High Explosive Bomb at Brampton Road

Keith Ranger — Wartime Memories Part One

Q: Can you tell me about your childhood during the war?
A: When war broke out I was 3 years old — I can’t remember much about the declaration.

Q: What were your first memories — can you remember gas masks?
A: I remember gas masks — I don’t think I had a Mickey Mouse one — my wife had a Mickey Mouse one, unfortunately she hasn’t kept it — but I know I had a gas mask and would have to go to school with gas mask over my shoulder and as we walked to school we used to pick up pieces of shrapnel, they were pieces of bombs or bullets. they used to be lying all over the road and we used to prize these if you found a nice bright silvery one they were quite treasured at school.

Q: Where were you living?
A: I lived in London. I lived near Finsbury Park, I lived on the other side of Finsbury Park to the Arsenal ground — that’s on one side and I lived on the other side of the park. I didn’t support Arsenal actually I support Tottenham Hotspur because my father was a season ticket holder at Tottenham, he actually went to White Hart Lane school so my father supported Tottenham so I supported Tottenham - whereas most of my friends supported Arsenal naturally being so close to the Arsenal ground.

It might be interesting for young people to know that the Arsenal actually shared a ground with Tottenham during the war — the Arsenal ground was commissioned by the Army — so Arsenal didn’t have a ground in those days, they used to share the ground with Tottenham and used to go along to Tottenham every Saturday because there was always a game — one week it would be Tottenham and next week it would be Arsenal at the Tottenham ground. When you went to see the games you didn’t know quite who would be playing — sometimes it was someone called ‘A.N.Other’ because they weren’t quite sure who was going to be playing, and often you would get people like Corporal so and so and one of my favourites was Sgt. Ditchburn — Ted Ditchburn who used to play in goal at Tottenham, he was a Sgt. On the programme it cost a penny I think it used to be Sgt. Ditchburn playing goal for Tottenham.

Q: Did your dad work?
A: My father worked in Smithfield Market and therefore was a reserved occupation but he had to go into London, most nights he’d come home from work got a little sleep then go back into London into the City into Smithfield and do some fire watching which was looking out for enemy aircraft, he also had to fight the blaze and repair the damage which was incurred on London during the blitz, he was in fact quite lucky towards the end of the war there were things called V2 rockets, these came after the V1 rockets, I’ll explain more about those in a moment.

The V2 you didn’t know when they were going to come they were very quick and they were the forerunner really of space travel, a lot of these people that worked on the V2 rockets were taken by the British and Americans after the war and worked on space programmes, but these rockets came across and just plunged into a town without any thought as to who they were going to hit, they weren’t targeted in any particular place.
One fell on the market itself and smashed it to smithereens, many people were killed and badly injured in that raid but my father was very fortunate in that respect because although he was in the market at the time the blast went around him because he was behind a very big pillar which held up the market and from the market there used to be a little underground railway where they used to transport the mail and the blast when it hit also travelled underneath the ground which is why it caused so many casualties and so much damage, so my father was very lucky that night. I did have picture of the market after it got hit and my eldest son actually gave it away — he gave it to someone who was doing a history of Smithfield Market and my son thought it would be very interesting to him and I haven’t seen it since, I’m not sure where that photograph is now. But it’s a rather famous photograph of the whole market in fire and collapsed buildings. It might be interesting because my wife’s father he also was in that sort of thing at one time, he did fire watching also in London until he went into the Army and went over to India but they lived in the East End, my wife’s family all come from the East End, they got very badly bombed and their house was a few that was still standing and when my father-in-law had to go to work or to go fire watching or whatever he often had to tread across all the people that were asleep in the hallway of the house to get to the front door.

I lived in London, near Finsbury Park and also near Haringey Arena. You have probably heard of Haringey which is not receiving good press at the moment, but when I lived there there used to be an Arena and a Stadium unfortunately neither are there anymore but they used to have the big boxing competitions in the Arena, even the world championships were fought in the Arena and the Stadium was next to it and they used to have speedway and greyhound racing and so on. But during the War the Arena was taken over by American troops so there were lots of Yanks around and we used to scrounge chewing gum from them, “Have you got any gum chum?” and invariably they used to give us the chewing gum and they used to give us rides in the tanks around the area.

Also the other side of Finsbury Park near Highbury Stadium was the main line out of Kings Cross so these were two areas very strategically placed for the Germans to attack so we used to have quite a lot of bombing and attacks on us and when it got quite bad, Mum decided we should be evacuated but we were evacuated to Chalfont St Giles, unfortunately Mum didn’t like it very much as it was very lonely and we were on a farm and coming from an area of London she was very lonely and there was just her and I and the people that owned the farm and after three weeks only we decided to go back to London and take our chances really. We lasted longer than my wife. She was evacuated to Peterborough and lasted ten days and they couldn’t stand it either, so they went back to London.

So when we went back to London we went back to our own house and because the raids were so bad we got, I don’t know if we had to buy them in those days or we were given them by the Government, but we had a shelter called a Morrison shelter and this was like a cage, a reinforced cage which stayed in the bedroom really and I used to sleep most of the time in this cage thing but if it got really bad, if the bombing got bad, my Mum and Dad used to get in it as well, which left my Nan, who lived with us, upstairs. If it got really bad, we had to take other action, and the action we took was to go to next door, because next door had a shelter called an Anderson shelter and this shelter was actually built in the garden. It was a very small garden that we had and it was back to back houses so the gardens were very small but they had the Anderson built in the garden and they were very kind to us and we used to have to get into this Anderson shelter so there were quite a few of us in there. So to get there we had to climb over the garden wall because we had a brick wall that separated the garden houses as you did in those days, there was a 4ft brick wall. We had to climb over this wall and not only was there a wall but because we didn’t have much food in those days even though my Dad worked in Smithfield we were rationed, so what my father did was to build some chicken runs all round the garden, and as I say, it wasn’t a very big garden, so we built these chicken runs around the garden and we also had some rabbit hutches, we used to keep rabbits on the top, so we had to climb over the wall and the chicken run and rabbit hutches to get to next doors garden to get into their shelter and my Grandmother as well so there was not only next doors family, the mother and father and their son, who was in fact my bestman when I got married. There were those three and there was all of us that got into this Anderson shelter until the all clear went and then we clambered back over the wall again into our own house.

Q: So, how often did this occur, that you had to go next door?
A: Probably two or three times a week we had to climb over the wall. It depended on the seriousness of the raid really, as you know the siren went and you would know that the bombers would start dropping, so you got prepared for that so you instinctively new if it was going to be a bad one or it was going to be just a few sort of recognisance aircraft may be dropping a few flares or something, as I say we used to go in there and pull the door shut and take our chances really. But not only did we have chickens and rabbits and we also thought we should have a duck and that would be nice for a Sunday lunch or something so we bought this duck, I can’t remember where we got it from now, I think Porterbella market we got it from. So we got this bath and sunk it in the ground at the end of the garden and put Donald the Duck in the thing, so he lasted as we just couldn’t kill him as we just didn’t have the heart to kill him, we used to kill the rabbits and the chickens and eat them but we just didn’t have the heart to kill Donald and he died of old age quite a long while after the war had finished.

Q: Presumably the chickens gave you eggs as well?
A: Oh, the chickens gave us eggs as well and things that I can remember was Mum making up the food for them and all the stuff used to go in the big pot and she used to buy some stuff to mix with it and this feed the chickens and the rabbits and also Donald of course, he was quite plump when he passed away.

Keith Ranger — Wartime Memories Part Two

Q: Can you remember how you felt when you were in the shelters, because you were quite young weren’t you?
A: Yeah, this is something I have firmly believe in that when you are young, if you see this sort of thing going on around you, you don’t really realise there is anything else in life. When I see people in Iraq or not so much Iraq but certainly in Ireland when the troubles were bad there. The young people, people thought wasn’t it terrible if they were throwing stones or something but if you were bought up in that environment you really don’t know anything else. You don’t know that there is a better life because that is the life you live with so you don’t know anything else. I was quite happy with my childhood I thought it was great.

Q: Can you remember any other changes in the house? So for instance, what happened if you showed a light?
A: We did get partially bombed. A bomb fell quite close to us, in fact it demolished some houses not faraway from us and the blast actually blew out our windows and took some slates of the roof. So I remember for sometime we had it just boarded up. It was quite interesting because next door to us that was even nearer to the bad blast was, they had their roof taken off. The roof was very badly damaged in that house as well and in 1984 I think it was, they finally got around to putting a new roof on, no sorry the new roof was put on prior to that. I think the new roof was put on in about 1980 or something. But unfortunately the roof that they repaired, they put on concrete tiles so they put these concrete tiles that you see on modern houses these days, but our house was quite an old one and we had the old fashioned slates on which weren’t quite as heavy as the concrete tiles and my mother and father were still living there in 1984 and I used to go back and see them because I lived in Berkhamsted then and the front of next doors house started to bow and I said to my mother and father that doesn’t look very safe and I was around there one day and there was an almighty crash and the concrete tiles proved to be too heavy for the roof and the whole roof just collapsed through, so it was just like being in the war again. Fortunately the woman that lived there was in the back of the house so she wasn’t hurt. I lost my grandfather in the first World War, but my Nan for many years lived on her own and I was the only one until after the war when my brother came along, I used to go and sleep with my Nan a lot of the time when the raids weren’t too bad and she used to sing me the old London songs and that is where I got the interest in musical hall. The favourite song I used to like was ‘Strolling along down the Mile End Road’. My Nan used to sing it every Saturday night and I have still have got that interest in the old time music hall. I belong to a group in Berkhamsted that does old time music halls for charity, we raised I think £4,000 about four, five months ago, so I love the old songs and I also like music and try to play the keyboard as well, so I think I have got that interest from those times as well.

My Mother used to do some War work as well along with my Nan as well. They used to make clothes for the troops. They were both good machinists and we had two singer machines in the house and they used to make clothes. One of the things they used to make a lot of were the khaki ties and the RAF ties and I don’t know if you know, but the ties are made inside out and when you make them you make them inside out and then you have a stick which you put in it and push one end and it goes in and it turns them the right way round and that was my job. Nan and Mum used to make these ties and I used to have this special stick and used to have to push these sticks through the ties to put them the right way round. So that was what they used to make mostly, they used to make shirts as well but mostly ties.

Q: Did they have to collect the material from someone?
A: That I can’t remember. I can’t remember where they got the material from it just suddenly appeared and I don’t know where they went but I know they used to make these ties and the shirts at home.

And the other thing that my Mum used to do, which I have got an interest in is Maps because after the D Day landings of course, Mum and I used to plot the advance of the British and American and Canadian troops and so on as they advanced through Europe. So we used to have this big map of Europe on the dining room table every morning and we used to listen to the news and we used to try and pick out the towns that the troops advanced into. I used to enjoy seeing the advance of the troops and Mum and I used to draw this line on this map of Europe to see where they advanced from and of course we also invaded Italy and we used to plot the advance of the troops along from the bottom of Italy. We used to plot the Russians coming in from the East of course, so we had three advances on Berlin, that’s were I got the interest in maps from, I have always had that interest and that stems from those days as well.

As I said to you, we had quite a lot of bombing around the area and there was one area that was particularly badly hit and a number of houses, perhaps 10 or 12 houses, were almost completely demolished and it was left like this for a long while. So at the end of the war we had lots of wood for a bonfire night so we had this big celebration after the war and there was plenty of wood because there was a lot wood on the houses like the staircases and the furniture and the window frames so we had an enormous big bonfire with a big guy on the top. So we set light to this bonfire and there was not restrictions in those days but the bonfire was so enormous that unfortunately that the heat was so intense it burnt the paint off of the house that had in fact survived the blast which were on the other side of the road, how they survived I don’t know but that is one of the peculiarities of bombing and all sorts of peculiar things happened. But the whole paint was burnt of the houses so we had to make a quick retreat but I remember people came out to through water on the bonfire but it took some time to douse the fire because it was so intense, the heat.

The other thing that I remember, in Finsbury Park itself, I don’t know if any of you know the park it is a venue now for a lot of concerts, pop concerts, it is a big venue but I can remember it because I used to go and kick a ball around and knock conkers off the trees that were there of course. But also during the war it had barrage balloons, these were balloons that were filled with light gas, you have probably seen pictures of them. They were suspended in the air, the idea was the planes would get caught up in the wire and they would get hit the barrage balloons but to my knowledge they didn’t work very well. But also they other thing they had in there was the anti aircraft guns. So not only did we have the noise of the aircraft’s but we also had the noise in the nights of the anti aircraft guns trying to shoot the aeroplanes down. But then of course the Germans stopped sending aircraft’s over then they started send the V1 rockets called doodlebugs and these things used to come over and they were quite slow but we knew they were coming because the noise of the engines you could hear them coming and they would stop and then Mum used to pray that it wouldn’t hit us and fortunately it didn’t. But of course it was a terrible time when the engine stopped and you just hopped that it wasn’t going to hit you. But when the V2’s came they were much quicker and you didn’t hear them coming and you didn’t know they were coming until you were hit and that was much worse. Perhaps it wasn’t worse were you didn’t have the suspense it was going to drop on you and it was worse when the engine stopped almost above you, it seemed as though it stopped almost above your house.

Q: Can you tell me how you used your ration book?
A: The ration books, well I didn’t do much shopping as I was too young but Mum used to take great care over the ration book because when you went into buy your whatever it was, your groceries because very often you were rationed as to how much you could have like margarine or bacon and you had points and those of you of have seen Dads Army and Corporal Jones in his butchers shop received the points on the customers and they had special customers that received just a little bit more. These ration books continued until after the war. You have probably heard people say that they never saw a banana, well I never saw a banana but I saw these imitation bananas used to hang up in these grocery shops and I never could understand what these things were because you never saw bananas and I have made up for it since because I quite like bananas.

Q: How did you think changed after the war? Because you were used to life during the War although to everyone else they would have been going back to times before the War.
A: I just think you though it was your lot you didn’t think that it was strange or anything. The end of the War was declared the War in Europe was declared over, the War in Japan was declared over and you just continued your life really, the only difference was that there was no one trying to kill you really.

Q: You didn’t have to carry gas masks?
A: No, you didn’t have to carry gas masks anymore. Wish I had kept them really know because they are quite valuable especially the mickey mouse ones.

Q: Do you remember the Morrison shelter leaving the house.
A: No not really, I think I can remember the Anderson shelter next door being taken away and I could also remember after the War the prefabricated houses being put up. Where I mentioned earlier on when we had the big bonfire and the houses were completely destroyed, that was eventually flattened and prefabricated houses were put on it. You can still see a prefabricated house in the Chiltern open air museum. These prefabricated houses were only supposed to last for a certain time, five or six years, but people were still living in them 20, 30 years after the War I think. In Lancashire, they are still living in them.

Home From Home. by Jim Hepting.

The story of one child's experience of the Blitz
and finally evacuation during the second World War.

My name is Jim. I was one of a family of 13 children,all born between 1923 and 1945. I was born in January 1934 and attended my first
infants school in 1939. After attending there for
a year I began to hear rumours from some of the teachers that we may all be evacuated at some stage, as a direct result of the declaration of war with Germany. Just before I was about to leave the school one afternoon I saw a big lorry drive up to the main gate. There were men on the back of the lorry in uniform, women also. They unloaded a massive silvery looking object into
the playground. When we all arrived at school the following morning we were amazed to see a large silver balloon floating above the school.
It was our first sight of what we later found out to be a barrage balloon, which was going to be a defence against the German airplanes that were expected to carry out air raids on london.

We all stood gazing at this massive balloon which
was going to be a permanent feature in our playground, at least until it was sent soaring high into the sky with it's thick wire cables
holding it to the ground.It had three half round tail pieces on the back which were keeping it in one place. On the ground it was being controlled by several people, including woman, all in uniform. One day while we were all sitting in the classromm there was an almighty crash on the school roof as the balloon had blown out of control as it was being lowered in a strong wind.

We all thought that a bomb had hit the school, as there were tiles and pieces of stonework all falling into the playground. I have never heard such a loud noise. I never felt too safe at all after that incident. The school was,Stamford Hill
infant and junior school, Seven Sisters Rd,Tottenham,London N15. That incident may well still be on record in the local town hall archives.

One Monday morning when we were all in the assembly hall, our headmaster, Mr Crabb,informed us all that we may all have to be evacuated to the countryside if it were considered that London would be a main target for the Luftwaffe,
The German airforce.

Months passed and there was no sign of German planes. My father had joined up as an Air Raid
Warden, and my eldest brother joined up at 17 years of age into the Army. He eventually finished up in the Airborne division. Another brother joined the Merchant Navy. They both looked very smart in their uniforms, and I used to look forward to them coming home on leave.
My father's Warden post was not far from our house and my mother used to take him some sandwiches and a jug of tea when he was on duty.
I used to go and see him quite regularly. He was always playing cards with his other warden friends.

Everything remained peaceful and quiet for the next few months. It was difficult to believe that we were at war at all. Then, one day, as we all sat at our desks in the school classroom we
heard the air raid warning siren begin to wail.
We had heard it before, mainly when they were testing and practising in the event of an air raid.

This was for real, we all heard the intermittent drone of the German bombers high overhead on this particular day and the teachers herded us all into a concrete air raid shelter in the corner of the girl's playground. We sat in there and just listened. There seemed to be many bombers in the sky, but our school barrage balloon was not high enough at that stage to do
any real harm. I will never forget the noise of
those German planes, but fortunately all of their bombs fell pretty wide of our school. We could hear the strange whistle as the bombs screamed earthwards, then there came the explosions in the distance. this went on for approximately half an hour before we heard the sound of the all clear. That raid made me really frightened that day.

On the same night as that we were all indoors
keeping ourselves amused listening to a speech by Adolf Hitler, on an old Cossor radio that had a very large battery in the back and an accumulator. I never knew what the accumulator did or what purpose it served. The radio was quite crackly but we all listened to the ranting and raving of this German, who they called the Fuhrer.

On this same night the air raid warning sounded again and after about 5 minutes we heard the dreaded drone of the German planes again. This was now about 10 o/clock at night and my mother rushed us all out into the back garden and into an Anderson air raid shelter made of corrigated iron.
It was half buried in earth and was right at the back of the garden. Everybody had them deliverd months before the air raids, but we never really expected to have to use them

Being such a big family we couldn't all get in, so the neighbours either side of us lifted some of us
over their fences and we stayed in their shelters until the all clear sounded. This night raid was more frightening to me as a child because I hated
the dark anyway, and we could not have any form of light on because of the Blackout rules. It was pitch black, cold and wet in our shelter

Then all of a sudden there was a massive explosion
which sounded very near. the ground shook, and you could hear lumps of metal hitting the roofs of the nearby houses. It was shrapnel, fragments of the bombs flying everywhere as they exploded. All oif a sudden my old mum started singing, and one of my brothers played the mouth organ, and we finished up a lot more cheerful then. The bombs just kept exploding everywhere, and you could see the sky light up with a orange red glow as the buildings and
factories went up in flames. This went on night after night, after the initial daylight raids, so my
mum decided that next time a night raid came we would get to the Manor House underground station,
as it was safer there.

We arrived there carrying old blankets and sheets and made our way down to the station platform.
I will always remember those people already down there. just lying around on makeshift beds. One man
was playing a piano accordion and many of them were singing along with him. People of all ages, and all backgrounds all joined in together.I recall lying awake all night wondering if a bomb was going to fall and bury us all alive. That was my biggest fear down the under ground. During the day all the kids would be out searching for pieces of shrapnel
from the bombs and anti aircraft shells that were fired at the german planes all throughout the raid.
But it was a waste of time because they were too high to hit. Barrage balloons were flying everywhere. The whole sky was covered with them.

My mother had had now had enough of London and the terrible danger of remaining there during these raids so she finally decided that we would all be evacuated. I was sent to Cornwall, a little village named Goonhavern, where i lived with a very nice family, named Eplett. My mother went with the youngest children to Luton in bedfordshire. My father stayed in London, as he had a job to do as an air raid warden. In fact we were scattered all over the country. One in Norfolk, another two in South Wales. In late 1944, just before the war ended I returned to London. While i had been away a V2 rocket had decimated a whole area of the road I
lived in, Tewkesbury Rd, Tottenham N15. My mother lost two of her best friends when a flying bomb had fallen on Broadwater Road,Tottenham. It is now the site of the Broadwater Road Estate. As I looked around at the bomb sites all over the place I was glad we had been evacuated from the worst of the Blitz. Our own house had every pane of glass smashed out dut to the rocket blast, but they had been boarded up until the war damage companies got round to repairing everything. My Dad told me he had slept in the warden's post most nights when it was quiet. When all the family were re-united at the end of the war we all felt like strangers to each other as we had been split up for so long.
I am glad to say we all finished up safe and sound.
Ours was a happy story, although it did take us all
some time to re-adjust to our virtual slum surroundings after living in more comfortable homes
during evacuation.

Jim Hepting

My name is Eileen Blancenay aged 14 years, I lived with my mother and sister Joyce in an old fashioned, gas-lit three roomed flat at 106 Bury Road, Wood Green, London N.22. We had been given this flat in February 1941 after being bombed out of our house in September 1940 in which father was killed.
I left school at Easter and worked as an office junior for a firm in Holborn Hall, Gray's Inn Road, London WC1 treavelling to the City every day by tube from Turnpike Lane.
The first time I heard a "Doodlebug" was one night during early June. I was in bed when I heard what I thought was an aeroplane. It woke me up but the siren hadn't gone. It seemed very loud and then the engine stopped and a short time after there was an explosion and I just thought the plance ahd been dameged and just come down. I heard nothing else and went back to sleep.
This then st the pattern. I still went up to London every day. We were on the top floor of our building and when we hear a "Doodlebug" coming we all used to go out in the corridor, we never had time to go down to the basement. When I used to come out of the tube station at night on my way home, you could be sure that the siren would go on the corner opposite andthen it was a toss-up whether I stayed in the station or went home. I sued to run the gauntlett along the High Road, Wood Green passed the shops, downa samll road and then down my road which was at the back of the High Roadshops and our flat was the last one at the end of the road. Opposite our flat, under some trees, was a brick-built surface shelter. One night the siren was just going as I came out toe the tube but I decided to chance the run. I ran along the High Road just as the siren was dying away and I could hear the "Doodlebug" coming, m y heart was thumping, nobody else was around. I turned into my road, the 'thing' was overhead but I couldn't look up at it. The silence was terrible all I could hear were my footsteps and as it exploded I went straight into the shelter wall instead of the doorway but at lease I was in one piece.
The shelter was our home for about three months. It was full every night. My married sisster Ivy and her three children came to stay with us as her husband was in the Army. The "Doodlebug" never stopped me going to the pictures, which I did about threee nights a week with my friedn Pam. We'd rather have died watching our favourite film stars than stay at home. They used to put up a notice in the cinema to say the the siren had gone but nobody ever left.
Pam, my friend, lived in Westbeech Road the next road to where I lived. When we left each other on the corner after the pictures we used to say see you later in the shelter. First of all when I got home I would change into my shelter clothes, these were old clothes kept especially for this purpose because we couldn't undress into night clothes, except for the small children, because of all the people who slept in the shlter and anyway it kept us warmer also we had differenct clothes to wear during the day. We used to put our hair in curlers and then put on a "snood" (it was a crocheted hair net made with wool) which al the girls wore, especially in the factories.
The shelter had three tiered wooden bunks and Pam and I had the op ones next to each other. We brought our blankets and pillows and we really enjoyed it and we talked and laughted until we were told to go to sleep by everybody else. The light was kept on all night but we got used to sleeping like that but the bunks were hard and often we longed for our own beds. One night when we'd been sleeping like this for some time, much to my mother's horror, I decided to stay home and sleep in my own bed and although it was a bad night, I let through it but I ached so much the next morning I could harley get out of bed, so back to the shelter.
There was a "ddoodlebug" dropped in Hornsey which wasn't far away and Pam and I were jokingly saying it would be our turn next. A few nights later early in the evening, a beautiful sunny evening, I was standing outside our flat with Ivy my sister just looking down the road and I remarked to her that the road looked so nice with not a window broken and all the houses intact.
That night we were al asleep in the shelter, the siren had gone and it must have gone 12am when all of a sudden this "doodlebug" was coming and it was so loud and very near and when it seemed overheadthe engine cut-out and that long silence whcih always made me hold by breath. The explosion was very near, the shelfter shook and a pebble fell of f the ceiling. Nobody moved for quite a few minutes, we all seemed frighttened to go outside. One of the women in the shelter accused Pam and I of making it happen buecause of our joiking a few days before but I suppose she was shocked and it couldn't possibly have been true. Anyway I said to my Mum give me the key and I'll go over to see if the flat was alreight. She had a jot to find the key but eventually I went outside. The whole street was covered in broken glass and grey slats off the roofs. I got to the flat and went throught the gateway which was covered in glass and found the font door was laying in the passage so I din't need the key. I wondered where our cat Tibby was. He usually slept on my bed but the wardrobe was lying across the bed and Tibby was nowhere to be seen. The only windows not broken were in my bedroom at the back of the flat as they had been open a bit. I left the flat and walked down the road and by then two great big lights had been erected on the roof of Marks and Spencers to shin on the appalling mess of the houses opposite. The Manager's of Marks and Spencers and Woolworths were soon down as they had there back doors blown off and were frightened their goods would have disappeared. People were too busy for that. It was the most eerie sight you could imagine, the centres of tow roads had been lasted. The "ddodlebug" had fallen in the back gardens between Bury Road and Westbeech Road and blasted ouwards on both sides of each road. The two spot lights lit up a scene of terrible devistation. There was a little boy of three killed. Hed had fair curly hair and I used to watch him ride his three-wheeled bike around the block. Other people were killeed and injured and two girls I knew had black eyes and bruises and also their mother was injured as their house was next to the demolished ones adn eventually had to be taken down because it was beyond repair. They were taken to a rest centre.
When the morning came at last we were so busy clearing up that we forgot about my sister's children who we'd left in the shelter and it wasn't until they came toddling out that we remebered them. My old grandad, agaed 89 years, lived in Westbeech Road and his house was very badly damaged and they had to take him to a rest centre but he protested so much because he didn't want to leave his house and within a week he died. We don't know whether it was shock or fear of not being allowed to go home again because of his age.
I was coming home from work three days later when I found my road cordoned off again and a policeman on duty there. He asked me where I was going and I said I lived there and he told me to hurry pass the demolished house as they had just found another two bodies in the wreckage and were just going to get them out. Nobody knew they were there. It was a widow and her son og about twelve, I'd seen them about and I always felt sorry for them as they seemed alone just the two of them and thats how they were found clasped in each others arms. They han't lived in our road long so nobody knew them.
At the end of the first day all the damaged houses in the two roads had temporary repairs. Our house has a tarpaulin on the roof and we had black carboard material in the bottom half of the window and sort of white muslin at the top but is didn't give us much light unless we opened our windows.
The cat came back after a couple of days, he must have been hiding somewhere, he wan't injured nor were his paws cut by glass.
One of the last "doodlebugs" to fall in Wood Green was on a Saturday afternoon in the Autumn. I fell in Farrant Aveneu, where my Aunt Flo and Uncle Andrew lived. Theire daughter Joan managed to dive in the table shelter which saved her from serious injury as they lived a few doors along from the devastated houses. My Aunt was in the little corner sub-Post Office in Salisbury Road when the "doodlebug" was coming and the postmaster invited her the other side of the counter so they could shelter underneath it. Good job he did as the windows got blasted. We gave shelter to Aunt and Unclea and Joan in our flat for a few months while there house was extensively repaired.

A V." rocket fell in Gladstone Avenue in the Autumn of 1944 a few streets away and I think if we'd had a lot more of these things, I think our morale would have broken. We got used to the "doodlebugs" which at least you could hear and take appropriate action but the rockets were silent and this made them more terrifying. The rockets seemed to cause more devistation and windows were broken over a wider area.
Fortunately, the victory in Europe came before too many of these things were launched.

We were too young to understand,
Each battle fought, the bitter cost,
So many husbands, fathers, sons,
Before our innocence was lost.

The train from Tottenham Hale station took us to March, Cambridgeshire, where we were met at the station by some very nice WVS ladies who gave each of us a warm welcome, a packet of digestive biscuits, a bar of chocolate and a tin of corned beef to tide us over the weekend. Once again we were loaded onto coaches and paraded round endless council estates trying to offload us onto anyone willing to take us in. No-one seemed to want my sisters and me, either they didn't like the look of me or, being unwilling to separate, we were too much to take on. It was quite late in the evening when they managed to persuade a Mrs Saunders to have us ''just for the weekend, but they must be gone by Monday". I remember thinking "that's all right; we are going home on Monday". Poor lady, that night she put us to bed, all three of us in one bed and I, who had scoffed a whole packet of biscuits, a bar of chocolate and a tin of corned beef, was heartily sick over the bed clothes and just to cap it I wet the bed. Mrs Saunders was delighted when Monday came; that was the day the war started so there was no way we were going home, London was far too dangerous. I was getting a bit fed up with the whole thing by then until we were taken to our next home, 29 Peashill Road, where a wonderful lady named Rosetta Harley lived with her husband Ted. Mrs Harley was a lovely cuddly lady whose two daughters, Cynthia and Barbara had joined the WAAFs, a third daughter Dora lived round the corner with her husband Ernie so she had a spare room in her house and in her heart. She and I took to each other at first sight; I think she had always wanted a son and the sight of me, scruffy little urchin, must have re-awakened her maternal instincts. Then there was little Joan with her golden hair and Anne who was old enough to lighten the load. We were going to get along fine. Unfortunately, a few weeks later Joan was fretting for her mummy so, under the pretext to me that they were only going home for a few days so that Anne could go to the dentist, off they went. Oh the lies; they never came back and for the next four years I was on my own. On my first night without siblings I wet the bed, and in the morning I was mortified, desperately trying to dry the bed but of course it was hopeless, I lay there awaiting my fate, Mrs Harley would be furious, but no; all she said was "I think we had better get a rubber under sheet". It must have been traumatic because from then on I wet the bed with monotonous regularity, each time with the same sense of shame. Did I mention school? No? Well school was the most fun I'd had since arriving in March, on my first day all the evacuees formed a motley crew on one side of the playground while the local boys lined up opposite us calling out "cor blimey mate" while we retaliated with "moo, baaa, oink". Of course we all tired of this after a while and started to make friends. My favourite teacher was Mrs Powell, who tried to teach us to sing songs from 'Merry England' with spectacular lack of success. The line, 'which like the ever hungry sea howls round our isle,' in particular seemed to upset her. We kept singing' ahls rahnd ahr isle', then the local boys who couldn't help laughing, joined us, and it was our version which was sung at the school concert, much to Mrs Powell's disgust. Another source of entertainment was inventing new noises from our gas-masks, a treasure chest of rich, fruity raspberries, which went down a treat during assembly, when we had gas-mask drill, the head master had to shout to get us to stop, and for some reason he had me spotted as the ring-leader, but I have a feeling he didn't mind too much. The school was a mile or two from Peashill Road which I always walked with three local boys, Ted Hills, Brian Strickland and Michael Nottingham. Our route took us along West End, a narrow lane which ran alongside the River Nene so often we would do a spot of fishing with cotton and bent pins, sometimes we caught eels. In those days there were otters which we loved to watch playing, are they still there? I hope so. Before too long Mrs Harley introduced me to her church, Saint Mary's, I don't think I had ever been in a church before and I loved it, the church was so lovely and the hymns and psalms were the most beautiful music I had ever heard, quite a change from 'Cherry Blossom Lane'. I became a regular and soon I was asked if I would like to join the choir, well after the fiasco of 'Merry England' I was somewhat doubtful but I was very keen to wear a cassock and surplice and sing those lovely hymns so I threw myself into it with great enthusiasm. To conserve electricity, the vicar decided that the organ would be pumped by hand, which would be done by choir boys in rotation? This meant squatting behind the organ in a tiny cubby hole and wait for the organist to knock on the screen, when we were supposed to start pumping to power up the organ. One Sunday I was so engrossed in a comic that I didn't hear his knock, when the music started the organ just died with a horrible groan, this roused me to start pumping like fury but the damage was do - I was in disgrace and had to forfeit my share of the collection, all tuppence ha'penny of it. My high point came though when I was chosen to sing a solo part in the Christmas carol service, I was Melchior in 'We Three Kings', I was so proud, my Cockney twang was fading fast, my family wouldn't know me. I spent nearly four years in the choir and the memory of all those hymns remains with me, I still tingle whenever I hear them. News of the war was a source of endless interest to me; I knew where each battle was being fought, all the advances and retreats, and the names of each general and their commands. My brother Harry was in France with the 51st Highland Division so when the news came of the Dunkirk evacuation; I knew that as a machine gunner he would be fighting a rear-guard action so one of the last to leave. Suddenly the war became serious, no longer quite the game it had been to us kids. When I heard that he was home safe I was overjoyed. Soon afterwards he was discharged from the army with a heart problem, not serious but it prevented further military service. He started work in a munitions factory where he met and fell in love with a girl named Jessie, being wartime they were soon married. A few weeks later, running for a bus, he tripped on a kerb stone, banged his head on a concrete gun post and died instantly. I was broken hearted and I ranted and raved at God for a long time. The vicar and Mrs Harley did their utmost to console me but it took quite a while. The blitz passed us by in March; they had a couple of goes at the marshalling yards but soon gave up. I did go back home in 1942 for Lucy's wedding; she was marrying a Grenadier Guardsman named Dick. What a shock! Instead of our lovely house in Peabody Cottages we had a three storey slum with outside toilet, no bath and in a really grotty neighbourhood. Some rotten swine had dropped a bomb on our lovely house so the family had no choice. Then I had my first taste of real bombing, it was terrifying, but everyone seemed to take it in their stride; all the neighbours ignored the Anderson shelters, which were holes in the ground covered with corrugated iron, in the back garden, nasty damp miserable things. When the siren went, they just grabbed their treasures which were left handily situated in the hall and hot-footed it over to the communal shelter over the road, handily situated in the back yard of the Queen Vic pub. No wonder they didn't mind, it was just one big party, a sing-song, with someone on the accordion, crates of beer, and they didn't seem to hear the bangs outside. After a few days we left for Cornwall to visit the boys and Joan, they were at the Lizard, Joan at 4 Coronation Cottages with a Mrs Johns, Sid and Billy were on a farm nearby with Mrs Johns' mother-in-law. It was great to be with my family again although they teased me no end about my country accent, and I teased them back about their ridiculous haircuts, close cropped all over except for a tassel of hair over the forehead. We spent a week or so there then back to Tottenham. Soon it was time for me to return to Mrs Harley so I was put into the guards van of a train in the care of the guard, like a piece of luggage, but he was very kind and put me off at March which was a good thing because all the station signs had been removed to foil Nazi spies; Mrs Harley welcomed me back with open arms; I think she had become quite fond of me by then. Although I missed my family, I soon settled down to what was a very pleasant life in the country. One thing always puzzled me though; my parents never came to visit me in four years and for some reason I never questioned them about this. The only visitor I had was my uncle Len who turned up out of the blue one day having cycled all the way from Bedford, where he was stationed with the RAF, what a very nice man! My friends and I used to play in a field at the back of the houses, we would dig for clay, which we fashioned into model planes, ships and guns, normal toys were very rare in those days. Then there was fishing and roaming the countryside, especially at harvest time when we could help, I don't think we were much help though. there was too much fun to be had, haystacks can be wonderful things to play on but too easily wrecked, that's when the farmers dispensed with our services, ungrateful, these farmers. As March had a large railway marshalling yard there were lots of goods trains carrying all kind of military supplies being transported to the war zones and we were fascinated to watch them go past with tanks, trucks and guns. We would count the wagons, sometimes there were up to a hundred and seemed go on for ages. By 1943 the bombing had subsided sufficiently for me to go home for a holiday, Sid and Billy were home from Cornwall, I think Billy had disgraced himself by setting about the barber with a stick after a particularly hideous haircut. Blood being thicker than water, I begged mum to let me stay, the worst decision I ever made, she agreed so I never went back to the lovely Mrs Harley. Tottenham was fun for a while, there were bombed-out buildings to explore, more mischief with my brothers and each weekend we all went to the T L and R Club, where dad was entertainment secretary. There were dances and concerts which I loved. It made my life in March seems dull by comparison. Of course someone had to go and spoil it eventually, Hitler again, he started sending us V1s (Doodlebugs) which were absolutely terrifying. We could hear them going overhead with an engine noise like an old motor-bike and we held our breath in case the noise stopped, which meant that the thing was about to drop on some poor souls and it could be us. One dropped on Fladbury Road, very near us which killed a lot of people and demolished about three hundred houses. Lucy was living in a flat above a butcher's shop in that direction and I was praying that she was alright. I ran out of the house to go to her, slates were falling from the roofs but I hardly noticed. Lucy was alright but I got a real roasting from mum. It was shortly after this that the subject of evacuation came up again and before I could argue I found myself in Leicester with dear Billy. He was two years older than me and he led me a dog's life, always teasing me and stealing things from me so I was not very happy. We were billeted with a Mrs Gamble, a short, roly-poly woman who loved to tell naughty jokes when she came home from the pub, she would often pass wind and go into Henry V mode exclaiming "Hark, I hear a distant peal of thunder, quick, quick the closet key, too late, too late, I've gone and done it". We slept on canvas camp beds in the parlour; we were not allowed to sleep in proper beds as we had Scabies, a skin disease which was rife at the time. I don't think we were there very long, Mrs Gamble couldn't put up with our Scabies so we were put into Roundhills Sick bay, a large old house filled with evacuees, all with similar complaints. There were just two nurses to look after all of us completely, which was almost impossible, so we were kept in bed like sick patients while the poor nurses did their best to cope. Inevitably disease was rampant and one of the nurses caught Scarlet Fever and I caught it from her. I was taken to Markfield Sanatorium which was a great improvement, and put in a children's ward with lovely clean beds, nice food and being pampered. I was the only evacuee there and in six weeks I had no visitors so the other children's parents felt sorry for me and brought me fruit and little gifts. I ended up with more visitors than anyone else, but not my own parents. In the next bed was a boy named Charlie Pickering, whose parents owned a garage at Measham, they made quite a fuss of me and Charlie and I became good friends for a while. When I was discharged I went back to Mrs Gamble as I was now clean, only to find that Billy had escaped from Roundhills with another boy by climbing through a toilet window then made his way back to Mrs Gamble who would not have him so he nicked my Saving Stamps, 12/6d worth to buy a ticket home. Mrs Gamble agreed to take me in and let me sleep in a proper bed as I was now free of the dreaded Scabies. I had to stay there for a while longer as the Germans were now bombarding us with V2s, which were similar to the Doodlebugs except, being jet propelled, they were silent until the explosion when they hit.