into the jars, before sealing the lids she used to put the jars on the kitchen window ledge to cool, to the great enjoyment of the local insects. They sometimes became so enthusiastic that they lost their footing. It was difficult to tell which was currant and which was fly. When mother got fed up with fishing them out, she warned me not to eat
home-made jam when it was subsequently served.
Since the war lasted more than the few months expected at the time, I went to the village school, which was a great shock to me. Although there are differences between schools these days, it was far greater then. Whereas the aim of schooling in London was to turn out citizens who (mostly) could read, write and have at least a reasonable standard of numeracy, suitable for shop assistants or clerks, the aim of the village school seemed far lower, mainly to turn out obedient farm
workers who knew their place.
Although competence in reading, writing and arithmetic was indeed a goal, it was hardly
expected of all students. One thing that I can justly claim I owe to the school was impetigo, which despite many visits to the local doctor went undiagnosed at the time, but was recognised (and cured) immediately I returned to Croydon.
After a year or so, mainly because my medical condition was getting worse and partly because
the air raids had not occurred with the predicted ferocity, we eventually returned home, in time to experience the start of the “Doodle-bugs”, or V1’s. Although crude, they were so fast the fighters of the day (Spitfires and Hurricanes) could not catch them in level flight.
They made a quite distinctive noise and we soon grew to recognise them and took no action until
the engine cut out, when everyone immediately dived for cover. They would glide for a short while (which generally gave enough warning), before hitting the ground and exploding. After some months they started to be fitted with a device which made them dive whilst the engine was still running. Sneaky!
Because the ground is higher where I lived, and it was on the direct route to London, the area
around Croydon suffered greatly from these unpleasant devices. Later we were subjected to V2’s (rockets). Unlike normal bombers and V1’s, the air raid sirens were unable to give any warning. V2’s
travelled so fast they exceeded the speed of sound and in those days there was no means of detecting them.
Following an entirely unexpected explosion, you would hear a rumbling echo, which was their
wake catching them up. It was said at the time that if you heard them coming, you were all right, it was only if you didn’t, that you (or your relatives) had problems. Fortunately, from my own selfish personal point of view, Croydon suffered less from these than the V1’s, partly because their launch
sites were being overrun by our forces.
However most of the damage I knew about was caused by bombers dropping high explosive or
incendiary bombs. Some were fitted with time-delay fuses, which caused even more disruption than those which exploded on impact. They could not be left, threatening a factory or houses, but had to be dug up and defused if possible. Whilst this was going on the inhabitants of the houses or factories were
evacuated, causing disruption.
I remember some peculiar and decidedly odd effects of bomb blast on houses, two in particular.
In one case a bomb had fallen during the night on a house in a nearby street, but I took a long time finding it next morning. The reason was that the front of the house was still complete, there was no visible damage, even the tiles on the roof and the very glass in the windows was unbroken and the curtains still hanging behind them, but unbelievably, from there on back there was nothing but rubble!
There were no centre dividing walls between the front and rear rooms, and no rear wall either. The house had been completely disembowelled!
I can’t explain how it occurred. It was not that the house had been damaged in a previous raid and the authorities had pulled down any dangerous structure, it had all happened in an instant during the previous night. The other occasion was almost the reverse, the front and centre walls had gone but
left the rear wall intact. This was not quite so amazing, all the glass in the remaining windows had broken.
Two types of shelter were issued, the type we were given was the Anderson, it assembled into a
curved tunnel-like corrugated steel structure about six foot long, about the same in width and five feet or so high in the centre. It was half-buried in the garden, the soil dug out was placed over the shelter as additional protection. Sand bags were put a little way in front of the entrance to divert direct blast
from that direction. There was just room for four bunks, two upper and two lower with space to walk between. It always suffered from damp and was liable to flood when it rained. Ours was later lined with concrete to keep the ground water at bay.
During the worst of the blitz we slept in the shelter every night and at first ran there during the day when the sirens warned of an air raid, later the warning sirens merely put us into a higher state of alert and we stayed out, but ready to run when we heard the approaching enemy aircraft or V1’s. Apart
from well-shielded torches it had no lighting of course, especially as the “Black-out” meant that even a candle exposed to the night was liable to bring down the wrath of the wardens. The cars and lorries,including military vehicles had their headlights covered by a metal mask with louvers which allowed
only a glimmer of light through, barely enough to see it coming, what it must have been like to drive I hate to think. Not that it bothered me then!
There were also communal shelters built of brick with a reinforced concrete roof. Although
stronger than normal buildings they were not sufficient to protect against a direct hit, but they did guard against bomb blast and the debris from anti-aircraft shells, commonly called ‘shrapnel’. I used to go
out most mornings looking for it. It came of course from the anti-aircraft guns of which there were several batteries on waste ground and parks in the neighbourhood. The other deterrent was the barrage balloons, although we could see several in the sky around, there were none based close to us. I think they were intended to make the bombers fly too high for precision aiming.
The bark of the guns, the thud of the shells exploding high overhead mingled with the distinctive drone of aircraft made sleeping in the shelter during the raids impossible, but it only became more than a nuisance to me when a bomber released a stick of bombs. If they were close one could hear the whine as they came down and we listened for the succession of explosions; hopefully (selfishly) getting
quieter as they receded, or as happened on one occasion landed one either side of our house,
fortunately a hundred yards or so away.
Still I was a child and as a child accepted this as normal. That is how things were. At that age I just did not realise the dangers I lived through. Except perhaps once. My father and I were alone in the shelter when we heard a VI cut out. In the silence that followed it flew closer until we could hear the air rushing over its wings. It got louder and louder, we were sure it was coming right on top of us.
Father grabbed me tightly and pulled me down, then the sound inexplicably faded and a few seconds later we heard it explode as it destroyed a nearby house.
I also remember that metal street fittings, notably house and park railings were taken away. Aluminium saucepans and other items were collected for the war effort. I remember taking a wheel barrow round searching out such ‘scrap’. I can’t help feeling now that it was more psychological than
practical. I must also mention gas masks, we were all issued them, they smelled musty and rubbery,were uncomfortable to wear and allowed only limited vision. They were kept in square cardboard cartons with string to hang round our necks and had to be taken everywhere with us, although later I don’t remember being unduly restricted going to school or roaming the streets and parks. Mine had a protective Rexene cover, probably made by mother.
Father’s health was such that he did not go into the armed forces. Prewar he was in the print butwas re-trained as a turner and sent to work in Grantham, a town which later produced one of our PrimeMinisters, though I do not hold him personally responsible. Due to continual health problems he later returned to Thornton Heath where he worked in a precision engineering factory in near-by Mitcham.
He joined the Air Raid Wardens and amongst the friends he made at that time was a young
solicitor who was of use to me professionally in later life. To increase his income, badly hit by the change in circumstances, we rented a room for a while to a young police constable. Mother also worked although pre-war she had been a full time housewife, most women were called up for essential work, for a time she worked as a typist in the same factory that also employed my father.
Later in the war several relatives lost their homes in air raids and two great-aunts came to live with us for a while. Still later my maternal grandfather also came to stay after he suffered a stroke that affected one whole side. I remember he was a big man and mother found it difficult to manhandle him with his lack of mobility, however I remember he married again and went to livc with his new wife in
Hove.
At my age the war didn’t make as much of an impression on me as my parents, they tried,
successfully, to shield me from the worst, we were very fortunate that we were spared any real damage to our house and immediate family. There were shortages and food rationing of course, and we ate different food from that my parents would have chosen otherwise, perhaps that is why I developed a liking for corned beef even after real meat became more readily available. I know my parents found that rather odd. But I accepted things, that is how they were and to my mind, always had been.
I remember the garden was converted into an allotment and we grew some of our own food,
particularly tomatoes and I remember we sometimes used to make a meal of them , cut up with salt, pepper and vinegar. I didn’t miss bananas (there was a popular song at the time;- “Yes we have no bananas....”) I must have had them pre 1939 but I had completely forgotten them and remember disappointing my mother when I was not enthusiastic about the first one I tried when they did come back into the shops. One thing that I still retain is horror at the thought of throwing away edible food.
We didn’t have television of course, nobody did, but we listened to the radio avidly. Not only the news but the midday music programmes broadcast from works canteens around the country and comedies, like, ‘I.T.M.A.’ (Its That Man Again, with Tommy Handley Colonel Chinstrap and all). I remember being glued to my chair during episodes of ‘Dick Barton - Special Agent’! The papers were also affected by rationing, becoming very thin, although of course I don’t remember them pre-war.
The papers and the cinema, the Gaumont British and Pathé news reels, provided the pictures of the war that are now shown on TV. The news those days was far less immediate (and censored too, in ways that would be impossible now).
For me life continued in much this way until the war with Germany eventually ended with a great deal of celebration, tinged by the fact that the war against Japan was still continuing, until that too finished.
We had celebrations then too, but rather more muted as the war with Japan seemed less immediate, unless you had friends or relations fighting there, which we didn’t. We didn’t have streets parties in our area, but I remember the victory celebrations well. Rationing and food shortages didn’t end then, but continued for some years afterwards, the end of sweet rationing in particular took a very long time coming.