Bombs dropped in the borough of: Hillingdon

Written by Arthur C Brougham, Northwood Hills, Middlesex

The second great war was in progress then (September 1942) and everything was blacked out after dusk. Every room had to be completely curtained or screened so that no light at all could be seen outside. Otherwise the police or Air Raid Wardens wanted to know the reason why! I was then in Civil Defence in the Northwood-Ruislip Council Area being firstly in the Ambulance Section then in the ‘Mobile Unit’ section (a sort of travelling hospital unit) and finally in the ‘Light Rescue’ section which was a mixture of first aid workers and rescue squads. I could only get one week’s holiday and so we didn’t have a long honeymoon.

The war was very near home at times and through the latter half of 1940 and the first part of 1941 we were heavily and frequently raided by German bombers. Day raiding turned to night raiding as their day losses got heavier and then we had night after night of raids. As the nights got longer in the Autumn of 1940 so did the raids and eventually they started at dusk 6.30 - 7.00 o’clock and went on for 12 or 13 hours. Before we were married I used to spend one or two nights each week at your mother’s house and this being in the area of Greater London proper, was frequently raided. Bombs often fell in the district and the gunfire was sometimes terrific, but fortunately little damage was done to their house — just a little glass blown out. Eastcote and district also had its bombs though, of course, not so bad as London. Haydon Hall, Eastcote, our Civil Defence Depot had some small bombs in the grounds and was twice bombed with incendiary bombs, but without much damage.

Sometimes your mother came to my house and then we (your grandma, Auntie Ethel, your mother and I) all slept on the floor protected as far as possible by the table and piano. The raids gradually diminished and left off and the ‘war’ got quiet. In 1944 a new series began but these were about ‘tip and run’ raids by fast fighter-bombers and our defences were then so strong that they had a rough time. However they did damage of course and it was in one of these raids that 48 Chichester Road, N.W.6. (where I was born and which belonged to your grandma) was struck by incendiary bombs and burnt.

All the time I was in Civil Defence (from September 1st 1939 to July 1945 when it was disbanded) I spent certain hours on duty daily and after we were married I was on shifts of 24 hours on and 24 hours off duty. Your mother, therefore, spent every other night alone and when the raiding was severe this was very worrying and unpleasant. She was very courageous, for it is always lonely in a house by oneself at night and especially so when all the windows and glass doors have to be heavily secured and one dare not switch on a light for a moment without making sure the windows were covered. We had a ‘Morrison’ shelter - a kind of heavy steel table with a mattress underneath — in which she slept when the raids were on. I always felt more nervous at home in raids than when I was on duty at the Depot, and I should have hated to have been home alone. Your mother’s pluck was all the greater as she had always been accustomed to a busy home and you should be proud of her courage accordingly.

Your mother was a designer of soft furnishing embroidery and was in charge of the department at Brook Bros and Dean Ltd of Rathbone Place, Oxford Street, W.1. She carried on work after we were married firstly because my Civil Defence pay wasn’t very high and rent and cost of living was, and secondly she would have been compelled by the Government Officials to work part time anyhow so she decided she’d keep on at the work which she liked and knew.

In 1944 (June 6th) the allies started the great landings in France. I was on duty that morning and I shall never forget the sight of formation after formation of aircraft, bombers, fighters, troop carriers and gliders being towed, hundreds and hundreds, for hours. The whole arc of the sky would be filled with columns of aircraft in a steady and continuous procession. A pause as the sky would clear and as the tail end of one lot disappeared so the van of the next great contingent started. It was a wonderful and awe inspiring sight and we only saw part of the great invading force. It was a day of excitement and great hopes. The landings were announced during the morning over the radio although we suspected great events by the masses of aircraft passing over earlier.

The Germans were not long bringing in their last desperate effort. On the 12th June (I think it was) I was off duty and at home that night and during the night we were awakened by sudden and violent gunfire very close. As things had been quiet for months we had given up sleeping in the shelter for it was a bit hard and cramped, and had returned to our proper bed.

We had heard no warning syren but only the loud guns and the noise of a loud, rattling and apparently low aeroplane. I lay petrified for a minute and then as the ‘plane’ faded away and the guns stopped, I jumped out of bed and went to the window. As I reached it there was a distant flash and a loud ‘boom’ suggesting the explosion of a bomb. The guns were those protecting Northolt Aerodrome and surrounding factories and I’d never heard them fired before. All became quiet and I returned to bed and sleep. In the morning I went on duty and then found that an air raid warning had sounded at night and what was more, was still on - after 8.00am.

My squad was on duty away from our depot, being stationed during air raids at a nearby depot by Ruislip Manor Station in a converted shop. We waited there and about 9.30 the “all clear” syren sounded. A few minutes later, however, the “warning” was repeated and I saw what I took to be a small plane flying past which was being fired at by every gun in the area. It disappeared and soon after the expected “boom” suggested another bomb. All sorts of rumours began to get around. It was strange after all this long time to be getting day raids again and such long “warnings” too. It was said that German paratroopers were being dropped. That a counter-invasion was taking place! The warnings continued on and off all day and night though we heard no more local guns. Then the truth was announced. We got it first through official channels (I was a Civil Defence Instructor and lectured on High Explosive bombs, gas etc and so was given some information) and soon it was publicly announced.

The Germans were sending over small pilotless planes (VIs) of which the nose was a bomb and a biggish one. These “Fly bombs” as they were officially called or “doodle-bugs” as they became known to the public, were powered by a simple jet type engine (like a blow-lamp) and travelled fast and low — about 400 miles an hour. When they reached the distance their makers intended, the engine cut out and the plane dived straight to earth, exploding on contact. They were fiendish but ingenious contrivances and were launched from sloping ramps all along the French Coast. In a few days they increased to hundreds and although many were destroyed by gunfire and fighters, many got through to London. When their nature became known they no longer fired at them in London for even if they were hit they still exploded on impact, so once they got past the barrage and fighters in Essex, Kent and Sussex, they were left alone as some over-shot London and landed in open spaces beyond. We were entertained by these pleasant contrivances for weeks — day and night — at frequent intervals and they were usually sent in batches, so one would get first the syren — a pause — then a peculiar humm as it approached — a sudden silence and then the “boom” of the explosion. As this died away the next “engine” could be heard and so on. When they got close the humm became a violent vibrating rattle — distant yet undismissable but horribly menacing and when the engine stopped! Well, you dived for cover and hoped for the best.

The explosion was heavy and violent and the damage by blast was severe. We had several in our area and many houses were damaged and a number destroyed. I had to assist in getting out bodies from a row of small houses destroyed by a Fly bomb at Uxbridge and it was very disagreeable and the little houses were just heaps of rubble. All through this period your mother was at business. Her company had been destroyed by fire from enemy action in 1941 and had been removed to New Cavendish Street where they still are. Fly bombs fell near her business several times though fortunately they were not damaged. I spent two or three Sunday afternoons up there with her when she was fire watching and there were plenty of warnings and “booms” but all some way away. At night either at home in the “Morrison” (to which we had returned) or at the Depot Shelter, I used to hear the buzz-buzz of the engines and the sound of explosions and we used to wonder where they were falling and if our various relations were safe. Fortunately they were, although there were several near misses. It was a very trying time for they came at all hours and especially during travel hours, during lunch time and early evening. Then they started again at night and frequently continued all through.

Personally, I found the frequent syrens and droning engines with their inhuman and ruthless efficiency more nerve racking and I hated those Fly bombs more than the earlier raids. They gradually subsided as we overran the French coast and captured the launching sites and although later a few were launched from aircraft over the North Sea, the main attack was broken down. Then, before the Fly bombs had entirely stopped, but when they had been reduced, news came that the Minister for Defence (Morrison) had examined an explosion at Chelsea. It was referred to as a “gas explosion” but no official explanation was given. As the days went by we used to hear periodic and irregular explosions of considerable heaviness but none were near us. No warnings were sounded and the explosions just boomed and that was all. They became more frequent and then we began to hear that they were German Rocket bombs. Soon after this it was publicly announced but many had fallen before the officials made a statement. These weapons (V2s) were huge rockets with an explosive war-head and they travelled to immense heights (40 miles or more) and at speeds so much faster than sound that nothing was heard of their passage till after they had passed and frequently after the explosion had died away. Speeds of 3000mph were probably reached. They were not very accurate but London was a large target and most reached their objectives. The damage they caused was even greater than the Fly bombs taken individually, and the noise of their passage was like a roll of thunder — a long and loud rumble. In view of their speed, no warning of approach could be given so one had to grin and bear it. They were fired well back from the coast so took longer to stop. In fact they were being used till almost the end of the war.

Your mother just missed one when in the train one day and another time one exploded in the air very high up right over Ruislip. I was on duty at the depot in Eastcote when we heard the terrible rumble. We half reached our feet when the explosion occurred. It burst like a puff of smoke high in the air which spread out like a cloud before long. It was about 2 or 2.30 in the afternoon and Air Raid Wardens after, collected a whole van load of bits and pieces which fell on Ruislip. If it had not exploded when it did it could probably have done a lot of damage to Ruislip.

After this, we over ran the Germans and finally joined up with the Russians and the war with Germany was over. VE Day (Victory in Europe Day) was a public holiday, with great crowds and jollifications. We, with others, crowded outside Buckingham Palace and cheered the King and Queen and Mr Churchill who appeared with them. It was a great day and night.

The war was still on with Japan though and at last on August 6th 1945 the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped by the Americans upon the Japanese city of Hiroshima with devastating results. Some 200,000 were killed and injured and a second bomb a few days later on Nagasaki finished the war. Then we had another holiday for VJ Day (Victory in Japan Day) with more jollifications. The atomic bomb was a terrible weapon to use, being the equivalent of 17,000 tons of TNT and similar ordinary explosives, but it undoubtedly saved the lives of many Americans and British by bringing the Japs to collapse.

The war itself will be a matter of history, albeit recent history, by the time you read this, and you will no doubt be able to read Mr Churchill’s book (just published) and those of others to obtain all the official details. I can only give the personal perspective. I will add that during the air raids I was frequently frightened and on a few occasions, had acute “wind-up” and yet, when the war had ended, I found that I missed the tension and thrills of air raids and the various excitements incidental to a great war. Even now the sound of air raid syrens in plays given on the wireless and in films gives me a kind of morbid thrill and it is almost an old friend.

The year started off well, even though we were frantically busy at work. I had my leave very soon to look forward to but first I celebrated my 19th birthday on the 6th January. I had letters and cards from home, and at lunchtime Mary, Marion, Rita and I adjourned to the Express Dairy for my birthday banquet. They sang “Happy Birthday to You” at the tops of their voices and treated me to Fresh Fruit Trifle! There was a lot of jelly about this concoction and ersatz cream, but we loved it and it was always reserved for special occasions. It was a sparkling day, surpassed only by the excitement of going on leave shortly afterwards. That leave followed the familiar pattern of previous ones and as always the days flew. In no time it was back to Uxbridge and once more into the fray.

Soon after this I was on night duty when we had an air raid, and the anti-aircraft barrage was terrific. Seven enemy bombers were shot down and I found it fascinating to be actually “in” on a raid, with the various A.A. Batteries being controlled from our H.Q.

I spent most of March in Harefield R.A.F. Hospital where I had been sent for several X-rays and tests after feeling off-colour. Their verdict was a slightly inflamed appendix which, with luck, should settle down. They decided to keep me in for the entire month, being stabilised they said. It was a very long, slow and frustrating month during which I was kept sane by the visits from my comrades. I had a 48 hour pass before resuming work, thus I was able to dash home and assure them I was fine.

But, on my return to Uxbridge, I was presented with a shock, for I had been posted to the “Y” list. This was something that happened automatically if you were sick for three weeks or more, and it meant that I was now available for re-posting, liable to be sent anywhere. The thought of leaving Uxbridge filled me with dismay, but fortunately it did not come to that. I was posted instead to another department to “G”. How can I begin to describe “G”? Well, the latter stood for Gunnery, and there were three sections — “G (Ops)” which covered the deployment of artillery: “G (Int)” — short for Intelligence: - and “G (Training)”. The Department was housed away from Hillingdon House in literally a Jerry-built building — it had been constructed by German Prisoners of War who had long since disappeared from the scene. It appeared to have been built of breeze blocks with windows so high up the walls it was impossible to see through them. There were various small offices where the Officers were housed, a large room which was the general office and a slightly smaller one, the typing pool. In here were three shorthand-typists for each of the three sections, making nine of us in all, with a desk and typewriter apiece. There was, in addition, a cast iron coke stove, very similar to the one in Hut 6, and a couple of duplicating machines, one a Gameter Multigraph which ran off stencils, and the other a Fordigraph which was a strange contraption that involved copious amounts of purple liquid to do its copying.

It was here in “G” typing pool that I met Marjorie McIver (known as Mac), Joan Lindsell (known as Lindy), Doris Keane, Queenie Hastie, Helen Kopelman, Anne Butler, Betty Taylor and Jean Poynter. Ma, Lindy and Doris worked for G(Int). One of their daily chores was to go down The Hole, as it was known, to obtain the weather forecast. The Hole, because it was situated underground, was the main operations room for R.A.F. No. 11 Fighter Group Command. To this inner sanctum every morning, Mac and Lindy and Doris went in turn to get the meteorological report. They also typed screeds of highly secret intelligence information pertaining to Ant Aircraft.

Queenie, Betty and Jean were in G (Training) team which was responsible, as its name implies, for organising the training rotas for A.A. officers and batteries within the Group.

That just leaves G (Ops) and it was in this section that Helen, Anne and myself held sway. The nine of us lived quite harmoniously in that dingy typing pool and, in between working, would natter, niggle, moan and groan, laugh and giggle, to our hearts’ content.

We were true to our sex, as when we did not possess a window from which we could perceive life passing by, we wanted one. But when, after much trouble, the GD men knocked out a piece of the wall to disclose a very dirty window, we decided we did not want people to see us sitting by the fire, so we immediately “bunged” it up with any old pieces of cardboard we could find, to obstruct their view.

We actually worked quite hard. Mid-morning we would go in relays to the NAAFI for coffee or tea. Tea was 1d and coffee 1 ½ d and neither bore the slightest resemblance to the actual beverage it was supposed to be.

We also went in relays down to the Camp in Hercies Road for our lunches. The first lunchers would meet the second lunchers who would ask “What is it today?” and “What’s for sweet?” If the answer to the latter was “Plonk” our hearts would sink, for that was our name for Tapioca Pudding which appeared all too frequently on the menu and which we loathed. We formed the opinion the Army had enormous reserves of tapioca somewhere. It looked like frogspawn in the big mess tins and tasted quite revolting.

I was getting slightly more money now. What with my first year’s increment and passing my Grade I Trade Test, I felt I was doing well. Rita celebrated her 21st birthday on 31st July with a party given by her parents in Frascati’s Italian Restaurant in London. I was invited and greatly enjoyed the occasion. I gave her 10/- as I couldn’t think what to buy her. As that represented almost half my weekly pay, it was quite a sacrifice, but she was a good friend and I made it gladly.

About this time, the first of the Americans arrived in Uxbridge. Some of them worked in our office and we found them an absolute phenomena. They chewed gum ceaselessly, had scant regard for discipline, were very casual in their dress, seemed to have a personal issue of Jeeps and called their officers by their Christian names. We were astonished, never having encountered anything like them before.

In August the Army laid on something special. They decided that H.Q. staff would benefit from visiting an actual operational gun site on the South Coast. On 10th August Mac, Lindy, Betty, Anne and I clambered aboard the lorry which was to take us to Rye. We sang as we lurched along. At last the cry went up “There’s the sea” and sure enough, there it was. Our first glimpse of the sea for such an age, grey and menacing with barbed wire rolls all along the beaches. The lorry drew to a halt and we jumped or clambered down. We were given an escorted tour around the gun site and then issued with ear plugs. Feeling slightly silly, we stuffed them into our ears, and then the guns thundered forth. Even with the plugs, the mighty noise was shattering. We ducked and flinched and cowed much to the amusement of the Gunners. “Thank you ever so much” we said when the barrage had ceased. “It has been most interesting”. We said goodbye to the sea, then it was back into the covered wagon for our journey home. It had been a break from the usual routine.

Platoon evening continued of course, with compulsory attendance at various lectures, but on 18th August we had one with a difference. It was decreed we would all go out blackberrying. We had a marvellous time and bore the fruit back to the Camp cooks who turned it into jam. This would be doled out in large soup dishes in the Mess, a positive magnet for the wasps. Sitting in the Mess was hazardous at such times, you were constantly flailing and swatting.

The War news was distinctly better now, and we said the tide seemed at last to be turning.

On Friday, 3rd September, we had a service to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the War, and British troops invaded Italy.

On Tuesday, 7th September, I woke in a happy mood, for it was my day off and Ruby and I had arranged to spend it together in London. We made our way to the Services Club, there to have lunch and play some table tennis. After our meal we went over to the Games Room and sat down to await our turn. A sailor and an Air Force chap were using the table at the time, playing a cracking game which we watched with interest. Suddenly the ball ricocheted off the sailor’s bat, came flying across the room, to land fairly and squarely in my lap. The sailor, grinning broadly, came over to retrieve it. “Sorry about that” he said, as I handed him the ball, and I liked the way his brown eyes twinkled. When their game was completed, Ruby and I played, and then the sailor and the Air Force chap challenged us to a game of doubles. Ruby partnered the Air Force lad, whose name was Jack Kenyon — “But I’m always known as Ken” he said. I partnered the sailor with the twinkling brown eyes, called Les. We played several games, and then had a break for tea, during which we learned a little more about our new acquaintances. Ken was a Yorkshire man, a radio operator stationed in London at the Air Ministry. Les was a Londoner, home on survivor’s leave. He was serving in Light Coastal Forces and his boat had been sunk in action in the Channel two days before. He made light of the incident, saying it had earned him 14 days respite. He was 23 years old and a Leading Telegraphist who had been serving on MLs, MGBs and MTBs since entering the Navy at the age of 20. I took to him enormously and readily agreed to come up to London to meet him again on the following Friday evening.

Friday evening saw me hot-footing to Baker Street, without a pass I might add, fingers tightly crossed I wouldn’t encounter a Red Cap. At Baker Street Les was waiting and we had a couple of delightful hours, just talking. He afterwards escorted me on the train back to Uxbridge and made a date to meet again the very next night. We got on so well together. He had such an honest face, such a dependable air about him, I instinctively knew I could put my whole life in his hands. We talked about our dreams for the future, and he said he always hoped that he would marry one day and have a family, but questioned the wisdom of getting romantically involved while he was doing such a dangerous job. He then declared, despite cautioning himself against it, he had fallen in love with me and I said I felt exactly the same. I returned to Uxbridge on wings.

On 14th September I was again on Night Duty. Les rang me about 8 o’clock to say he’d had a wire recalling him off leave and he had no idea when we’d see each other again. He gave me an address to which I could send mail and begged me to write.

On 16th, to my absolute joy, I got a wire from Les to say he was coming back to London again to resume his leave. I dashed up to Charing Cross — once more minus a Pass and also notwithstanding the fact it was Platoon evening. We were reunited and nothing else mattered. On Sunday 19th, he asked me to marry him and with a heart full of love and joy I said yes. We knew it couldn’t be for quite a time but we made the promise to each other that one day our dreams would come true.

On 20th October he retuned to Dover. I went to see him off at Charing Cross and met several of his crew members who were also going back.

Letters arrived from him informing me he had gone to Portsmouth but was still unsure of future movements and then he was in Brightlingsea but again didn’t think that would be for long. Then a letter arrived at the beginning of October telling me they had picked up their new boat and he would continue to be in Home Waters. That at least was some comfort. He was now on M.G.B. 695.

Then on Wednesday 6th October I began my leave. It was marvellous to be home again. I told Mother and Pop all about the love of my life. Mother made little comment but listened patiently to my eulogising. Then on the 13th I had the most thrilling and exciting surprise, in the form of a wire from Les saying he was coming to Birmingham that very day. I rushed to meet his train and then I bore him home. I ushered him in and introduced him. He looked so smart and resplendent in his naval uniform. Mom and Pop shook his hand and made him welcome.

The end of my leave soon arrived and we said Goodbye to Mother, Pop and John and caught the train back to Euston. I had been feeling so unwell that when we arrived I returned to Uxbridge straight away foregoing the few hours we were going to spend in London.

I was still the same next day, so I was told to stay in bed and a doctor was called. He had me promptly admitted to Hillingdon R.A.F. Hospital where they said it was the appendix again and this time it would have to come out. However, an observant Sister, whilst making up the bed next to me, looked at me with interest and noticed I was changing colour. She came and stood by me, peering into my face and announced I had Yellow Jaundice. This is precisely what I had. It was a nasty illness but at least I was spared the surgeon’s knife. Les had returned to his base and sent letters expressing his concern.

I felt very poorly for the first few days and slept most of the time. Gradually I began to improve.

Les was now back in action, and on the Ward radio I was sickened to hear that Light Coastal Forces had been in combat with E boats off the coast of Lowestoft and that casualties had been incurred. My prayers were answered and I heard that Les was safe.

On 30th October I was pronounced well enough to go out and was given a week’s sick leave. I went home and 7 days of Mother’s care and home cooking worked wonders.

On 7th November I spent my first day back in “G” for a month. I was soon back into the swing of things and in no time at all it was as if I’d never been away.

Letters from Les were now my chief source of pleasure. On days when they arrived I would be in seventh heaven, and on days when they didn’t I would know keen disappointment. I went to visit his family and was given a very warm reception. They clearly were all so proud of their sailor hero.

Next day I got a wire from Les disclosing he was now in Penzance. They’d had some torpedo tubes fitted and were re-designated M.T.B. 695. He sent me his photograph which I framed and put on the shelf over my bed.

Mid November saw me once more turning my thoughts to Christmas shopping. Les wrote that it looked highly unlikely he would be home for Christmas — they were doing some trails in Irish waters. His parents had invited me to spend Christmas Day with them as I couldn’t get up to Birmingham.

On 20th December I posted off all my little gifts and cards. It would be my second Christmas away from home and the thought saddened me. But I threw myself into helping to decorate the hut. We put up coloured paper chains and greenery, liberally decked with cotton wool snow. Very effective we thought.

After duty on Christmas Eve, I made my way to London to Regents Park, and spent Christmas Day with his family. My thoughts hovered between a certain person on the high seas and my own dear folks at home. Boxing Day saw me back at work and very busy.

The War news was getting better and better and a letter from Les brought the joyful tidings that he hoped to have leave in January.

And so, here we were, on Friday the 31st December, the end of a year that had, for me, been wonderful. I fervently hoped it would be the last of the War years, that 1944 would bring us peace. Rita and I dashed into town and arrived in Trafalgar Square to find the crowds already dense, swinging and swaying and laughing. You would have thought no-one had a care in the world. We joined in the singing, quickly catching the mood of revelry. The din was quite tremendous until silenced as Big Ben struck midnight. Then all hell broke loose with a giant roar. Everyone began wishing everyone else a Happy New Year, kissing, hugging and singing Auld Lang Syne. Welcome 1944. Please be good to us.

Kay wanted a motor cabin to herself and also to be captain of a crew. My friend Wendy also on her first training trip with another trainer. It seemed just right. I liked Kay and felt we’d probably get on all right, it solved the problem of who we were going to work with. Miranda, of whom I was still a little in awe and certainly hardly knew, was going off with someone called Nora. “Only one trip” reassured Kit. It seemed Nora was a very poor boater and could never keep a crew. Miranda didn’t look very happy about it. But whistling around, the willowed bends of the Willow Pound, it seemed all my troubles were over. The breeze blew, the trees went silver and the water slapped. I suddenly remembered Bob and realised I hadn’t thought of him at all for quite a long time — anyway I was going home soon. I might even see him much better than abstract though! Heaven itself was a small thing! He went down the Paddington Arm and unloaded at Glaxo — a filthy job with a grab. I was reminded repressibly of Bill the Lizard out of Alice. The little man in the crane kept saying “Bill here, Bill no, here. I can’t move the crane all over for you — what’s that? Can’t hear, up here, it’s the wind — you bloody well keep it where it is — what? — what difference does it make to you anyway?” The poor little main in our boat, a very hen pecked type, kept making wild attempts by gesticulating to point out what he did want — all quite hopelessly and helplessly. He swept the coal out of the side sheets with a hand brush and out of the boat with a broom. That night it being Kay’s last night with Kit at the end of her second training trip, we all went to the local pub. A vast suburban pub that I didn’t really like. Kit bought me a sherry and I sat and watched the people, the other three played darts with cockney partners very gaily. I liked the friendly atmosphere but was surprised at the poverty of the people in comparison with the surroundings. I hated the beer slopped on the wooden tables and the smell of sweat from some of the customers and went home before they did. Kay came back and we both felt flat and rather miserable. Kay talked of Jeffrey who should have been getting a divorce from his wife and who wasn’t and with whom she had already lived with for two years. I got a sort of ache in my chest. I knew what that was and went to sleep cross with everything. Next day we finished unloading and empty and tidy we whistled off for Hayes and the depot. The breeze, the sun and the clouds chasing each other across the sky — our spirits soared and I packed my things ready to bolt as soon as we arrived. We were finished by 4pm. Feeling rather odd in my travelling clothes, I walked down the lay-by — conversation stopped in the little groups as one went past and I was conscious of not being a “boater”. One’s clothes and appearance made so much difference to whether or not one was accepted! On the train I felt dirty and “interesting” but once home after a day or so I realised I felt just the same, although it seemed I must be different! I wasn’t, most peculiar!

The Second Training Trip

I went back to the cut regretfully, leave had been good. But I was going back to work with my friend Wendy who was a friend from my Art School days. It was her idea to go on the canals in the first place and I decided we would have fun working together. It would also be interesting to see how her training trip with Daphne Frend another trainer had gone. In what ways it had differed from ours with Kit. The cabin was already well inhabited by Wendy I thought — when I eventually found our motor having her engine overhauled, rugs on the seats cushions and photographs. I packed my things away. Wendy landed tightly on the roof “Jean!” We had not seen each other for nearly a year, not since Wendy’s nervous breakdown. There was so much to talk about. It was really grand. Suddenly Kay appeared looking very clean and glamorous — quite a stranger. Wendy and Kay liked each other immediately — we were astounded to hear Kay was leaving to get married — Who!!!” “Well a commando named Pat that I met on the train.” They had fallen for each other just like that! Something inside me said “that was a bit quick!” But I kicked myself for a cat, who was I to talk! Kay was returning next trip and was keen that as her prospective crew we should learn as much as possible to make up for her lack of a third trip. All was enthusiasm. I decided to make a notebook of the trip as soon as possible. Miranda was also in town and ensconced with Nora sharing her cabin. She had brought back a very sweet little dachshund puppy and was busy teaching it cabin manners. The third of their crew was a tall Irish girl with long straight golden hair and an exceptionally beautiful face as of Botticelli’s Venusin some lights and just plain ugly in others, most odd. She had a glorious soft Irish accent, Susan Blood. Nora herself looked masculine with her square cut face and brown curly short hair and a soldier’s jacket. But there was a disarming kindness on her blue eyes and I wondered — why all the fuss? Later in the evening I chopped wood on the cabin roof and extraordinary girl called MayFlood appeared. Golden curls, bright blue eyes and very red tanned skin. She seemed very excitable, talked volubly and turned out to be one of Wendy’s former companions. I had heard a rumour that Billie their third crew member was very excitable — a rough tough girl and I began to wonder exactly what Wendy had been through on her first trip. It sounded like the Marx Brothers. Next day after meeting the third crew member a very quiet spinster type of forty, pale blue eyes that were very direct and a pair of riding breeches that she wore faithfully the entire time.

Vera, Wendy, Kit and I went over to listen to a radio broadcast of a canal programme in Frankey’s cabin. I knew Kay detested Frankie as a bully — she was also a trainer and had a mate called Christian an art student which interested me as a fellow student. Frankie was enormous and very vigorous she had a great admiration for Kit and sense of humour at awkward moments. Her ancestry was half Mexican and half French, she was handsome and exotic and blatant way with her heavy black fringe, her almond shaped brown eyes, her freckles, brown skin and powerful arms. A scarlet scarf round her throat and white shirt, dark shorts, a husky compelling voice and a throaty attractive laugh. Both were dirty although their cabin was spotless. Christian was quiet, also dark fringed with dreamy wide blue eyes and neat features. I liked her. We all had a lively argument on art after the radio programme, great fun. Franky, talking of Augustas John and Graham Sutherland in easy tones of familiarity. We went to bed, tired but happy and overslept completely till Kit called us at seven. Whereon, we rushed into clothes and had to eat our breakfast after the first lot of locks. I saw Miranda again at the docks and heard she had fallen in and been fished out by Nora. The docks thrilled me stiff as usual. It’s the excitement of coming down into the world of ocean going liners and feeling the link with the world beyond, being part of it, a working part as a spectator never can be. I wanted to draw but there was no time. I became aware of George Smith yelling at me at one point — a tall handsome young boater waving a coil of rope — he was just feeling cheerful. I was furious with myself for blushing scarlet. He laughed, although I am sure of that he was oblivious, I cursed myself for a fool. We toiled back up the locks, loaded with steel again and into Hayes two days after our start from the docks. There we were astonished to see Kit introduced to an American by Mr Curtiss our enormous boss. The American we eye’d with distrust. He was ugly but attractive. Had a graceful figure like a young panther easy and supply. He also carried a camera, we felt resentful. Kit informed us, he was coming with us for four days and would sleep on the steel. We went on after ‘Jeff’ had settled himself in. It was quite impossible to dislike him. He was cheerful and friendly getting us to do scatty things with ropes and jumping off to take the boats at odd angles from bridges etc. He worked too, taking a windless and doing his damnedest to the paddles. By evening Jeff was ‘in’. The next day I went in a silvery mist to lockwheel. I lay on the lock gates watching with fascination the bows of a boat slide into a lock under the bridge. The engine beating softly, the bows parting the water into arrow shaped ripples on either side. Sometimes everything about boats has an exquisite rhythm and beauty entirely incompatible with their bulk. We were locked up at North Church on the summit due to low pounds. There is a spring, there were the water from the lower stretches of canal is pumped up to the high pounds. The spring is crystal clear and pure. We washed ourselves and everything in it and hung clothes to dry in skatty rows from a clothes line between shafts. Jeff photographed and photographed and cursed the English weather and the fitful sun. Eventually he had to leave us to catch his train back to his unit. We were very sorry to see him go, all of us. There was a gap for some time. Wendy and I went for a long walk and Wendy was rather silent, she and Jeff had fitted as people do sometimes. Next morning, the water was translucent and green one could see everything on the canal bed, the only time I’ve ever seen that happen! An odd thing happened the afternoon before when Wendy and I got back from our walk a W.A.A.F and her friend came to look at our boats. Thinking us real boaters, we looked up and I realised she was an old college friend whom I hadn’t seen for years. They drank tea with us and went away — truly an odd coincidence. We went over to Mathas next day. It was truly a golden September and the trees were beginning to turn. The summit with its long wind between trees was lovely, berries trailed from the yellowing leaves. The heat was oppressive and quivering. Wendy and I went into town in the afternoon in Leighton Buzzard to the flicks and out to tea at a very amusing and prim hotel where we ate polite cakes and giggled about the possible reaction of the surrounding “polite” people to the announcement that we were bargees! Later that evening we sat on an open hillside gazing at the sky and talked of deeper subjects. I can’t remember what we talked about but we wandered back to the boats slowly and silently as those who have unburdened their thoughts are apt to. Next day we went on and as we went on things began to go wrong. Ropes broke and went in the blades, we jammed in locks, things went overboard and nearly always it was Wendy who was somehow involved. She began to worry about it and Kit talked seriously to me. “Second trip, must improve or I shall have to throw her out — she doesn’t seem to care”. It was difficult, Vera and I had our hands full with our own troubles. Kit talked to Wendy and for two days there was astounding improvement but I noticed she wasn’t sleeping well and talked in her sleep. Anyway I thought “It’s a hangover from last time, take no notice, that’s the best thing”. So I didn’t. But suddenly, the rocket went up. Wendy cooked an exotic lunch one day, it took so long to prepare that she had to go on duty, bang slap, on top of lunch — never the best time. We were on the Oxford canal. Those dire bends, the worst we stuck on good and proper. “Fool!” shrieked Kit. Wendy gave her a long slow look and muttered something in an undertone as she went to get a shaft. For no known reason my hackles rose like a scared dog and Kit realising perhaps that she had said something wrong was very kindly. We went lock after lock.

Wendy was in an incomprehensible mood and talked of great troubles and what one should do and I not knowing what she was getting at, avoided direct answers. When eventually we tied up for lunch below Hatton she was odd and kept staring at me and muttering again. I thought “Don’t be a fool, it’s over-tiredness” and tried to throw it off. But I couldn’t lose a sense of unreality and that rising hackless feeling of fear. We drank cider from the pub and went up Hatton’s twenty-one locks and on to the “Black Boy” pub tie. She was very strange that night and even Kit noticed it and looked at me oddly. She talked in her sleep and I was too worried now to sleep — I listened and my blood ran cold — things my friend Wendy should never have known or spoken. I lay stiff and silent and prayed. “Bob, oh my Bob — I must have some of your strength and your sanity — Oh God!” Next morning I got hold of Kit on the butty and we talked worriedly. When we got into Tysley docks I felt better but so tired I could have dropped. In the afternoon Wendy seemed keen to go to the Baths. Her skin was so yellow now and her eyes blank and unknowing, she was slowly under my very eyes changing into a stranger. I would almost rather she had died than that.

We went into Birmingham on the tram and she started an uncontrollable giggling. People stared, I cling to Bob — I must be calm and look as if nothing had happened, especially not let Wendy know I knew something was wrong. We went to the Victorian Public Baths we had gone to on our first trip. Wendy talked loudly, hating my publicly and laughed wildly and muttered. I bathed and was so weakly relieved to hear Vera’s voice I could have hugged her. I implored her to stay with us, Wendy after a eulogy on Vera’s stalwart character in comparison with mine — now infamous, agreed to the idea. We went to the flicks — she laughed hysterically and cried and fought off soothing hands. I stand literally dripped sweat throughout the film. How we got home, I don’t know, but we did, Kit was out. Blow one. We got supper and I talked as firmly as I could, Wendy sat and watched with malevolent brooding eyes. I lit the stove with meths and she seized and swung the bottle onto the table and over the straw mattress and lit the proceeds. I put it out with the floor cloth, I was far too surprised to be scared. We ate supper in silence. I thanked my lucky stars for my Log Book and took it up to go over to see Kit suggesting Wendy went to bed in the interval. When I got into see Kit only Vera was there — I just went flat on the bed and laughed it was altogether too much — we talked over what had happened and decided it was definitely a breakdown and finally Kit returned and we explained the position and I went back for the night. It took a lot of time getting Wendy to bed, but she was docile, thank heaven, she just talked and talked the most utter filth I’ve ever heard. When finally we were in bed I weighed my chances of survival till morning and hugged my thoughts of Bob to me. Thank God for his friendship I thought and could never thank him enough for his unwitting help that night.

Next morning we unloaded. Kit suggested Wendy changed to her cabin as a normal part of trip procedure. It rained steadily. Wendy was unanimated. Vera clambered over with all her things. The workmen who knew nothing of all this joked Vera “stand there missy and you’ll get tipped in”. Sure enough next time as she climbed over arms full of clothes, a piece of steel went up like a bird and so did the boat, precipitating Vera like a ton of coals into the “cut”. It was the last straw. Kit dived in and fished Vera and clothes out and we laughed helplessly in the rain while Vera dried herself in my cabin. We went down Camphill next day. Kit said she never expected to lockwheel the Bottom Road with a lunatic. It rained and was filthy and the butty swayed like a sulky cow. But I could have dealt with any number of butties so long as I didn’t have that nameless terror again.

Part 1

Well before my tenth birthday in April 1939 I was sufficiently well aware of current affairs to know a war was expected, so I was not surprised when one was actually declared on September 3rd of that year. To a small boy, the concept was very exciting. It would be a glorious success in which we, the British, would of course show Hitler the error of his ways in a very short time. After all, had we not won the previous war with Germany only 21 years previously?

Looking back, I suppose my main source of information was the newsreels that were shown as part of every cinema show I went to see. Television was in its infancy in Britain and was still nothing more than an experimental novelty enjoyed by the wealthy, and my friend across the street, Hugh Metcalfe, whose home was equipped with a set made by the firm his father worked for as an electrical engineer. Over the years of our childhood attendance at cinemas my friends and I sat transfixed at the newsreels as we watched the Germans under Hitler invading first Austria then Czechoslovakia and finally, Poland. Interspersed with these were newsreels of the Italians under Mussolini invading Ethiopia and Albania and, a year or so earlier, shots of the Spanish civil war. There were also confusing newsreels of Japanese attacking Chinese. We did not always know which side to cheer for but we thought we knew what to expect when war came upon us, especially from the air.
In those uncertain times, my parents listened regularly to a lot of news programmes on the radio. The contents of these radio reports also did not evade me and were the subject of regular discussion. I could relate particularly to Ethiopia because one of the emperor Haile Selasie’s daughters was my nurse when I had my tonsils taken out at Great Ormand Street Hospital for Children in London in 1936. The other countries were nothing more to me than places on a map that produced stamps for my collection. We encountered few foreigners in England at that time. To hear someone speaking a foreign language was most unusual.
I also remember hearing the broadcast of the announcement describing the treatment of Jews in concentration camps in Germany. That must have been about 1938. There was a
general air of shock that re-enforced everyone’s feeling that the war was not far off. When it arrived, we would right all these wrongs; and of course, we would win.

My friends and I were very conscious of being British, the upholders of fair play, winners of the previous war, the hub of the British Empire, on which the sun never set. These were the days when Empire Day was celebrated each year to remind everyone what it was all about. Those children belonging to Guides, Brownies, Scouts or Cubs would wear their uniforms to school, and we would spend the afternoon in the school hall singing the patriotic songs we had been practicing for weeks — “Land of Hope and Glory”, “The British Grenadiers”, “Jerusalem” with its “And did those feet in ancient times…” and such. (It has always amused me that the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory” should have been chosen to be played at graduation ceremonies throughout the U.S.A. while the words never heard in that country, would constitute a much better national anthem for the British than “God Save the Queen”.) Our headmaster, Tom Wilkinson, sometimes accompanied by the vicar, would stand beside the lectern on the stage beating time vigorously with both arms in a paroxysm of patriotic fervour. Our teachers, except for the one pounding the piano, stood facing inward along one side of the hall, ready to rush down a line of singers to thump over the head with a hymnbook any backslider who had the temerity to display lack of patriotic spirit such as pulling the pigtails of a girl in the row in front.
These were also the days when Armistice Day, November 11th, was observed with great dignity. Again, everybody who owned a uniform would wear it to school. This was the day on which the previous war had stopped — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Wreathes were laid on war memorials in villages throughout the country and there were parades at which the old soldiers would wear their medals. Everyone wore a red poppy cut from canvas mounted on a piece of green wire. They were supposed to resemble the poppies that grow wild in Flanders where much of the fighting took place in World War 1 and millions of British soldiers lie buried along with others.
The whole poppy scheme had been dreamt up and organized by a General Haig (of the whiskey distilling family fame) who had planned a good number of the mass slaughters which had gone, during the war under the misnomer of “battles”. Volunteers sold the poppies everywhere during the weeks before on behalf of the British Legion, an organization of old soldiers founded by Haig. For the rest of the year the British Legion was a social club for old soldiers devoted to giving them a place to drink beer and chat, and to looking after the welfare of the down and out amongst them. We bought our poppies from ladies who came to the school. These were depression times so nobody had much money. The usual poppy cost a penny but there were more elaborate ones for the larger givers, like for six pence, and there were even arrangements which the affluent could mount on top of the radiators of their motor cars which in those days had chromium plated filler caps at the front end of the hood, or bonnet. Income from sales went to the support of the blind and wounded ex-servicemen who manufactured the poppies.
At eleven o’clock, at the precise time the Armistice was signed, everyone stopped for a minute’s silence. A service at school was timed to incorporate the moment. We would hear the field guns boom from their site in Hyde Park in the centre of London about fourteen miles away. My mother would stop housework, women would stop in the streets, and there was a general cessation of all activity, even of traffic. 1939 was the last year of such devout observation.

We felt especially important when we wore our cub uniforms to school because our troop was sponsored by Field Marshal Lord Milne whose name appeared beneath the number of our troop on our shoulder patches (“1st Ruislip Cub Troop, Lord Milne’s Own”). None of us had the slightest idea who he was or what he had done but he must obviously have been a war hero of some kind. When he came to inspect us one day we were very deflated. We had expected him to arrive in military uniform resplendent in the red tabs of staff rank and mounted on a horse but here was a short, stooped man wearing a bowler hat and overcoat. It was a cold afternoon and he hurried away to his chauffeur and car without addressing us. Years later I looked the gentleman up in a reference book. It seems he conducted himself quite well in the Balkans campaign. In peacetime he rose to become chief of the imperial general staff so must have had some merit. At least he did not organize any of the mass slaughters. I was always puzzled as to how our troop had become “his own”. Many years later, it turned out that when Milne was campaigning in the Balkans, he met and became friendly with a young medical officer called Max Wilson who, in the course of time, moved to Ruislip and became involved with scouts. Wilson simply asked Milne, who agreed.

Another celebration that was held for the last time was Ruislip Day. This festivity was organized by the local residents’ association, of which my father was a keen member. A huge crowd would assemble at the Manor Farm situated at the end of the High Street, which was bought about 1936 from owners and changed to public use. The old tythe barn was made over very artfully into a library, a bowling green made where there had been a rick-yard, and the orchards set aside, as far as us boys were concerned, to be plundered at will by the youth of the town. On Ruislip Day there would be races, competitions, talent shows, Morris dancing, bowling for pigs, and, to our great amusement, a demonstration by the ladies of the League of Health and Beauty who would perform a series of graceful callisthenics to music while dressed out in white blouses and navy blue knickers. Such activity was regarded as rather avante garde as adults were not thought to need to take any more exercise than they encountered in their daily toil. The sight of grown women running around in dark blue knickers was not a common sight. My peers and I found the whole performance very amusing.
My mother rather admired the women of the “League” under the direction of their leader Daisy Dormer, but would never have considered joining. She stuck to voluntary work for the infant welfare programme. For years every Thursday afternoon she would join her friend and near neighbour, Mrs. Wilfred Wilson, and walk to the church hall on Bury Street where they would register mothers who brought their babes in to see the doctor or nurse under this government-sponsored programme.
My job was always to deliver the programmes for Ruislip Day on our street before the event. The principal and owner of one of the many private schools that flourished at the time (and put out of business by the 1946 Education Act) was a leading Scout leader and related to a comedian of the time called Gillie Potter who was usually prevailed upon to perform. His line was “good afternoon England” as he introduced his patter dressed in a dark blue blazer with the broad red arrow of a convict on the pocket. None of this was to come back in pre-war form although the Ruislip Days were continued after the war.

History tells how Britain was grossly unprepared to fight a war but to me at the time we had everything ready. My father took me to an Air Display at the nearby Northolt airport in 1938 where we were in the crowd when a Hawker Hurricane fighter swept overhead at the astonishing speed of 400 miles per hour. How could the Germans stand up to this? The fact that Britain had only about twelve of these planes at the time escaped me, as I suspect it did many others. This was 1938 and the rest of the planes were biplanes with fixed undercarriages that gave demonstrations of aerobatics. They belonged to an era that had already passed. Wilkinson, our school headmaster, was like all the males of his generation, a veteran of the previous war. He had been lucky and survived it without any evident wounds. He lived just a few doors from my home, as did the school caretaker, Mr. Emery. Each would walk to the same pub each evening but on different sides of the street and then sit in different bars. I don’t think they ever spoke outside the school. Awareness of class distinctions such as this example was part of the way of life.
Millions of other men who had avoided death in the war, were not so fortunate and carried evidence of wounds in the form of facial scars, limps, an eye covered with a patch or replaced with a glass one, and lost limbs, while others coughed their lives away as the result of breathing poisonous gas. These men were all between 38 and 55 in 1939. Many were fathers of school friends. My recollections of childhood trips to London include that of the groups of be-medalled old soldiers, often including some maimed or blind, walking in lines along the gutters displaying their medals and playing musical instruments rather badly as they begged for money. My mother always gave me a penny to hand them. Theirs, they had been promised, was the war to end all wars. Britain would be made into “a country fit for heroes”. How badly they were led and misled! A German general is credited with saying of the British army that it was a group of lions led by donkeys. Now we were approaching another war. Some of the unfortunates from the previous war carried mental wounds of one kind or another — generally lumped together as “shell shock”. One of this number, who had also lost a leg, rode down our street every day on his bicycle which had been modified by the removal of the free wheel capability and removal of the pedal on the side where the artificial leg hung stiffly down. He was a watchmaker at a shop on Ruislip’s High Street and would ride by shouting remarks such as “take your damned watches to Jericho” at nobody in particular as he pumped away with his remaining leg.
Not only had the previous war taken the lives of millions of young men, but the ensuing influenza epidemic had taken even more of both sexes. So many deaths reduced the number of men available for marriage that many young women were left without hope of ever finding a partner. These ladies had to support themselves and provided not only the many unmarried women teachers we had in the schools but a substantial portion of the work force in general. It was not unusual find they had no remaining relatives. We had a substantial number of these ladies and war widows living around us. One or two had private incomes in the form of pensions but the rest worked. One lady, a Miss Kershaw with modestly independent means had not a relative in the world, spent much of her time walking her dog. She carried a large whip that she would use to drive off any other dog that got within reach. In her sober moments she was pleasant enough but she succumbed to alcoholism during the war and finally suffocated in a fire started by a cigarette she was smoking dropped on the furniture when she dropped off to sleep. A sad tale, but unfortunately not unique.

Anticipation of the coming war had been widespread for some time. As part of the air raid precautions (ARP), we were all fitted and issued with gas masks before hostilities began. Millions of these had been manufactured. Apart from the standard version, there was a coloured Mickey Mouse version for small children and a big bag version to accommodate babies. There was a general agreement that it was only a matter of time before the Germans would use this weapon on civilians much as both sides had used it on each other’s armies during the previous war. This time, we were convinced, poisonous gas would come in bombs dropped from planes. We all had our gas masks fitted in neat cardboard boxes that, we were told, would have to be carried by everyone once hostilities began. A great mistake was made in the design of the gas masks of the type issued to our family and we all had to return to the distribution centre to have an extra filter taped on! I have often wondered what it was that had been overlooked. Manufacturers made a small killing by marketing tin tubes in which to store and carry the gas masks as the card board boxes would not have lasted more than a short while. It was an offence not to carry your gas mask on the street.Scouts and cubs from the Ruislip area put on a great demonstration of air raid precautions drill during the summer of 1938. My part in this was as a member of a class of children. After what seemed like months of practice the great day arrived. With other cubs I was seated in an assortment of school furniture in the middle of a field where we stood at the appropriate moment to sing a song. When the signal came we all ducked under our desks while a plane flew over at low level simulating a bombing attack. Scouts, acting the roles of firemen, messengers, etc. rushed about. If someone had told me then that it would be six years before I would be required to duck under a school desk, in all seriousness, I would never have believed it.When the war came we were sure it would be short. The same misconception had been held in the previous war when, on its declaration on August 4th, 1914, everyone was convinced it would be over by Christmas. In this war, the enemy missed the chance to invade Britain in the late summer of 1940 when the country was virtually unprotected following the fall of France. If Hitler has taken the advice of his generals to invade right away, the war really would have been over by Christmas 1940.

Part 1

Well before my tenth birthday in April 1939 I was sufficiently well aware of current affairs to know a war was expected, so I was not surprised when one was actually declared on September 3rd of that year. To a small boy, the concept was very exciting. It would be a glorious success in which we, the British, would of course show Hitler the error of his ways in a very short time. After all, had we not won the previous war with Germany only 21 years previously?

Looking back, I suppose my main source of information was the newsreels that were shown as part of every cinema show I went to see. Television was in its infancy in Britain and was still nothing more than an experimental novelty enjoyed by the wealthy, and my friend across the street, Hugh Metcalfe, whose home was equipped with a set made by the firm his father worked for as an electrical engineer. Over the years of our childhood attendance at cinemas my friends and I sat transfixed at the newsreels as we watched the Germans under Hitler invading first Austria then Czechoslovakia and finally, Poland. Interspersed with these were newsreels of the Italians under Mussolini invading Ethiopia and Albania and, a year or so earlier, shots of the Spanish civil war. There were also confusing newsreels of Japanese attacking Chinese. We did not always know which side to cheer for but we thought we knew what to expect when war came upon us, especially from the air.
In those uncertain times, my parents listened regularly to a lot of news programmes on the radio. The contents of these radio reports also did not evade me and were the subject of regular discussion. I could relate particularly to Ethiopia because one of the emperor Haile Selasie’s daughters was my nurse when I had my tonsils taken out at Great Ormand Street Hospital for Children in London in 1936. The other countries were nothing more to me than places on a map that produced stamps for my collection. We encountered few foreigners in England at that time. To hear someone speaking a foreign language was most unusual.
I also remember hearing the broadcast of the announcement describing the treatment of Jews in concentration camps in Germany. That must have been about 1938. There was a
general air of shock that re-enforced everyone’s feeling that the war was not far off. When it arrived, we would right all these wrongs; and of course, we would win.

My friends and I were very conscious of being British, the upholders of fair play, winners of the previous war, the hub of the British Empire, on which the sun never set. These were the days when Empire Day was celebrated each year to remind everyone what it was all about. Those children belonging to Guides, Brownies, Scouts or Cubs would wear their uniforms to school, and we would spend the afternoon in the school hall singing the patriotic songs we had been practicing for weeks — “Land of Hope and Glory”, “The British Grenadiers”, “Jerusalem” with its “And did those feet in ancient times…” and such. (It has always amused me that the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory” should have been chosen to be played at graduation ceremonies throughout the U.S.A. while the words never heard in that country, would constitute a much better national anthem for the British than “God Save the Queen”.) Our headmaster, Tom Wilkinson, sometimes accompanied by the vicar, would stand beside the lectern on the stage beating time vigorously with both arms in a paroxysm of patriotic fervour. Our teachers, except for the one pounding the piano, stood facing inward along one side of the hall, ready to rush down a line of singers to thump over the head with a hymnbook any backslider who had the temerity to display lack of patriotic spirit such as pulling the pigtails of a girl in the row in front.
These were also the days when Armistice Day, November 11th, was observed with great dignity. Again, everybody who owned a uniform would wear it to school. This was the day on which the previous war had stopped — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Wreathes were laid on war memorials in villages throughout the country and there were parades at which the old soldiers would wear their medals. Everyone wore a red poppy cut from canvas mounted on a piece of green wire. They were supposed to resemble the poppies that grow wild in Flanders where much of the fighting took place in World War 1 and millions of British soldiers lie buried along with others.
The whole poppy scheme had been dreamt up and organized by a General Haig (of the whiskey distilling family fame) who had planned a good number of the mass slaughters which had gone, during the war under the misnomer of “battles”. Volunteers sold the poppies everywhere during the weeks before on behalf of the British Legion, an organization of old soldiers founded by Haig. For the rest of the year the British Legion was a social club for old soldiers devoted to giving them a place to drink beer and chat, and to looking after the welfare of the down and out amongst them. We bought our poppies from ladies who came to the school. These were depression times so nobody had much money. The usual poppy cost a penny but there were more elaborate ones for the larger givers, like for six pence, and there were even arrangements which the affluent could mount on top of the radiators of their motor cars which in those days had chromium plated filler caps at the front end of the hood, or bonnet. Income from sales went to the support of the blind and wounded ex-servicemen who manufactured the poppies.
At eleven o’clock, at the precise time the Armistice was signed, everyone stopped for a minute’s silence. A service at school was timed to incorporate the moment. We would hear the field guns boom from their site in Hyde Park in the centre of London about fourteen miles away. My mother would stop housework, women would stop in the streets, and there was a general cessation of all activity, even of traffic. 1939 was the last year of such devout observation.

We felt especially important when we wore our cub uniforms to school because our troop was sponsored by Field Marshal Lord Milne whose name appeared beneath the number of our troop on our shoulder patches (“1st Ruislip Cub Troop, Lord Milne’s Own”). None of us had the slightest idea who he was or what he had done but he must obviously have been a war hero of some kind. When he came to inspect us one day we were very deflated. We had expected him to arrive in military uniform resplendent in the red tabs of staff rank and mounted on a horse but here was a short, stooped man wearing a bowler hat and overcoat. It was a cold afternoon and he hurried away to his chauffeur and car without addressing us. Years later I looked the gentleman up in a reference book. It seems he conducted himself quite well in the Balkans campaign. In peacetime he rose to become chief of the imperial general staff so must have had some merit. At least he did not organize any of the mass slaughters. I was always puzzled as to how our troop had become “his own”. Many years later, it turned out that when Milne was campaigning in the Balkans, he met and became friendly with a young medical officer called Max Wilson who, in the course of time, moved to Ruislip and became involved with scouts. Wilson simply asked Milne, who agreed.

Another celebration that was held for the last time was Ruislip Day. This festivity was organized by the local residents’ association, of which my father was a keen member. A huge crowd would assemble at the Manor Farm situated at the end of the High Street, which was bought about 1936 from owners and changed to public use. The old tythe barn was made over very artfully into a library, a bowling green made where there had been a rick-yard, and the orchards set aside, as far as us boys were concerned, to be plundered at will by the youth of the town. On Ruislip Day there would be races, competitions, talent shows, Morris dancing, bowling for pigs, and, to our great amusement, a demonstration by the ladies of the League of Health and Beauty who would perform a series of graceful callisthenics to music while dressed out in white blouses and navy blue knickers. Such activity was regarded as rather avante garde as adults were not thought to need to take any more exercise than they encountered in their daily toil. The sight of grown women running around in dark blue knickers was not a common sight. My peers and I found the whole performance very amusing.
My mother rather admired the women of the “League” under the direction of their leader Daisy Dormer, but would never have considered joining. She stuck to voluntary work for the infant welfare programme. For years every Thursday afternoon she would join her friend and near neighbour, Mrs. Wilfred Wilson, and walk to the church hall on Bury Street where they would register mothers who brought their babes in to see the doctor or nurse under this government-sponsored programme.
My job was always to deliver the programmes for Ruislip Day on our street before the event. The principal and owner of one of the many private schools that flourished at the time (and put out of business by the 1946 Education Act) was a leading Scout leader and related to a comedian of the time called Gillie Potter who was usually prevailed upon to perform. His line was “good afternoon England” as he introduced his patter dressed in a dark blue blazer with the broad red arrow of a convict on the pocket. None of this was to come back in pre-war form although the Ruislip Days were continued after the war.

History tells how Britain was grossly unprepared to fight a war but to me at the time we had everything ready. My father took me to an Air Display at the nearby Northolt airport in 1938 where we were in the crowd when a Hawker Hurricane fighter swept overhead at the astonishing speed of 400 miles per hour. How could the Germans stand up to this? The fact that Britain had only about twelve of these planes at the time escaped me, as I suspect it did many others. This was 1938 and the rest of the planes were biplanes with fixed undercarriages that gave demonstrations of aerobatics. They belonged to an era that had already passed. Wilkinson, our school headmaster, was like all the males of his generation, a veteran of the previous war. He had been lucky and survived it without any evident wounds. He lived just a few doors from my home, as did the school caretaker, Mr. Emery. Each would walk to the same pub each evening but on different sides of the street and then sit in different bars. I don’t think they ever spoke outside the school. Awareness of class distinctions such as this example was part of the way of life.
Millions of other men who had avoided death in the war, were not so fortunate and carried evidence of wounds in the form of facial scars, limps, an eye covered with a patch or replaced with a glass one, and lost limbs, while others coughed their lives away as the result of breathing poisonous gas. These men were all between 38 and 55 in 1939. Many were fathers of school friends. My recollections of childhood trips to London include that of the groups of be-medalled old soldiers, often including some maimed or blind, walking in lines along the gutters displaying their medals and playing musical instruments rather badly as they begged for money. My mother always gave me a penny to hand them. Theirs, they had been promised, was the war to end all wars. Britain would be made into “a country fit for heroes”. How badly they were led and misled! A German general is credited with saying of the British army that it was a group of lions led by donkeys. Now we were approaching another war. Some of the unfortunates from the previous war carried mental wounds of one kind or another — generally lumped together as “shell shock”. One of this number, who had also lost a leg, rode down our street every day on his bicycle which had been modified by the removal of the free wheel capability and removal of the pedal on the side where the artificial leg hung stiffly down. He was a watchmaker at a shop on Ruislip’s High Street and would ride by shouting remarks such as “take your damned watches to Jericho” at nobody in particular as he pumped away with his remaining leg.
Not only had the previous war taken the lives of millions of young men, but the ensuing influenza epidemic had taken even more of both sexes. So many deaths reduced the number of men available for marriage that many young women were left without hope of ever finding a partner. These ladies had to support themselves and provided not only the many unmarried women teachers we had in the schools but a substantial portion of the work force in general. It was not unusual find they had no remaining relatives. We had a substantial number of these ladies and war widows living around us. One or two had private incomes in the form of pensions but the rest worked. One lady, a Miss Kershaw with modestly independent means had not a relative in the world, spent much of her time walking her dog. She carried a large whip that she would use to drive off any other dog that got within reach. In her sober moments she was pleasant enough but she succumbed to alcoholism during the war and finally suffocated in a fire started by a cigarette she was smoking dropped on the furniture when she dropped off to sleep. A sad tale, but unfortunately not unique.

Anticipation of the coming war had been widespread for some time. As part of the air raid precautions (ARP), we were all fitted and issued with gas masks before hostilities began. Millions of these had been manufactured. Apart from the standard version, there was a coloured Mickey Mouse version for small children and a big bag version to accommodate babies. There was a general agreement that it was only a matter of time before the Germans would use this weapon on civilians much as both sides had used it on each other’s armies during the previous war. This time, we were convinced, poisonous gas would come in bombs dropped from planes. We all had our gas masks fitted in neat cardboard boxes that, we were told, would have to be carried by everyone once hostilities began. A great mistake was made in the design of the gas masks of the type issued to our family and we all had to return to the distribution centre to have an extra filter taped on! I have often wondered what it was that had been overlooked. Manufacturers made a small killing by marketing tin tubes in which to store and carry the gas masks as the card board boxes would not have lasted more than a short while. It was an offence not to carry your gas mask on the street.Scouts and cubs from the Ruislip area put on a great demonstration of air raid precautions drill during the summer of 1938. My part in this was as a member of a class of children. After what seemed like months of practice the great day arrived. With other cubs I was seated in an assortment of school furniture in the middle of a field where we stood at the appropriate moment to sing a song. When the signal came we all ducked under our desks while a plane flew over at low level simulating a bombing attack. Scouts, acting the roles of firemen, messengers, etc. rushed about. If someone had told me then that it would be six years before I would be required to duck under a school desk, in all seriousness, I would never have believed it.When the war came we were sure it would be short. The same misconception had been held in the previous war when, on its declaration on August 4th, 1914, everyone was convinced it would be over by Christmas. In this war, the enemy missed the chance to invade Britain in the late summer of 1940 when the country was virtually unprotected following the fall of France. If Hitler has taken the advice of his generals to invade right away, the war really would have been over by Christmas 1940.

Part 2

In 1938, my father had bought his first car. By the summer of 1939 he had mastered driving well enough to take my mother and me to the extreme north of England to visit my mother’s parents, my Gardner grandparents. Driving around in those days was a laborious business. There were no main roads, as we understand the term today. The road to the north of England was a two lane affair, one going each way as it snaked through every village and town. Many of the larger commercial vehicles were restricted to speeds of less than 20 mph so cars would be stuck behind trucks for miles before an opportunity to overtake came along. We seldom drove at over 50 mph.

The only photograph of the whole of my mother’s family together was taken during this holiday. My youngest cousin Michael was very young at the time and must have been left asleep so does not figure in the photograph. We had not long since returned from this adventure when the radio announced the German invasion of Poland. The date was 3rd September 1929. Prime Minister Chamberlain told us that after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Hitler had promised not to invade anywhere else. The wisdom of that appeasement is still being discussed and the photograph of Chamberlain emerging from a plane and waiving the note, supposedly bearing Hitler’s signature to a promise not to invade anywhere else, remains among the outstanding news photos of all time. To the best of my knowledge, this piece of paper has never been reproduced any where, or exhibited in a museum. I suspect it was ruse on Chamberlain’s part. Perhaps it was a receipt for his dry cleaning. Hitler announced that the occupation of Czechoslovakia was “his last territorial demand”. Neither Britain nor France could have done much to prevent Germany moving into Czechoslovakia. They were not prepared for one thing.

I was waiting for the end of the school holiday in order to begin my last year at primary school when Hitler sent the German army into Poland. Chamberlain gave the Germans an ultimatum — either they pulled out immediately, or Britain would declare war. France promised the same. Just how much of all this was public knowledge at the time I do not recall. On the Sunday morning, September 3rd, when my friend Robin Hood came around to play, my father suggested we both do something both patriotic and useful by going to the Ruislip fire station to fill sand bags.
Off we went feeling very conscious of doing something useful. The sandbag filling proved hard work but we laboured away. We cannot have filled more than three or four. Some of the men drifted off about eleven to hear Chamberlain’s speech on radio at Mr. Chapman’s quarters at the farm — he being the chief fireman and in charge of filling sand bags. About eleven thirty Chapman returned and announced very formally “Gentlemen, we are at war with Germany” adding “You lads get on home”. We had no sooner started off than the siren heralded an air raid.

Newsreels and radio reports had left none of us in doubt about the results of air raids. We had all seen pictures of the damage wrought by German bombers in Spain during the civil war. I had seen Spanish children who had been brought to Britain from Spain to avoid this bombing. (It was the first time I had heard children talking a foreign language). Now we were hearing similar tales from Poland. Robin and I began to run down the deserted streets expecting the dreaded Stuka dive bombers to appear at any moment.
Halfway to my home we were met by an elderly man (probably no more than fifty, but old to us) who had clearly responded to the call for volunteers to become Air Raid Wardens. He took his training seriously and was armed with everything the authorities had issued to him — his military type steel helmet with the letters “ARP” (standing for ‘Air Raid Precautions’) on it, his special gas mask in a canvas bag, a whistle with which to attract attention, an armband bearing the letters “ARP”, and a rattle to warn of a gas attack. Again we were advised to “hurry along home”.

Home was tranquil indeed. My mother had a roast of lamb on the table for Sunday lunch as usual. Later we learned from the radio that the air raid warnings had been sounded over the whole south of the country because a single unidentified aircraft had been seen approaching the east coast. The plane was later identified as “one of ours”. In retrospect it is surprising that we were led to expect air raids as the range capabilities of the German bombers of the time would barely allow them to reach the English coast from their bases in Germany.

To prevent repetitions of such disruptions and to keep track of aircraft in general, the Observer Corps was formed. Volunteers came from the same group of men as our Air Raid Warden. My father’s two elder brothers, both wounded in the previous war, were among them. Their uniform consisted of dark blue dungarees with chrome buttons and a black beret, both with suitable badges and of course their medal ribbons. Their duties consisted of taking shifts for the continuous manning of one of a series of “observation posts” which were set up across the country from which every aircraft seen was first identified then its rough position and direction plotted. This information was transmitted by telephone to a network of Royal Air Force bases. Such an organization was necessary as these were the days before radar. Few women were recruited into the Observer Corps for in those days the divisions between what it was considered men could do and what women could were strictly drawn.

In 1941, Rudolf Hess, who was Hitler’s deputy at that time, defected and flew in a twin-engined Messerschmidt 110 fighter to Scotland. His declared objective was to renew his acquaintance with the Duke of Hamilton and persuade him to intercede with prime minister Churchill to negotiate a peace. All across Scotland the Observer Corps tracked the plane that they correctly identified but the Royal Air Force discredited the recognition because they knew that model of plane lacked the range to return to Germany. Hess crash-landed on the Duke’s estate and was imprisoned. After the war, he was transferred to Spandau jail near Berlin where his imprisonment was supervised in rotation by soldiers from America, Britain and Russia. Both Britain and America considered his release but the Russians were adamant he should remain in Spandau as indeed he did until as a lonely old man at the age of 92, he killed himself.

So certain was the conviction that widespread air raids would start immediately that when school began it was only for an hour or so each morning. We hurriedly copied homework from the black board and rushed home to complete our tasks. One day the Rev. Watkins came to talk to us. He had been one of the two curates at the Anglican Church to which our school was affiliated but he had left to become an army chaplain and was now posted with the British Expeditionary Force in France. He was with a British unit on the French Maginot Line, a huge string of defences strung out along France’s border with Germany to dissuade any advance in the direction of France and prevent reliving the “glory” of Verdun and other slaughters of the previous war.

The Germans had built a similar ‘Sigfried Line’ on their side of the border. When France announced plans to extend their Line along their frontier with Belgium, the Belgians complained loudly and made a diplomatic incident out of it so the extension of the line was not built. Eventually the Germans did exactly what they had done in the previous war when they wanted to invade France — they simply went through Belgium and turned the French flank. At this time however, all was quiet. Belgium was still neutral and the Germans were busy mopping up in Poland. In any case, why worry when the Germans were still engaged in mopping up in Poland?

The popular song of the time was “We’re going to hang out our washing on the Sigfried Line, have you any dirty washing mother dear?” The rest of the song failed to explain how this was to be accomplished. Both sides were convinced their line was impregnable, as it probably was. The Rev. Watkins enthralled us with his description of the defensive features of Maginot Line and showed us the gold coloured badge that gained him entry to the fortifications. We never saw him again and I used to wonder what became of him when hostilities really got going and the remains of the British force that was not outflanked left from Dunkirk.

One surprising fact is that in 1944 when the allied invasion force reached this area, no mention was made in the press about either of these lines of defence. Guns of the Maginot line would of course be pointing the wrong way for the defenders of Germany, but not those of the Sigfried line. I do not recall the Sigfried Line even being mentioned in the press at the time.

At the time of the German invasion of France and the Low countries there was a substantial influx of Belgian refugees into England. Until more permanent accommodation could be found for them, they were billeted in private homes around the country. They stood out as many of the men wore carpet slippers while walking around outdoors. I was never to learn the reason they did not wear proper shoes.
I was considered still too young to be left unattended at home so accompanied my mother on voluntary work she did going around the streets knocking at doors assigned to her to find out how much spare accommodation there was. Anyone who spoke French sufficiently well for them to act as an interpreter achieved high social standing. I have no idea of the background of these Belgian people but many were quickly absorbed into the community. Several of my friends had Belgian schoolmates who were highly valued for the help they could give with French homework. The only trouble was that the vernacular twists of French spoken in Belgium deviated from the Parisian French that we were taught so that the ‘help’was easily detected by the school masters.

My greatest concern at the time was that all the sales promotions by various manufacturers were cancelled as soon as the war started. I had collected about 950 of the 1000 wrappers from Oxo cubes (a meat extract drink) that could be redeemed for a football. Needless to say I never did receive the ball. Along with several other incomplete collections of coupons and wrappers my collections were consigned eventually to the scrap paper drive.

Diptheria had long been a scourge of British life. Sufferers from the disease were incarcerated in an isolation hospital until they either recovered or died. In the middle of all the adjustments to war, a vaccine against the disease was perfected and immediately all the children were required to take the injection. This once feared disease is never heard of these days.

No sooner had war been declared than my mother’s Aunt Aggie and her husband, Uncle George, moved in with us. Their home at Herne Bay was right on the coast on the southern side of the Thames estuary which they were convinced would not only be bombed to smithereens but that the German Navy would sail up the Thames shelling every town as it went.

George, unquestionably wealthy by our standards, was able to buy many luxuries in the food line to supplement the elementary food rationing which had begun. I recall especially an expensive and very tasty anchovy paste he and I would spread on bread and enjoy with great relish so much relish that I suspect George discontinued buying it. My first anchovies and there was a war on.

Aggie, who at 58 was convinced she was suffering from some heart illness yet to be properly diagnosed and treated, spent much of her mornings in bed sipping a hot milk preparation called Bengers Food for Invalids and only ventured out of the house once a week when George took her by the car to a specialist in London, who I now suspect was a quack, for colonic irrigation. I held both George and Aggie in awe. They tipped me generously and bought me expensive presents at Christmas but were both very conscious of their self-assumed social status. Some would call them snobs. Instead of eating the remains of the Sunday roast cold with home-made pickles as we had always done, George showed my mother how to make curry, which I enjoyed very much. He also brought beer into the house, a treat my father had previously only enjoyed at Christmas and while on summer holiday. George had an accounting business with partners in London that he visited once a week. For the rest of the time he puttered about helping my mother put up fittings for the blackout curtains. In retrospect, I think George must have made a lot of his money on the stock market but it would have been intrusive to ask.

Two years later Aggie was to die during an operation to remove her appendix. She was only 61. I do not believe the cause of death was ever determined but suspect there was a problem with the anaesthetic. Doctors were too busy at that time.
Aggie’s funeral was nothing if not dramatic from my mother’s report of the occasion. Cremation was still regarded as something of an innovation. This was the first my mother had attended. It was held at the then fashionable crematorium at Golder’s Green in north London and attended by George’s business associates who were uniformly attired in top hats and tailcoats. No sooner had the service begun than the air raid sirens sounded. Handel’s Largo was being played on the organ as the coffin glided slowly out of sight. Just at the moment the coffin reached the curtains and was about to disappear, there was a tremendous crash of anti-aircraft fire overhead and Aggie slipped from sight with a multiple gun salute. My mother came away most impressed with the symbolism of it all.

George and my father decided that when the raids became really bad, we should all shelter in the back sitting room. This room had glass doors that opened onto the back garden. My father produced some ancient cork linoleum about one centimetre thick that George and he cut up and hung from hooks on the insides of these doors and the adjacent windows to serve as both blackout material and protection from flying glass. George and my father went all over the house pasting adhesive strips of brown paper in cruciform patterns on all the windows, again to prevent flying glass. Details of how to do this were advertised by the government in the daily papers that were becoming slimmer with time. How effective these paper strips were was never discussed in any publication I saw. Later, when air raids came every night, I slept with my parents in the downstairs room.
By Christmas 1939 George and Aggie decided the war would last longer than they had expected so they moved into more permanent quarters at the Peahen Hotel in St. Albans. Simply nothing was happening in the progress of the war as far as we could see except that more and more men were being called up and we heard disturbing reports about ships being sunk at sea.

A great blow to morale came with the sinking of HMS Hood, a battleship and pride of the British fleet. During the chase into the North Atlantic of the Bismark, a German battleship and the heaviest battleship afloat, a stray shell hit the magazine and blew up the Royal Navy’s flagship Hood. Only three of the crew of over one thousand were saved. Every effort went to find and then sink the Bismark. That was effectively accomplished in what was really the end of battleship warfare. From then on, war at sea was fought using aircraft based on carriers. At least, the side with the carrier born aircraft was the side that won as the Japanese were first to demonstrate in the Pacific before the Americans perfected the technique.

Part 5

I was recovering from measles and had just gone to bed in the back room where I was severely bounced about by the effects of another bomb that had landed on the bungalow backing onto our house. The screens of old linoleum held up very well so I was safe enough but the lady in the bungalow lost a leg and bled to death before anything could be done for her. The heavier bomb landed further up the street where it killed another neighbour in one of the seven houses that had eventually to be demolished. On the next morning we were busy carrying out and dumping in the street buckets full of broken glass and lumps of clay. Now it was our windows that were covered with tarpaper. All but one of seven downstairs windows was blown out but upstairs only one was gone.

As part of the air raid precautions, shelters had been built in the streets. They consisted of brick walls with a concrete slab roof. Nobody used them except for amorous escapades. The government also distributed shelters of corrugated steel to homeowners who elected to take and erect them. Few of our neighbours bothered. To assemble these shelters (known as “Andersons” after the Minister under whose guidance they were issued), the owner had to dig down about four feet. No cement was available for a floor so wooden duckboards had to be laid. I suppose some lives were saved by people spending the night in these shelters while their homes were destroyed by bombs, but I rarely heard of them. The many nights spent in the damp cold must have done a lot of lasting harm in effect increasing the mortality rate among civilians just as the bombs were intended to do.

Food was becoming progressively shorter in supply. Just about everything was rationed. Ships bringing food were being sunk at an ever-increasing rate by submarines very much as was done in the previous war. Britain was slipping into the position of loser until it acquired the German codebook without the Germans knowing. After that, the positions of the submarines could be tracked and appropriate actions taken. It was about this time that we saw our first canned pork meat from America. It was called Spam and its arrival caused quite a sensation. Immediately the papers were full of ways to cook it. There was no Spam ration as such but its distribution was controlled by a system of “points” which we were all allocated. Whenever there was something different to be had, it was rationed out at a certain number of points. Later, we were to receive two-pound cans of ground lean pork meat. Immediately the papers carried recipes on how it should be prepared. The gist of the tips was that the meat was far too rich and should be diluted with lots of breadcrumbs. Even so, I remember it as being incredibly tasty. Towards the end of the really hard times, probably late 1943, a shipload of canned fish arrived from South Africa. The fish had been packed under the Afrikaans name of “snoek”. It was actually quite tasty but was the brunt of much humour when members of parliament would ask the minister of food how to pronounce the name, etc. The music hall comedians we listened to on the radio did not let the subject go lightly.

Offal was not rationed at all but was given out by the butchers as they thought fit. Needless to say there was a lot of bribery and ill-feeling when ox-tail, liver and kidneys were distributed but otherwise the rationing system worked well and, we were to learn later, much better than the one organized by the Germans. The local shop of the J. S. Sainsbury chain where my mother shopped for most of our groceries was very different from the supermarkets that would come after the war. Our “Sainsbury’s” sported marble counters at which customers stood in line for the commodities each supplied. Cold meats and bacon were cut in front of the customer with a slicing machine. Meats were laid out on cold marble slabs. The carcasses were cut in a room off the shop where a butcher would obligingly cut what you ordered, or at least he did when the supplies allowed him to do this. The floor of the entire shop was made up of little hexagonal bits of white marble over which clean saw dust was sprinkled each day. The manager, an imposing gentleman called Biddlecombe (he entered local politics as a councillor for the Conservative party), dressed in a blue and white striped apron, would hold court at the end of the counter at the back of the shop where there was an opening into the “back”. From this position he would invite regular shoppers into the “back” for various treats such as liver. I always thought he tried to be fair in the distribution of largesse but it must have been difficult for him to gratify so many obsequious women but he tried his best.

Economy of bulk cooking and feeding was utilized throughout the country by the establishment of “British Restaurants” in church halls and other suitable buildings. These establishments had a distinctive, rather unpleasant smell that I can still bring to my imagination and hope to never smell again. These establishments provided a two-course meal, cafeteria style, for six pence. Even in those days before inflation, that was cheap. When I returned with my own family to live in England in 1966, I was surprised to find school meals were still the same price.

I bought a hot lunch every day at school for the same sixpence. One boy at each table would collect the money and deliver it to the master at the head table, where he held court with the senior boys. The rest of us sat twelve to a table, six to a side. Everything had to be eaten. Desserts consisted mostly of variations of rice pudding and prunes until Japan came into the war and interfered with the supply of rice. At least that is what we all thought was the cause but now I suspect the rice came from the U.S. After service of rice ceased, we had various forms of semolina flavoured with fruit concentrate that was supposed to keep our vitamin intake at an acceptable level. The dollop of coloured fruit concentrate in the middle of the bland semolina conjured up many names — mostly disgusting. We were at an age when we could eat forever so we would try to get the squeamish to give up their dessert. One lad called Miller had a glass eye that he would pass around on a spoon in the hope of finding a second dessert. By having both my father and I eat our main meal out each day, our rations went a lot further. What my mother ate at noon I do not know.

Everyone “did their bit” for the war effort. Not to contribute was to earn the disapproval of friends and neighbours. I collected salvage material and of course looked after my rabbits. Many older women took up voluntary pursuits while all those below an age that was progressively raised were called up to take full-time work of a specified kind. My mother started off with the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) which had a multiplicity of duties, door to door surveys, looking after evacuees in transit, running canteens for service people, etc. but eventually she was posted to full time work at the Royal Air Force records office in Ruislip where she helped keep track of the payroll records of airmen when they were posted to a different station. She raised a smile when she told the person interviewing her for the job that she could not possibly work full time because she had a child at home to look after. I was fourteen at the time! Her weekly wages were a little over three pounds, then the equivalent of twelve dollars and now a modest tip after a meal for two in a good restaurant. So much for inflation. This job allowed her to eat daily in a canteen as well. The size of wages meant little as there was nothing much to buy in the shops beyond the rations.

Rather than put up the income tax, the government introduced “post-war credits” which were deducted from wages and were to be repaid after the successful conclusion of the war. This was actually done years later by paying off the elderly first and then the younger until all had been repaid with a low rate of interest.

Nobody had time off to rest and there were no vacations. Everyone worked full-time and spent weekends cultivating vegetables in line with the exhortation to “Dig for Victory” All around Britain, a security strip three miles wide along the coast was made inaccessible to anyone except residents so there was no opportunity for the “seaside holiday” so loved by the British. In any case, the beaches were rendered inaccessible with strings of barbed wire and concrete blocks designed to thwart tanks and landing craft.

Other women’s voluntary organizations included the Citizens’ Advice Bureau (which explained the intricacies of government regulations to bewildered citizens), and a variety of money-raising groups ranging from selling national Savings stamps to nursing. For the younger women who were recruited to national service, there were the women’s organizations for the three armed forces, the Women’s Land Army (which helped on the farms), the Auxiliary Fire Service, ambulance driving, etc. For those few who could fly, or were lucky enough to be chosen for instruction, there was Ferry Command that flew aircraft from factory to air force bases. As the war progressed the planes from North America became available, Ferry Command would bring them over the Atlantic. Everybody it seemed had a uniform of one sort or another. I had bought a book to help me identify the multitude of badges and uniforms to be seen on the streets.

Churchill discarded the formal clothes of a politician and was pictured dressed in boiler suit of coveralls that became known as a siren suit. Women’s hairdressing shops were left without help or materials so few of the women had their hair curled anymore and it became fashionable to wear a “turban”. Women with long hair controlled it by means of a net, or “snood” which was very popular in factories, or simply braided it. Some popular film stars were prevailed upon to cut their long hair in the hope that factory workers would do the same and so reduce the number of accidents caused by long hair becoming caught in machinery.

As soon as school was over for the summer of 1941 I was dispatched to Princes Risborough again to stay with my uncle Ray and Hester grandparents. It was only 30 miles from home but well away from most of the bombing. My grandfather had been stone deaf for forty years. When he learned the army was about to detonate an unexploded bomb nearby he got through the cordon somehow and hid behind a fence as close as he dared to the site. When he returned home triumphant claiming he had heard the explosion, we rejoiced with him although we all believed what he sensed was the concussion. I was to stay there for the whole month we were off school.

My father joined me for a week while my mother went north to her parents. On one of these days my grandfather Charles Edward Hester, who was then aged about 76, took my father and me by bus to West Wycombe, where he spent his early years following his birth there in 1867 . With him we toured the sites of his youth that included the house in which he had been born and the school he attended. Like most village schools, this one was built following the Education Act of 1871 and was ready for occupancy about 1875. My grandfather showed us the hawthorn bush behind which he and several friends had hidden before rushing to be first into the school when the teacher opened the door for the first time. We also saw the building that had housed the dame school that my grandfather’s older siblings had attended before the village school opened. We borrowed candles from a nearby house and explored the artificial caves which had been dug as a “make work” project 150 years previously to help alleviate unemployment in the village. Many years must have passed since grandfather was last in these caves but he remembered his way around very well. It was one of those days when I would have liked to have owned a tape recorder, but this was an invention yet to come.

All brand names of consumer goods like clothing, shoes and furniture were disbanded and production for the civilian market concentrated in one or two factories. Products were marketed as “Utility” items with a trademark ‘CC41’. The ‘C’s looked like pies with a quarter segment cut from them. We had utility suits, utility furniture, utility hats, utility shoes and so on, including of course “utility “ jokes. The long cotton underwear favoured by my grandfather was no longer manufactured and so became unobtainable. My grandmother had to “make do and mend” as the saying went. My grandmother also was most concerned as the nightwear he wore to bed consisted of a style of long flannel nightshirt that reached down to his ankles also became unobtainable. Neither came back into style! Wearing of long cotton underwear was a habit of his youth acquired before the dry cleaning process had been invented. In order for a suit to be cleaned, it had first to be taken apart at the seams and each piece washed separately before being sewn back. This was expensive and time consuming so it was prudent to keep perspiration away from the suit material by wearing long cotton underwear.

I was thirteen at the time and had never been at all interested in mastering the bicycle. My father determined he would teach me. By the end of the week, I was sufficiently proficient to ride the seven miles to Thame to see my uncle Percy and aunt Vi Hester who lived there. Until then I had never wanted a bicycle, but now I realized how useful one would be to get around there were none to be bought! Eventually a colleague of my father’s who was in the army lent me his bicycle “for the duration” and I was off on my own exploring roads around my home.

During the course of one such excursion the following winter I became overheated and succumbed to tracheitis, or inflammation of the trachea. Sulpha drugs had just come on the market and were prescribed. The doctor told me mine was a very patriotic condition to have as Churchill had the same thing at the time. The pills I had to take every four hours for two days were stamped “M&B 693" and were enormous but effective. Their after-effect was to leave me feeling very tired and I would lie in bed all day scanning the short wave radio dial. If Churchill felt anything like I did at the time, he cannot have worked with much effect.

www.oldoppos.co.uk

Part 5

I was recovering from measles and had just gone to bed in the back room where I was severely bounced about by the effects of another bomb that had landed on the bungalow backing onto our house. The screens of old linoleum held up very well so I was safe enough but the lady in the bungalow lost a leg and bled to death before anything could be done for her. The heavier bomb landed further up the street where it killed another neighbour in one of the seven houses that had eventually to be demolished. On the next morning we were busy carrying out and dumping in the street buckets full of broken glass and lumps of clay. Now it was our windows that were covered with tarpaper. All but one of seven downstairs windows was blown out but upstairs only one was gone.

As part of the air raid precautions, shelters had been built in the streets. They consisted of brick walls with a concrete slab roof. Nobody used them except for amorous escapades. The government also distributed shelters of corrugated steel to homeowners who elected to take and erect them. Few of our neighbours bothered. To assemble these shelters (known as “Andersons” after the Minister under whose guidance they were issued), the owner had to dig down about four feet. No cement was available for a floor so wooden duckboards had to be laid. I suppose some lives were saved by people spending the night in these shelters while their homes were destroyed by bombs, but I rarely heard of them. The many nights spent in the damp cold must have done a lot of lasting harm in effect increasing the mortality rate among civilians just as the bombs were intended to do.

Food was becoming progressively shorter in supply. Just about everything was rationed. Ships bringing food were being sunk at an ever-increasing rate by submarines very much as was done in the previous war. Britain was slipping into the position of loser until it acquired the German codebook without the Germans knowing. After that, the positions of the submarines could be tracked and appropriate actions taken. It was about this time that we saw our first canned pork meat from America. It was called Spam and its arrival caused quite a sensation. Immediately the papers were full of ways to cook it. There was no Spam ration as such but its distribution was controlled by a system of “points” which we were all allocated. Whenever there was something different to be had, it was rationed out at a certain number of points. Later, we were to receive two-pound cans of ground lean pork meat. Immediately the papers carried recipes on how it should be prepared. The gist of the tips was that the meat was far too rich and should be diluted with lots of breadcrumbs. Even so, I remember it as being incredibly tasty. Towards the end of the really hard times, probably late 1943, a shipload of canned fish arrived from South Africa. The fish had been packed under the Afrikaans name of “snoek”. It was actually quite tasty but was the brunt of much humour when members of parliament would ask the minister of food how to pronounce the name, etc. The music hall comedians we listened to on the radio did not let the subject go lightly.

Offal was not rationed at all but was given out by the butchers as they thought fit. Needless to say there was a lot of bribery and ill-feeling when ox-tail, liver and kidneys were distributed but otherwise the rationing system worked well and, we were to learn later, much better than the one organized by the Germans. The local shop of the J. S. Sainsbury chain where my mother shopped for most of our groceries was very different from the supermarkets that would come after the war. Our “Sainsbury’s” sported marble counters at which customers stood in line for the commodities each supplied. Cold meats and bacon were cut in front of the customer with a slicing machine. Meats were laid out on cold marble slabs. The carcasses were cut in a room off the shop where a butcher would obligingly cut what you ordered, or at least he did when the supplies allowed him to do this. The floor of the entire shop was made up of little hexagonal bits of white marble over which clean saw dust was sprinkled each day. The manager, an imposing gentleman called Biddlecombe (he entered local politics as a councillor for the Conservative party), dressed in a blue and white striped apron, would hold court at the end of the counter at the back of the shop where there was an opening into the “back”. From this position he would invite regular shoppers into the “back” for various treats such as liver. I always thought he tried to be fair in the distribution of largesse but it must have been difficult for him to gratify so many obsequious women but he tried his best.

Economy of bulk cooking and feeding was utilized throughout the country by the establishment of “British Restaurants” in church halls and other suitable buildings. These establishments had a distinctive, rather unpleasant smell that I can still bring to my imagination and hope to never smell again. These establishments provided a two-course meal, cafeteria style, for six pence. Even in those days before inflation, that was cheap. When I returned with my own family to live in England in 1966, I was surprised to find school meals were still the same price.

I bought a hot lunch every day at school for the same sixpence. One boy at each table would collect the money and deliver it to the master at the head table, where he held court with the senior boys. The rest of us sat twelve to a table, six to a side. Everything had to be eaten. Desserts consisted mostly of variations of rice pudding and prunes until Japan came into the war and interfered with the supply of rice. At least that is what we all thought was the cause but now I suspect the rice came from the U.S. After service of rice ceased, we had various forms of semolina flavoured with fruit concentrate that was supposed to keep our vitamin intake at an acceptable level. The dollop of coloured fruit concentrate in the middle of the bland semolina conjured up many names — mostly disgusting. We were at an age when we could eat forever so we would try to get the squeamish to give up their dessert. One lad called Miller had a glass eye that he would pass around on a spoon in the hope of finding a second dessert. By having both my father and I eat our main meal out each day, our rations went a lot further. What my mother ate at noon I do not know.

Everyone “did their bit” for the war effort. Not to contribute was to earn the disapproval of friends and neighbours. I collected salvage material and of course looked after my rabbits. Many older women took up voluntary pursuits while all those below an age that was progressively raised were called up to take full-time work of a specified kind. My mother started off with the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) which had a multiplicity of duties, door to door surveys, looking after evacuees in transit, running canteens for service people, etc. but eventually she was posted to full time work at the Royal Air Force records office in Ruislip where she helped keep track of the payroll records of airmen when they were posted to a different station. She raised a smile when she told the person interviewing her for the job that she could not possibly work full time because she had a child at home to look after. I was fourteen at the time! Her weekly wages were a little over three pounds, then the equivalent of twelve dollars and now a modest tip after a meal for two in a good restaurant. So much for inflation. This job allowed her to eat daily in a canteen as well. The size of wages meant little as there was nothing much to buy in the shops beyond the rations.

Rather than put up the income tax, the government introduced “post-war credits” which were deducted from wages and were to be repaid after the successful conclusion of the war. This was actually done years later by paying off the elderly first and then the younger until all had been repaid with a low rate of interest.

Nobody had time off to rest and there were no vacations. Everyone worked full-time and spent weekends cultivating vegetables in line with the exhortation to “Dig for Victory” All around Britain, a security strip three miles wide along the coast was made inaccessible to anyone except residents so there was no opportunity for the “seaside holiday” so loved by the British. In any case, the beaches were rendered inaccessible with strings of barbed wire and concrete blocks designed to thwart tanks and landing craft.

Other women’s voluntary organizations included the Citizens’ Advice Bureau (which explained the intricacies of government regulations to bewildered citizens), and a variety of money-raising groups ranging from selling national Savings stamps to nursing. For the younger women who were recruited to national service, there were the women’s organizations for the three armed forces, the Women’s Land Army (which helped on the farms), the Auxiliary Fire Service, ambulance driving, etc. For those few who could fly, or were lucky enough to be chosen for instruction, there was Ferry Command that flew aircraft from factory to air force bases. As the war progressed the planes from North America became available, Ferry Command would bring them over the Atlantic. Everybody it seemed had a uniform of one sort or another. I had bought a book to help me identify the multitude of badges and uniforms to be seen on the streets.

Churchill discarded the formal clothes of a politician and was pictured dressed in boiler suit of coveralls that became known as a siren suit. Women’s hairdressing shops were left without help or materials so few of the women had their hair curled anymore and it became fashionable to wear a “turban”. Women with long hair controlled it by means of a net, or “snood” which was very popular in factories, or simply braided it. Some popular film stars were prevailed upon to cut their long hair in the hope that factory workers would do the same and so reduce the number of accidents caused by long hair becoming caught in machinery.

As soon as school was over for the summer of 1941 I was dispatched to Princes Risborough again to stay with my uncle Ray and Hester grandparents. It was only 30 miles from home but well away from most of the bombing. My grandfather had been stone deaf for forty years. When he learned the army was about to detonate an unexploded bomb nearby he got through the cordon somehow and hid behind a fence as close as he dared to the site. When he returned home triumphant claiming he had heard the explosion, we rejoiced with him although we all believed what he sensed was the concussion. I was to stay there for the whole month we were off school.

My father joined me for a week while my mother went north to her parents. On one of these days my grandfather Charles Edward Hester, who was then aged about 76, took my father and me by bus to West Wycombe, where he spent his early years following his birth there in 1867 . With him we toured the sites of his youth that included the house in which he had been born and the school he attended. Like most village schools, this one was built following the Education Act of 1871 and was ready for occupancy about 1875. My grandfather showed us the hawthorn bush behind which he and several friends had hidden before rushing to be first into the school when the teacher opened the door for the first time. We also saw the building that had housed the dame school that my grandfather’s older siblings had attended before the village school opened. We borrowed candles from a nearby house and explored the artificial caves which had been dug as a “make work” project 150 years previously to help alleviate unemployment in the village. Many years must have passed since grandfather was last in these caves but he remembered his way around very well. It was one of those days when I would have liked to have owned a tape recorder, but this was an invention yet to come.

All brand names of consumer goods like clothing, shoes and furniture were disbanded and production for the civilian market concentrated in one or two factories. Products were marketed as “Utility” items with a trademark ‘CC41’. The ‘C’s looked like pies with a quarter segment cut from them. We had utility suits, utility furniture, utility hats, utility shoes and so on, including of course “utility “ jokes. The long cotton underwear favoured by my grandfather was no longer manufactured and so became unobtainable. My grandmother had to “make do and mend” as the saying went. My grandmother also was most concerned as the nightwear he wore to bed consisted of a style of long flannel nightshirt that reached down to his ankles also became unobtainable. Neither came back into style! Wearing of long cotton underwear was a habit of his youth acquired before the dry cleaning process had been invented. In order for a suit to be cleaned, it had first to be taken apart at the seams and each piece washed separately before being sewn back. This was expensive and time consuming so it was prudent to keep perspiration away from the suit material by wearing long cotton underwear.

I was thirteen at the time and had never been at all interested in mastering the bicycle. My father determined he would teach me. By the end of the week, I was sufficiently proficient to ride the seven miles to Thame to see my uncle Percy and aunt Vi Hester who lived there. Until then I had never wanted a bicycle, but now I realized how useful one would be to get around there were none to be bought! Eventually a colleague of my father’s who was in the army lent me his bicycle “for the duration” and I was off on my own exploring roads around my home.

During the course of one such excursion the following winter I became overheated and succumbed to tracheitis, or inflammation of the trachea. Sulpha drugs had just come on the market and were prescribed. The doctor told me mine was a very patriotic condition to have as Churchill had the same thing at the time. The pills I had to take every four hours for two days were stamped “M&B 693" and were enormous but effective. Their after-effect was to leave me feeling very tired and I would lie in bed all day scanning the short wave radio dial. If Churchill felt anything like I did at the time, he cannot have worked with much effect.

www.oldoppos.co.uk

Part 4

Members of the Local Defence Volunteers (or “LDV”), later to be known as the Home Guard, accomplished all this work in a matter of weeks. As the war progressed, this force would be armed with old rifles but for the moment they drilled with pikes! All the men were volunteers from above or below the age group that was called up for the regular army. Veterans from the previous war were very much in evidence. Ancient officers came to life all over the country to lend a hand with training. Initially the LDV were identified solely by their arm-bands that bore the letters LDV but they were soon to be given regular army uniforms. With their intimate knowledge of the surrounding country, they would have given a lot of trouble to an invading force.
It was announced that church bells would cease to be rung except to announce an invasion. Sunday mornings were to be silent until May 1945 except for one Sunday in 1943 when they were rung to celebrate the winning of the Battle of Alamein in North Africa..

To keep people on their toes and aware of the possibility of a gas attack, someone from the military would drive up to a place where people were gathered, such as a shopping street, and throw out a tear gas grenade before driving away. The air raid wardens would have been tipped off and would appear wearing their gas masks and waiving their warning rattles. Woe betide anyone who had left home that day without their gas mask!
Fortunately for us, Northolt airport, although a fighter base, was never bombed. The Germans concentrated on the airfields nearer the coast from which our fighter planes could be more of a nuisance to the bombers.

Once school was finished in the summer of 1940, I was sent to Princess Risborough in the country to be with my grandparents, uncle Ray and cousin Derrick. I had passed at the appropriate level of the ill-famed “eleven plus” examination, and bane of all schoolchildren, to gain a place next term at Harrow County Boys School in Harrow, about four miles closer to London than my home at Ruislip. The eleven-plus examination was abandoned about thirty years later following a contentious debate that still continues.
The summer weather ended and the Germans’ daylight raids stopped just in time to save the British who were having trouble replacing aircraft and pilots at the rate the Germans were destroying them! I went off to my new school at Harrow just at the end of the daylight raids. To reach school I had to travel four miles by train. Several of my friends were at the same school so I was not completely among strangers.

The school had an enrolment of about 750 boys (girls went to a different school). We were divided into classes, or forms, each consisting of about 35 pupils. For the first four years, there were four parallel forms (A to D) for each year of induction. At the conclusion of the fourth year we took what was then known as the General School Certificate examination in about eight subjects. Passing this was considered the key to good jobs. At that time, the school leaving age was fourteen. There was little money around so for many families it was essential to have another breadwinner in the house as soon as possible. Our school got these boys into the labour force at age 15 as opposed to other schools of this type that took an extra year. Many boys left after passing the examination, while others went on into what was called the sixth form where they took up to four subjects in the Higher School Certificate examinations two years later. At this point, the real achievers could take university scholarship examinations as well. We were started off with one hour of homework a night with one and a half at weekends but the rate was built up quickly to two hours a night after three years, and three hours in the sixth form. There was not much else to do in the evenings to distract us. At eighteen, you went into one of the armed services. Nobody had much ambition beyond that or gave much thought to the longer term.

By the time I started at this new school the air raid sirens were going on and off all day. The rule was that if an air raid warning was in progress when we arrived at the station, we would go to a nearby shelter, otherwise we were to go directly to school. At the school, a basement floor had been shored up with big timbers and all windows and doors shielded with sandbags that were later replaced with brick walls. When the warbling note of the warning sirens went during classes, we were herded downstairs until the steady note of the “all clear” blew. No schoolwork was attempted in these circumstances. We sat and played games such as chess and battleships, a mindless game in which you had to guess the coordinates of squares on a sheet of paper on which your opponent had
distributed his fleet of hypothetical battleships. As long as we kept reasonably quiet, nobody on the staff seemed to bother.

An important distraction in our lives was to get the teachers to interrupt the lesson with their reminiscences of “their” war. We became adept at asking leading questions!
The whole concept of shelters struck me as illogical. If bombs were to fall on us, the further we were spread about the fewer of us would be hit. The basement shelter was particularly ridiculous in hindsight, as any bomb on the school would have crashed through all the floors until it exploded in the basement where we were gathered. We would have been better off in the classrooms except for the hazard of flying glass. Sometimes on our escorted trips to the station on our way home, we would stand on the bridge over the tracks and look eastward towards London to see the vapour trails of dog fights between the planes of the two sides. Incongruously, the bridge was plastered with fascist symbols which had been painted on using a stencil for a fascist demonstration a year or so before the war started.

If the air raid warning was still in force when school was over, the teachers would hold a staff meeting to decide what to do, should we stay or leave? If things looked quiet, those of us going to the station would be formed into a crocodile and marched to the station under the guardianship of a master. Quite a responsibility for the poor fellow but nothing ever happened. Among the masters given this job was a Dr. Hartland, who taught French and who, because of his round body and characteristic bouncy walk, was known as “sorbo”, after the name given to a form of rubber. There was no doubt he knew the nickname because it was common practice to refer to him as Dr. Sorbo when talking about him to new boys who would then address the poor chap with this name. He was a dedicated teacher and good sport but none of us appreciated this at the time.

With the deterioration in the weather, the daylight raids stopped and the Germans settled down to night bombing raids. These seemed interminable with sirens every night. For most of the time we would hear nothing more, but occasionally an enemy plane would come over Ruislip and the searchlights and anti-aircraft guns would come into action. My father and I used to guess which model bomber it was by the sound of the engines. Engines of the Heinkel 111 had a characteristic throbbing note that we thought, incorrectly as it turned out, must indicate a diesel engine. All the aircraft used for bombing by night had two engines. The Germans had learned that by not synchronizing the engines the resulting throbbing noise disrupted the direction finding equipment used to guide the searchlights and anti-aircraft fire.

London was being heavily bombed at this time. Great Victoria Street in the City, where my uncle George had his accounting firm was completely razed. One evening, just before I went to bed, my father called me outside to see the glow on the horizon of the Surrey Docks burning nearly twenty miles away.

It was generally supposed that the German bombers navigated at night by identifying the various bodies of water scattered around west London. How this story arose I do not know but it was finally confirmed to me in East Africa in 1986 by an old German acting as navigator for an aerial photography contractor who admitted to having previously been a navigator on a Heinkel which bombed London during 1941. He also confirmed what we all suspected at the time that the bombers would release all their bombs the moment the searchlights found them. The loss of weight would cause the plane to pick up speed and rise several hundreds of feet and so escape the lights. We would regularly pick up in the streets pieces of shrapnel from anti-aircraft guns on the morning following a raid.
Later, when the Germans had realized the nature of the radar the British had developed, bombers would routinely dump rolls of black paper edged with aluminium foil that apparently caused great confusion on the radar screens. We would collect these souvenirs to show them off to our friends.

There were always jokes going around about “secret weapons”. Radar fell into this classification and the government did its best to explain in other ways the sudden success this invention brought to our fighter planes in shooting down enemy bombers at night. Later we learned that the early version of airborne radar was so precise that some of our fighters actually crashed into the enemy planes on dark nights before they had a chance to fire. At the time, we were treated to propaganda photographs supposedly showing pilots in sun glasses resting in arm chairs. The text beneath explained that medical science had found it possible to improve the night vision of these pilots by a combination of the dark glasses and a diet in which carrots figured prominently. Rabbits like carrots. Rabbits live in dark burrows so must be able to see in the dark. Hence it was “logical” to conclude that carrots help rabbits see in the dark! A story of the same kind had circulated during the previous war when soldiers rumoured to have been seen passing through a London railway station had been recognized as Russians by the snow on their boots! It seems that at times of great national jeopardy, citizens can be persuaded to believe just about anything if it is told with an air of authority.

By the end of 1940 everything was in short supply. Whatever industry had stockpiled at the beginning of the war had long since been consumed. We were constantly being asked to contribute to scrap drives. At one time everyone was asked to contribute spare aluminium pots and pans. We wondered how many good pots found their way into the homes of the scrap collectors! Crews of men with cutting torches cruised along residential streets cutting down the ornate iron railings installed during the previous century. Newspapers were collected for recycling. Nothing that could be re-used was thrown away. I collected blunt razor blades.

Even while “relaxing” in the evening and listening to the radio, my parents were busy doing patriotic things. My mother would crochet mittens out of cord that were worn over regular gloves by sailors on mine sweepers. My father would sit with a pair of pliers straightening out the springs for the newly devised Sten gun. The springs were manufactured mechanically but never came out of the machine as straight as the designer intended so they were distributed from places of work so that volunteers could utilize their spare time to give the springs the required delicate twists.

The newspapers were printed on a poor quality paper and consisted on bad days of a single sheet, or four pages. More commonly we got an extra half page in the middle. They did not take long to read. There might be as many as two photographs in the entire paper — generally the King, Winston Churchill or some other well-known figure doing something patriotic. One enterprising local resident who found he had exhausted everything of interest to him in the paper long before his daily reached his destination. For the balance of the journey, he would scan the birth announcements in order to record the relative popularity of names chosen for children. Each year, even after his ultimate retirement, he would report his findings in a letter to The Daily Telegraph.
Early in 1941 the First Canadian Fighter Squadron was moved away from Northolt aerodrome and the Canadians billeted around Ruislip of course went too. Our friend Carl Briese, was to return for leaves occasionally throughout the war from his new base at Middle Wallop, a name he found most amusing. A Polish Squadron equipped with Spitfires (fighter planes) replaced the Canadians and their obsolescent Hurricanes. I don’t recall ever having met foreigners who spoke no English before the Poles arrived and some were billeted next door. Our neighbours, the Fryers, accommodated the Squadron Leader, Zbigniew Czaikowski and his wife Christina. He spoke enough English to get along but she was fluent in French as well as English. Few of their compatriots spoke a word of English. Meeting all these foreigners was all very exciting. This was the first time I had been in close contact with people who spoke another language in preference to English. The Poles had arrived in Britain by a circuitous route through the Balkans that was never completely explained to me.

Once they were trained to fly the Spitfires, the Poles did a good job. On their return from a successful operation they would fly “victory roles” over Ruislip at zero altitude in fits of joie de vivre. The population was not amused but tolerated the exuberance as a patriotic obligation. These manoeuvres were very impressive but were stopped eventually when one or two planes came out of the roll at a wrong angle and crashed! Some particularly impressive displays of victory rolls were performed right over our house, in all probability by the lodger next door for his wife’s benefit.

Several kinds of bombs now fell routinely near our house and we spoke knowledgeably of 100, 500, and 1000 pounders (it never occurred to us that the enemy likely measured the bombs in terms of kilograms) as well as land mines and D.A.’s, or delayed action bombs. The first three were simply bombs of different weights, real or imagined. (How well can you tell the weight of a bomb when you are on the receiving end listening to the pitch of the whistle changing?) What we called landmines as far as I ever learned were simply bombs on parachutes. They would arrive silently well after the plane responsible for dropping them had gone into the night. One such bomb landed in the woods near home one summer’s night. We were all out next day to collect pieces of the parachute. Blast from such devices was very large but damage was usually light. The one in the woods was over a mile away and although the blast sucked all our curtains out through the transom windows there was no damage. I did not even wake up. As a terror weapon, they were particularly useless. Nobody seemed to get upset by them.

It was the task of the air raid wardens to listen to the bombs coming down and try to find where they landed so they could arrange first aid, ambulances and fire brigades. When no explosion was heard, we all knew a D.A. was in the neighbourhood. No matter what the time of day or night a warden would knock at the door and ask to be allowed to examine the property. Generally my father would have done this already.

The sirens would signal an “alert” or “all clear” without any apparent relation to what was going on. We generally ignored them in the evenings and just ‘carried on” until we heard a bomb coming down and would then fall flat on the floor. The thought that I might get killed by one of those bombs never really bothered me and I was surprised one night when my father lay across me as a bomb came hurtling down.

One night in early 1941 we heard the inevitable Heinkel come over with its engines throbbing away. All of a sudden every anti-aircraft gun in the district seemed to open up and in characteristic fashion, down whistled a string of bombs this time right across our street. My father, in his methodical manner, later plotted all the craters on a street map. His interpretation was that the ten or so bombs had all been light in weight except one, the heavy one, and that had drifted off line. Had it followed the trajectory of the others, it would almost certainly have landed right on us. As it was, my parents threw themselves on the living room floor in time for the shards of broken glass to fly over their heads and cut their way into the wall above them. The bomb had fallen just across the street in someone’s back garden.

In 1939 I was working in a semi-underground building on a machine where my foot depressed a pedal and punched .303 calibre bullets into blued steel clips which my hands linked together. The end product was a measured ammunition belt ready to feed one of the eight machine guns in the wings of a Hurricane or Spitfire fighter aircraft.
By an ironic twist of fate, and a year later, I stood in a busy London street on the periphery of Shepherds Bush listening to, and watching, those same fighter aircraft spiralling vapour trails and firing their guns at attacking German war planes. I couldn’t help thinking:” I wonder if I filled those machine gun belts?” It was 1940 and I was now seventeen years old. The Battle of Britain soon escalated to the indiscriminate bombing of towns and cities in Britain.
I didn’t know it at that time but I would not return to my previous place of work until many decades later. Then it would be only to see the monstrous crater and mourn some of the victims I once knew who were killed in the terrible explosion at 11.10am on the morning of the 27th November 1944 at Fauld in Staffordshire. Then, thousands of tons of high explosive bombs that had been stored in the excavated caverns of Ford’s Gypsum Mine, blew a gigantic hole out of the hill at Hanbury causing death and devastation.
But I digress and deviate from my situation in 1940. I lived with my family (father, mother and younger brother) in a flat off the Uxbridge Road in Shepherds Bush. On that road, towards Acton, I had found work at a factory that made Aircraft controls.
Up above, in the wide blue yonder, fat, floppy, grey blobs of the Barrage Balloons dotted the London skyline. Sometimes these Blimps, as we called them, would break away from their moorings and dance erractically in the sky, dragging their distructive cables across the rooftops.
At the factory they formed a section L.D.V. an abbreviation for Local Defence Volounteers but better known at that time as Look Duck and Vanish. Later they became the Home Guard.
That autumn of 1940 saw many daylight air raids. When the warning sirens wailed we stopped work in the factory and crossed the busy Uxbridge Road to the shelters. These were the standard type resembling a long concrete tunnel buried half way into the ground with the excavated soil piled up on top. Hard, wooden slatted seats extended the length of those cold, damp musty smelling ovoid walls.
The daylight raids became so frequent the firm decided to employ men as spotters to watch from the roof. The siren was then ignored until the spotters sounded the internal alarm for raiders overhead. Then we could all go to the shelters. The sound of droning aircraft was very clear. Then the anti-aircraft guns stationed in Hyde Park and Wormwood Scrubs would open up forming a ‘Box-Barrage’ (a big square of exploding shells to divert enemy aircraft and perhaps assist our fighters). On one memorable occasion I watched fascinated as a big square was formed by many puffs of smoke from the exploding shells in the clear blue sky.
Well, as you know, what goes up must come down. Some people call it shrapnel but it wasn’t. The large, jagged slivers of metal, some about six inches or more long and maybe an inch wide were the exploding cases of the anti-aircraft shells. In this incident a shower of these shards clanged musically and frightfully on the road and pavement amongst us only to bounce high once more before coming to rest with a reverberant echo. Naturally I picked one up to add to my collection which included a nose cone and later a number of tail fins from incendiary bombs and a durolumin shaft and base of a container used for dropping clusters of incendiary bombs. None of these souvenirs were kept very long.
When the night air raids started, a multitude of searchlights stabbed at the dark sky. Most were white light but a few coloured ones mingled with the illumination all highlighted by the enforced blackout. No anti-aircraft guns were fired, and after several days of obvious inaction people began to ask why. Nobody bothered whether the guns were accurate at night or not, they wanted to feel that we were fighting back. When, without warning, it suddenly came the action was deafening. Every anti-aircraft battery in London seemed to be firing in unison. After that I saw no more searchlights piercing the night sky. There was a new noise to get used to though. It was the shrill screech of falling bombs. The blast of those near ones shook the house and the light bulbs danced erratically on the hanging flex.
Perhaps you’ve seen films of the so-called Blitz with families moving out to their cold and damp Anderson shelters? If so, spare another thought for those people who had no gardens to dig them in. I don’t remember anyone who had a metal in-door Morrison shelter. Queues would form long before dark with shadowy figures clutching bed rolls and personal belongings to enter the cellars of larger buildings. There were, of course, the brick-walled pavement shelters with a thick concrete, flat roof. These were notorious for collapsing like a deck of cards from an adjacent explosion. So, like many others, we made sure the black out devices were in place and just stayed put. When the night raid was really bad the family in the only flat above would join us and we would sit in the hallway. Under the stairs was supposed to be the best place. The hall or passageway from the front door was the nearest we could get. It was almost under the staircase of the upstairs flat.
Most nights the all clear would wail before daylight. The way I walked to work would reveal the tragedies of the night. The acrid smell of burning or the odour of premature demolished buildings would tinge the air. Deep craters in the road, some with ignited gas pipes flaming powerfully like an angry dragon in its lair. Houses reduced to debris. It was pitiful to see baths and lavatories hanging from broken walls and half collapsed floors. Churned up in the shattered bricks and mortar were the possessions of people, who for a while anyway, you wondered how fate had treated them. The cinema on the main road was one day a pile of rubble except for the entrance at the front. Ludicrous in a grotesque sort of way the still standing front wall advertised the film ‘Forty Little Mothers’ starring Eddie Cantor. Sometimes the air raid warning would sound again before I got to work and sometimes we could have a day or two’s respite without the wailing siren. On one such day, as brother and I returned to work at mid-day, a Heinkel bomber flew very very low over Shepherds Bush green and then opened up with its machine gun along the Uxbridge Road. Then, after we got over the shock, the siren on the green wailed its late warning.
But we were lucky really. Apart from a shard of metal smashing the back room’s sash window and an incendiary bomb which crashed through the roof. Yes, we nearly got it hot that night.
With no near explosions we decided to go to bed and catch up with some sleep. Startled, I heard a bang hitting the roof of the flat above us and then the hammering on our front door by one of the older girls from upstairs who was shouting that we were on fire.
When the fire-watchers arrived with their bucket and stirrup-pump they couldn’t get any water. Seemingly, in a panic, the bloke upstairs had turned off the water and the electric supply. Stupid as it may seem now, both brother and I dashed up and down the dark stairs carrying water in pots and pans to fill the fire-watchers bucket. We spilled more water over ourselves in the process. Eventually the fire was extinguished; but not before the bomb had burned its way through our ceiling and into our water logged front room. A burnt out sofa was pushed through a smashed upstairs window onto the pavement below. The horrible smell of burning lasted for days. There were many fires in the city that night but the worst was still to come.
It was Sunday evening and December 1940 had only two days left. Brother and I decided to walk into Acton and go to the pictures. The film was nothing special but it was somewhere different than sitting at home listening to the wireless. Halfway through, and superimposing itself on the mediocre black and white picture, a notice read:-
THE AIR RAID WARNING HAS SOUNDED.
THOSE WHO WISH TO GO TO A SHELTER
SHOULD LEAVE NOW
THE SHOW WILL CONTINUE.
Not many people left. There wasn’t many in the cinema anyway. We stuck it out for another half an hour then, bored stiff, we decided to walk home.
Once outside in the cool of the night air we got the shock of our lives. The sky towards Shepherds Bush was blood red. We watched in amazement as the crimson sky swirled in what looked like agonized torment to the accompaniment of screaming bombs and the roar of anti-aircraft guns. Overhead, the intermittent drone of enemy aircraft engines seemed to follow us on that long, terrifying walk home. Houses that we had walked past on our way to the cinema had disintegrated into ruins. A long wooden fence beside the pavement we had earlier walked upon was pitted with the jagged holes of bomb fragments. The horrible thought that if we had left the cinema when the warning flashed on the screen we would probably have no legs now, hurried our homeward steps. A row of terraced houses in the street leading off to our right looked completely demolished and the vehicles of the rescue teams stood in silence, waiting.
The air raids continued into the new year of 1941. By March of that year my father's job had transferred him to the North of England. They called it Cumberland in those days. Mother, brother and I were left in London awaiting a letter to say a new home was available. When that day came we saw our furniture and belongings loaded into the van. With insufficient money for train fares, arrangements were made for us to travel north in the back of the van; but not that day. The furniture van was scheduled to set off at first light from a lorry park somewhere in Chiswick. We had to find the place and the only way to do just that was to walk.
As the evening sky darkened to night the wailing siren heralded another raid. That final night in London, as the whine of bombs preceded the house shaking explosions, we made tea from an old kettle and drank our fill out of glass jam-jars.
It was still dark when we left our flat in the very early hours. The raid had ebbed and flowed all night and the guns still blasted their shells into the sky. I think we turned left into Uxbridge Road where luminous strips on the forever darkened lamp post glowed in guiding light through the dreary blackout.
From Goldhawk Road I think our aim was to find the Chiswick High Road. As dawn broke over Chiswick the all-clear sounded. We were more relieved to have located the van and a disgusting and distasteful smelling lavatory than to hear the sound of that long, wailing note we had heard so many times before. The conventional air raids would continue for another couple of months.

You don’t want to know that somewhere near ‘Rutland Water’ the half-shaft of the dilapidated van broke with a loud crack followed by a big skid and a stink of burning rubber, or that a year later I received a four shilling postal order (which I still have) and a leaflet which said :- ‘YOU ARE ABOUT TO BECOME A SOLDIER’. That’s another story.

It’s a morning in June, 1944 at Uxbridge Base west of London. Everyone is underground because the work they do out there is top secret. It is the Air Force Signal Control Centre. These headquarters were principally meant to test the operation of weapons when landings were taking place at the port of Dieppe, in France.

Renee Shalom is on duty. She is constantly watching Allied movements on screen and on controls. She works in the telex, and her boss is off today so she is in charge of anything that might be needed.

All of a sudden, a group of high-ranking officers comes in, all wearing uniforms with many important medals. They say they must send a coded message and it must be sent very carefully and with no mistakes. Renee is nervous but she sends the message, apparently without any problems.

The following day she finds out what she had sent - it was the communication instructing British troops of the launching of D-Day.

My mother was born in Manchester and came from an orthodox Jewish family of nine children. She was the first child to volunteer in the Air Force, quite courageous in that context and at that time.

Denise Chrem Shalom de Brujis - Maryland, US

The War in Ruislip Manor Part 2

It was difficult to find your way during the war as the authorities removed all signposts in case they would have helped the Germans in an invasion.

My father was stationed at A.R.P. wardens post K4 in Bessingby Field. Ruislip Manor.. In the early time of the war there was no telephone installed at the wardens post and as we were one of the very few families to have a telephone and lived just a short distance from the wardens post an arrangement was made whereby we would be told of impending air raids and state of alert, green, amber or red and either I or my mother would then run to the wardens post to pass on the message to enable the air raid siren to be sounded in good time. Fortunately there was no need to put this into operation before the telephone was installed in the wardens post.

My father owned a Morris 8 car and used this while petrol rationing was in force but had to lay the car up in 1942 for the duration of the war as petrol was then only issued for wartime purposes. While he was able to use the car we made occasional visits to the seaside but were unable to get to the beaches as they were mined and covered in barbed wire. The centre sections of seaside piers were demolished in case they were used by the Germans in an invasion.

The “Phoney War” was a strange experience. Although nothing happened to us at home we were always expecting an air raid or an invasion by the Germans (or “Jerries” as we called them). There was much speculation that German spies would arrive by parachute and we were all on the alert. We were all issued with identity cards which we had to carry at all times (we could see the reason for this in war time) and ration books for food and coupons for petrol. There was only one brand of petrol, “Pool” petrol.

The huge silver-grey barrage balloons had become a familiar sight. We had learnt how to operate stirrup pumps and how to put out an incendiary bomb with a bucket of sand.

When the first air raids started in August 1940 it was in a strange way a relief. At least we now knew what war was about. It was fascinating to see the searchlights criss-crossing in the sky searching for enemy aircraft, the sound of the ack-ack guns firing at the bombers and the occasional tracer bullets from the fighters. Living so close to Northolt aerodrome the Spitfires and Hurricanes would take off over our house and I used to wave to the pilots from my bedroom window. I still thrill to the sound of a Rolls Royce Merlin engine. We quickly learnt the difference between the note of the engines of the German planes and our own and to identify the different types of plane.

The lawn in our back garden was dug up to build the Anderson Shelter which was constructed of six curved corrugated steel panels with flat corrugated steel end panels. The shelter was buried some three to four feet deep, lined with concrete inner walls up to ground level, and the top was completely covered with soil on which grass and plants eventually were grown. We were fortunate in that we had electricity laid on to the shelter from the house which enabled us to have electric light, an electric fire and electric ring to boil a kettle as well as a small De Wald radio so that we could listen to broadcasts during the many hours we spent in the shelter. To ensure that no light could be seen from the shelter there was a black curtain over the entrance and a timber porchway protected by sandbags. To enable us to get into the shelter without jumping down we used to step on to a large wooden blanket box which was filled with tinned food and water in case we were trapped in the shelter.

We spent many nights sleeping in the Anderson shelter and always listened to the radio. One broadcast that we always listened to was a German propaganda programme - news from “Lord Haw Haw”, an English traitor William Joyce. We always had a good laugh at the way the Germans tried to make us downhearted by broadcasting news that we were losing the war (even if sometimes there was some truth in it). We also listened to the various wartime programmes such as “ITMA” with Tommy Handley, “Monday Night at Seven” (later Monday Night at Eight)”, “Band Wagon” with Arthur Askey and Kenneth Horne, “In Town Tonight” and the Nine o’ Clock News with various news readers such as Bruce Belfrage who always identified themselves by name “Here is the news and this is Bruce Belfrage reading it” so that people recognised the voice and would not be taken in if an enemy were to broadcast false news. Other good programmes were Children’s Hour with Uncle Mac. Toytown and Wurzel Gummidge were always enjoyed. Workers Playtime was a variety programme broadcast at lunch time from various factory canteens.

Our air raid shelter measured 6’6” x 4’6”, the inside was painted cream and it was fitted with three bunks made from timber and flat steel strips, one either side and a smaller one for me which ran across the end of the shelter near to the roof. After a short time in the shelter the condensation from our breath would form on the roof of the shelter and drip down on me in my top bunk. By morning my bedding would be quite wet. If I sat up in bed my head would hit the corrugated iron roof so I soon learnt to keep my head down when I woke up! We all slept in the shelter for most nights in 1940. “Jerry” (the Luftwaffe) would arrive with monotonous regularity at about 11.00 p.m. by which time I would have been asleep for a couple of hours when the air raid siren would wail and wake me up. My mother would wrap me up in my dressing gown which she had made from an old car rug, and we would go down into the shelter where we would spend the rest of the night fitfully sleeping between the sound of bombs whistling down and exploding around us and the barking of the ack-ack (anti-aircraft guns). When bombs fell nearby the whole shelter would vibrate. On one occasion during a heavy air raid the electricity in the shelter failed and my father risked life and limb by leaving the shelter to change the fuses in the house to restore the supply. We all had our steel helmets to give protection against falling shrapnel, but they did not protect against much else. Gas masks of course had to be taken with us wherever we went.

We had a young kitten named Soot. The first time we were warned of an air raid by the siren the poor little kitten was so frightened by the eerie wailing sound of the alert that he trembled violently and peed on the settee cushion. Needless to say he was not scolded for this as he was otherwise well house trained. During the air raids which followed in 1940 Soot used to follow us all to our corner of the dining room underneath the staircase which we thought to be the safest place in the house during day time raids. We used to wear our tin hats during a raid. When we went to our Anderson shelter, Soot would always come in with us and snuggle down on a bunk.

After an air raid we would collect pieces of shrapnel, cartridge cases and “window” (silver paper dropped by enemy aircraft to confuse our Radar). I still have a couple of pieces of “window”. Swapping pieces of shrapnel was a popular pastime at school. It was often a dangerous practice to pick up shrapnel shortly after an air raid as it was very hot and could burn the skin.

I often travelled up to the West End with my mother and would see the shattered buildings sometimes still smouldering after the previous night’s air raid. Also I remember the devastation in the City area when I visited my father at his office. It was strange to see the remains of tall buildings with fireplaces and wallpaper still intact but the rest of the building only a heap of rubble. These walls were quickly demolished as they were unsafe.

Food rationing made us very conscious of the value of food and we never left anything on our plate at the end of a meal. We grew vegetables in our garden instead of flowers and grass and I learnt a lot about gardening as I had my own little plot of land in which I grew carrots and lettuces. We still use one of the wartime recipes for upside-down pie on a regular basis today. Rose hip syrup and malt with cod liver oil were available for children. In 1942 it became illegal to make white bread and the “national loaf” was an unappetising grey colour. I was delighted when white bread became available again after the war.

Clothing was rationed and my mother was an expert at “making do and mend” and knitting garments using wool unpicked from old garments. Toys were scarce and my mother made dolls and soft toys from old dresses and her wedding dress. These were much prized by my school friends who received them on their birthdays.

As a child I was affected by the rationing of sweets. My parents used to give up part or all of their sweet ration for me. I used to buy Wrigleys Spearmint chewing gum and Rowntrees Fruit Gums as you could get more of those for your ration than you could get chocolate, and as the fruit gums were more brittle than they are today you could snap them into quarters to make them last longer. On rare occasions I would buy a Mars bar and cut it into very thin slices to make it last for several days. Ovaltine tablets and Horlicks tablets were not on ration and I developed a liking for them as substitute sweets.

On the decisive day of the Battle of Britain we were enjoying a picnic in Burnham Beeches watching the many dog-fights in the sky overhead. Little did we realise the significance of those aerial battles at that time fought by our courageous pilots. When we arrived home everywhere was deserted and people had been in their shelters all day while we had enjoyed the fresh air of the countryside.

The air raids stopped as the war progressed and we were able to sleep indoors at night instead of in the Anderson shelter. However the next phase of aerial bombardment started in June 1944 as Hitler launched his V1 doodlebugs. The speed of the doodlebugs meant that there was no time for air raid sirens to give warning of their approach. The engine of these unmanned missiles made a distinctive “whump — whump” noise as the doodlebug approached. As soon as the noise stopped we knew that the missile would drop and we dived for cover under the table or wherever we felt safest. I did not worry too much about the doodlebugs as they could be seen flying across the sky with the flames coming from the engine. The worst missiles for me were the V2 rockets which travelled faster than sound and started arriving later in 1944.. The explosion came first followed by the sound of the rocket whistling to earth. The explosion and vibration could be heard and felt for some distance from the point of impact. The V2s were more powerful than the V1s and certainly more unnerving as you had no time to take cover and never knew when one would land. I was very glad when these weapons ceased.

On D-Day on 6 June 1944 I was awakened by the tremendous sound of many heavy aircraft droning overhead and on looking out of the window I was amazed to see the sky almost blacked out by aircraft towing gliders. Wave after wave came over for a considerable length of time. This was the first time I had seen a plane towing a glider and the sight of so many at once has left me with a lasting memory of that day. Of course at the time we did not know the reason for this but later in the day heard on the radio the news of the D-Day landings. I then followed the progress of our forces every day on the radio and in the newspapers until the wonderful day on 8 May when we heard that the war in Europe was over. The war in the far east continued until August 1945 but it was remote from us and although we rejoiced on VJ day it did not have the same impact as VE day.

VE day was celebrated by bonfires with guys of Hitler on top, thunderflashes for fireworks, music and dancing in the street and in the field opposite our house. There was a fancy dress parade and street parties for children with tables and chairs in the road and food which miraculously appeared.

The War was an exciting time for me as I was growing up and it has made me appreciate our freedom and the wonderful country that we have. It is a terrible thing that so many lives were lost and homes destroyed and we have to honour those who fought for us by ensuring that needless conflicts are not entered into in future.

Not a lot happened during 1939 or Spring 1940, but as we moved into early summer the air raids were much more frequent and lasted much longer. By now rationing was introduced and for some goods was to last until the early 1950s. As we moved into September, the Battle of Britain was at its height. We lived almost entirely in our Anderson Air Raid Shelter. We'd all helped to build this: it was about 9ft by 5ft and we had dug down about 6ft to start building. We had steps down into it, a porch at the entrance, hooks for clothes and shelves for radio,a clock, thermos flasks and food tins,books and puzzles. We were issued with bunks, and had a light, running off a car battery. With blankets, pillows and hot water bottles we slept quite cosily.
My father joined the Home Guard and I learned how to put out incendiary bombs and use a stirrup pump. I became a fire watcher at the laundry where I still worked.
We longed for dull foggy days, but the skies were clear and the raiders came relentlessly. We watched fighters take off from Heston airport and counted them as they returned much later: so many missing.
We had our first taste of the bombing in October 1940. We no longer listened for air raid sirens and all clear signals. Sometimes raids lasted all day or all night. We automatically went straight to the shelter on returning home from work and stayed there until morning.
On October 21st we awakened about 4 a.m. hearing a terrible bang. The whole shelter shuddered. We realised that a bomb had been dropped close by. We couldn't see anything because it was too dark, so went back to sleep. Shortly afterwards, there was a banging on the shelter door and an air raid warden flashed his torch inside. He told us a large bomb had landed on a house opposite ours, bringing the house down and killing the old gentleman who lived there alone. It had not exploded and the whole area had to be evacuated. We were given 5 minutes to collect a case full of things and leave. The assembly point was the Mission Hall opposite the laundry where I worked. My brother and sister were so frightened. My father was making arrangements to get my grandfather moved;he was bedridden and slept in a downstairs room reinforced with iron girders. He was whisked away by ambulance and never returned home again. We were a sorry lot trailing down the road with our neighbours, some with coats over nightclothes, carrying young children, some with dogs and cats and birdcages. Old and young, we were a dejected lot until someone started to sing: "There's a long, long trail a-winding"
On arrival at the Church Hall, we had to sign in,giving name, address and number in family. We each got 2 blankets and a palliasse, found a space in the hall and made up our beds. We were all there for 4 days. The WVS were wonderful and provided us with breakfast of porridge, toast and marmalade at another church for anyone who wanted to go. We couldn't cook anything as the gas ring only had 2 burners, but we made endless tea and lived off fish and chips. We didn't get much sleep as people were coming and going day and night, working different shifts. We were also very conscious that we were in a wooden building with a tin roof-not much protection. We weren't allowed back into the house for anything but my father managed to sneak over the back fence, feed the chickens and bring us clean clothing. Eventually we were told that it was safe to return: the bomb was not set on a time fuse, so would not now explode. It was left till after the war when a huge crane lifted it out. Had it gone off,we were told, the whole street would have gone up as well.
The raids continued throught the winter and as water seeped into the shelter we returned to sleep in the house. Daytime raids were upsetting during working hours. A look out post linked to Hesto Airport was set up on the roof of our laundry. If the airport siren went, we knew to head for the deep shelter. Once there we knitted for the forces: gloves, mittens, scarves helmets and long sea boot stockings with wool etc provided by the WVS.
The autumn brought the first terrible onslaught on London and the surrounding areas and this continued well into 1942. Night after night: they were indescribable. We returned to shelter life. We concreted the floor to keep out the water.That winter was one of the worst for Southall and Heston as the bombers were aiming all the time at the airport. We spent the days clearing glass and broken items in the house. The safetymen inspected the damage and declared our house unsafe, but as we had nowhere else to go, we were allowed to stay, provided we slept in the shelter and did not use the upstairs at all. We had no electricity or gas and my father fixed up a camping stove and an open fire on bricks. We seemd to be the only family with even these facilities for cooking. There were no doors on the house, but my father nailed a tarpaulin over the roof and men came in the afternoon and nailed canvas over the open windows. A few days later, gas and electricity were on again. One thing that sickened all of us were the looters, stealing whatever they could from people who had lost so much.
Now there was a new threat- incendiary bombs. These were not very big but on landing they burst into flames. Fire watching became essential; buckets and flowerpots filled with wet earth or sand were best: as they landed we quickly turned the pots on top of them. The main danger was that they landed on roofs and caught fire before they could be reached.
Winter 1942 and through to summer 1943 there was not a lot of activity. The summer of 1944 brought the flying bombs, V1s or doodlebugs as they were known. They were small in comparison to an aeroplane and were pilotless, just an engine and a bomb. Some travelled further than others but not many reached further than North London. Kent bore the brunt, but a lot of the country there is open and they fell in open fields. They could be heard and seen so clearly. We watched and listened for the engine stopping, then just lay flat wherever we were. Most evenings were spent in the shelter.
My fiance stationed overseas sent me a parcel for my 21st birthday which arrived on August 29th. I decided to leave opening it until after work. I was never to know what was in that parcel: during the day we knew that a V1 had come down near to my home and my foreman sent me home to see if everything was o.k.. The nearer I got to home, the worse the damage. There were ambulances and fire engines and I was really frightened. I knew my mother was at home as well as my brother, who was on school holidays. I can remember saying over and over as I got nearer: "Be in the shelter! Be in the shelter!" I arrived to find a heap of rubble: 12 houses were down in all. I checked the shelters and they were not there. I helped our next door neighbour out of her shelter, with her little nephew. Her husband, who worked nights had been in the house in bed. There was nothing I could do but stand, watch and wait.
The warden came and told me my brother was safe but injured. He'd climbed out himself and was on the way to hospital. My mother and the dog were still buried in the rubble and the teams were waitng for lifting gear to get the beams off of her. They lifted the beam clear and found our puppy lying across her legs whimpering. My sister and father arrived home not knowing that there had been a bomb and collapsed in a state of shock. By the time they got her out, she was unconscious as the doctor had given her an injection. She and my father were whisked away in the ambulance,leaving me and my sister, who was still weeping.
I clambered over the rubble and rescued family documents and dad's Home Guard rifle and ammunition. Friends took us in and found out where Mum and my brother were. Wally was in Southall and Mum and Dad in Hillingdon, which was six miles away. Wally was not badly hurt but very shocked and worried about Mum. To this day he still has a piece of glass in his chest. Mum was a different story: the doctor asked to see me and told me she was desperately ill. Her body was a mass of glass splinters and she had a deep wound to her lower body. He didn't think she would last the night.
In the meantime friends and neighbours had worked hard to slavage what they could, but already looters had broken into the garden shed and all dad's tools had gone and all the chickens had been taken. The oddest things survived: the mantle clock, a bottle of milk, mum and dad's wedding china, but so much had already been taken.
The house was definitely unsafe and a fire had started. 2 of our neighbours had been killed and more injured. I couldn't sleep for worrying about the future.
My mum became known as the human pincushion, she was so pitted with glass. She survived against all the odds, but to the end of her life in 1967 she still had glass working towards the surface. I made an appointment to see the Air Raid Distress Officer for I needed new ration books and clothing coupons for all the family. They were very helpful and local friends and neighbours did what they could. I also started badgering the housing department to find us somewhere to live. I didn't have much luck as raids were continuing and more people were made homeless. Houses were in short supply and I saw one or 2 unlikely flats. Eventually I was offered the ground floor of a large detached house which I accepted. We had no curtains, bedding, very little furniture and only a few household items we had salvaged. Once again I visited the Air Raid Distress Organisation asking for help. I was given coupons for curtains bedding and blankets and dockets for furniture and lino. They also had a large warehouse of utility household goods for people in our situation: crockery and cutlery and some furniture for the sum of £25. It was not much but a start. The American red Cross were also very helpful giving us kitchen equipment, rugs and quilts. We also got a cheque for £150 from the Lord Mayor of London's distress fund as dad had paid into this regularly, never thinking he would need it. We also got a box of linens from the Kings Hall Sisterhood friends. I made curtains and we scrubbed out the flat all ready to move in and for Mum to come home from hospital.
It was a horrible house really despite our best efforts. Rats were a constant pest and we had to have the pest control officer. We were also plagued by ants, spiders and crickets.
The flying bomb terror had subsided but we did get a few V2s. The nearest one landed on the Smiths Crisp factory at Osterley killing hundreds.
So into 1945. Mum needed more operations and I heard that my fiance was missing believed killed in Burma. Whatever else could happen to us?
The war ended in May. We pulled down the blackout and turned on all the lights!!Dad was looking into the possibility of getting our house rebuilt and we spent many evenings making an inventory of all we had lost for the insurance company. That June we paid the final instalment on the original mortgage, but there was nothing there! My fiance was pronounced officially dead in November. Our house in Regina Road was rebuilt in 1946 and we moved back in November of that year. We as a family considered ourselves fortunate compared with many. We were together again in our own home and although Mum was to carry the scars and weakness to the end, she was able to resume family life.