Bombs dropped in the ward of: West Ruislip

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.

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.

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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.