Bombs dropped in the ward of: Turnham Green

I have worked overtime and rest days throughout Royal Ascot Week dozens of times over the years but I think the day I picked up Alf and Daisy is the freshest in my mind. It was a gorgeous day and my driver and I were on our normal service duty, 701 from Gravesend. I guessed the young couple who boarded us up the Old Kent Road were off to the races — best clothes and a paper carrier bag holding a warm cardigan, sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a lemonade bottle full of cold tea practically shouted “out for the day at Ascot” — and so it was. They sat about halfway up the coach, making a start on the sandwiches almost immediately after paying their fare. Alf had done the trip before and kept telling Daisy how quickly we should travel once we had left the London traffic behind and what a great day they were going to enjoy. Daisy was very quiet until we crossed the river at Lambeth Bridge and approached Victoria. Then, obviously in strange country, began to ply Alf with questions — “Where were we now?”, “How much farther was the race course?”, “What was the great big building over there?”. Although he had made the trip once before, I suspect that Alf had probably been more likely to be studying form in his newspaper than looking out the window at the passing scene but he rose to the occasion nobly and when he didn’t know the answer to a question he promptly made up one of his own. Thus I learnt that St. George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner was “some big toff’s house” and Hyde Park Corner itself became Marble Arch! Every time I passed up and down the coach collecting fares I overheard more of this highly amusing conversation and I must admit I began to see the route in quite a different light from that day on.

But the best was yet to come. Within about one and a half miles of our destination the coach had to slow down considerably as the Royal Carriage swung out of a lane in front of us. It was a beautiful sight — the horses groomed to perfection, the silver in the harness winking in the bright sunlight, the panels of the coach-work gleaming with a mirror-like polish and the groom and postillions at the back — very smart in their Royal Livery. Obviously they were going to pick up the Royal Family and take them to the course. Then, from behind me, came the unmistakable voice of Daisy with yet another question, “Why are we going so slow, Alf?” Not being able to see from his seat, Alf got up and walked to the front and I stood aside so that he could see the Royal Coach in all its glory. He took one look and then turned his head back to call out, “No wonder we’re going so blinking slow — we’re behind a HORSE AND CART!”

At least that episode was more amusing than yet another journey on the 701 route. My driver at the time was Tom, a young bachelor of about twenty-five who lived alone in a caravan at Wraysbury. We knew it would be a busy journey, leaving Staines at about 8 a.m. and due at Victoria about an hour later. The traffic was heavy through Houslow and Brentford and even heavier when we pulled up at traffic lights near Kew Bridge, alongside Brentford Market. The lights changed to green and the coach pulled away. Seconds later I became aware that strangled noises were coming from the driving cab alongside me. At first I thought Tom was trying to sing and turned to joke about the quality of his voice. To my horror I saw that he was half up from the driving seat, hands dropped from the wheel, saliva trickling from the corner of his mouth and eyes bolting from his head. Luckily, his foot had also slipped partly off the accelerator pedal but the engine was still running and the coach travelling at about ten miles per hour towards the oncoming traffic. Without consciously realising what I was doing, I leaned over, thrusting my right arm across Tom to reach the handbrake and struggling to pull the wheel towards the kerb with my left. To my relief, the coach responded, actually mounting the kerb and running some yards along it. Fate was kind that day as it was 4th October and my wedding anniversary and there were no cyclists riding on the nearside at that moment and no pedestrians standing on the kerbside.

Someone opened the door and the driver of a passing trolley bus who had witnessed the incident dashed in and turned off the engine while an inspector materialised to phone for an ambulance. The odd thing about the whole affair was that I remained as cool as a cucumber until after the ambulance had taken poor Tom off to hospital — even writing out an auxiliary waybill and getting the passengers on the next coach to continue their journey — but as soon as that was accomplished I almost collapsed and had to be half carried into a nearby teashop till I felt fit enough to travel again. I felt a real fool — shaking like a leaf and crying like a baby for almost twenty minutes. A team of mechanics arrived from Chiswick Works to examine the coach and, finding everything in order, take it back to Chiswick for a more detailed check-up. Until we knew what was wrong with Tom it was always possible that he had been affected by fumes or even suffered an electric shock of some kind.

The inspector put me on a bus back to Staines where I had to make a detailed report, both written and verbal, to the Chief Inspector and arrived to find that the news had gone before me and I was treated like some kind of heroine. True — I had averted what might have been a very serious accident, but since I had acted without even thinking about it and since I had been moved by nothing more heroic than a strong sense of self preservation I felt rather a fraud. Probably sensing this Ron Coles — a depot inspector at that time but now the Chief — told me the police would almost undoubtedly be along to arrest me soon on a charge of driving without a licence!

We later learned that Tom had suffered an epileptic fit and would no longer be allowed to drive for us. Apparently, when questioned by the doctors, he could remember waking up on the floor of his caravan on several occasions in the past and had believed that he had nothing more than a restless night. The attack on the coach was the first time that the affliction had manifested itself in waking hours. Thus make it possible to diagnose and treat him.

The following day, with a relief driver, I did the same duty and one of the passengers brought me a big box of chocolates. It was a very nice gesture on her part but there was another sequel to the story that still makes me laugh when I remember it. On completing the day’s work I was told that I was to go to London to meet one of the Board Managers who wished to thank me for my actions the day before. Instead of reporting for work I was to present myself at Western House, Oxford Circus at 10 a.m. and even provided with a special Green Line Pass for the occasion. When the news got around in the garage my mates began to speculate as to what form the gratitude would take — a life-saving medal, perhaps? It was almost certainly a sum of money — estimations going even as high as twenty pounds.

Although still feeling something of a fraud and very embarrassed over the whole affair I duly arrived at Western House and entered the office where I was greeted by a very distinguished gentleman whose name I never caught and do not know to this day. After congratulating me on my presence of mind and coolness of action he mentioned that his fellow members on the board agreed that I deserved some sort of reward for my bravery and enquired as to whether I had been a special Green Line Pass to travel from Staines. On being assured that this was the case he went on to say that I was being paid and would not have to work that day so the rest of the day was my own and I was free to use the Pass and go wherever I liked on the Green Lines for the rest of the day! Somehow I managed to keep a straight face while thanking him and leaving the office only to collapse into a fit of giggles on emerging into Oxford Circus. Passers-by must have thought I was crazy but the thought of rewarding a Green Line conductor with a free pass to travel round for a day was really rather comical. After spending eight hours every working day doing just that the last thing I wanted on my day off was a Green Line ride! Instead I returned, mostly by Underground, to Hounslow and then bus to Staines — it was quicker that way! Within an hour of leaving London I was handing in the special pass and telling my mates about the interview. I am certain that at least half of them believed I was making it all up but an official report came back to the Chief Inspector the following week to verify what I had said. I’m still laughing!

For some reason the incidents I remember on the 725 road are almost all linked to bad weather conditions; heavy fogs between Bromley and Crayford, deep snow between Dartford and Gravesend and a torrential downpour that flooded Crayford for a depth of four feet and held us up for several hours. As the coaches were heated we rarely wore overcoats and a sudden fog would mean the conductor leaning out of the open door to keep an eye on the kerb and guide the driver along the road. Not as bad as walking in front of the tram with a flare perhaps but a cold and miserable duty when you were twenty miles from home and shivering in a summer uniform, so I was somewhat less than delighted when I was approached by a lady passenger warmly clad in a fur coat and gloves who complained of the draught caused by the open door and couldn’t we go a bit faster as she didn’t want to be late at the Bridge Club! This thoughtless remark left me speechless — but not so my driver, however — he brought the coach to a halt, closed the door and climbed out of the driving seat, “Here you are, ducks,” he said, holding the door to the cab open, “There’s a nice heater in there to keep your feet warm — see if you can get us there any quicker!” Without another word the irate passenger meekly returned to her seat and we proceeded on our way.

We dreaded deep snow, especially between Dartford and Gravesend. There were several gravel pits some ten feet or so from the road with only a frail wire fence between the coach and a sheer drop of sixty feet or more. No matter how slowly and carefully the coach was driven there was always the danger of a heavy lorry skidding into us and sending us over the top. I suppose the sand and gravel lorry drivers were on piecework — they always seemed to be driving like maniacs on that road no matter what the weather was like. One of our coaches did bring the wire down once but, mercifully, came to a halt a bare eighteen inches from the edge.

In a heavy downpour one day, on a narrow winding country lane between Chislehurst and Sidcup, we were overtaken by a car. Spotting another car coming round the bend in the opposite direction, the lady driver cut in front of us very sharply and my driver had to brake very quickly in a vain attempt to avoid hitting her car, the front of the coach catching the tail light of the car as it swerved in front of us. Our relief, that the accident was nothing more than a broken taillight, was very short lived. Those old RF coaches were notorious for vicious back-wheel skids and this one was no exception — the back came round right in the path of the oncoming car, crushing the bonnet and offside wheel and smashing the windscreen. By some miracle, the driver was unhurt but absolutely furious — the car was only three days old and looked a total wreck. Climbing across the passenger seat, he charged down the road towards the lady driver, by now out of her car, waving her hands in the air and in tears on surveying the damage she had caused. She looked so pathetic and apologetic that the poor man stopped shouting and swearing and ended up putting an arm round her and supplying a large white handkerchief to dry her tears!

Of course, all accidents have to be fully reported on the appropriate form at the conclusion of the day’s work, in the crew’s own time, and all accidents are entered on the driver’s record should London Transport decide that their driver was in the wrong. Despite a letter of abject apology from the lady driver and another from the driver of the wrecked car stating that, in his opinion, the accident involving his own car was totally unavoidable; my driver was held to blame on two counts: 1) He was too close to the car in front and 2) He had been trained on the skid patch at Chiswick on how to control a skid and was, therefore, to blame for damaging the other car! In vain, he protested that all skid patch training was with a double deck bus on an enormous square half the size of a football pitch — whereas the accident involved an RF coach on a narrow country lane. His appeal was dismissed, he lost a day’s pay and the accident was entered on his record sheet.

I suppose the reason behind such harsh judgements is to keep the drivers alert to possible accident situations in future, though it frequently results in a driver giving notice and leaving the job. There is no doubt that London Transport employs some of the finest drivers in the world as a result of such high standards.

I would have been about three years of age when this happened.
During raids and alerts, my grandmother would sit in my bedroom until I had fallen asleep. We lived in West London, and it never seemed to be worthwhile to go to the shelter during raids, so I slept in my bedroom. On this occasion, my grandmother had stayed with me until I fell asleep. I do remember vague memories of searhlights, and the noise of the Anti aircraft batteries firing from Ravenscourt Park some distance away.
I awoke some time after the raid had finished. I lay awake listening to rather strange noses coming from outside of my bedroom, but within the house. I got up out of bed, opened the bedroom door and walked onto the landing. There in the stair well, up and down the stairs, numbering at least between fifteen and twenty, were smoke-blackened exhasuted filthy London firemen. They had fought the fires from the houses up the street, set alight by incendiaries, and my mother and grand-mother were busy giving them tea, cigarrettes and whisky. They were still dressed in their thigh boots, and protective clothing, wet and dirty with the effects of the fires. I will never forget the strained haunted look on their faces, before my mother came over, and put me gently but firmly back into bed. I fell asleep, and the next day with great excitement saw the results of enemy action.

The Atlantic

By now we were well into the open ocean and meeting with the full strength of the Atlantic swell. The ungainly shape of the carrier tilted first this way - and then that - in a long rhythm of pitching and rolling quite different from the Manchester’s responses to movement caused by the sea. The Victorious, with a displacement of about 22,000 tons, rode the swell heavily, ponderously. It was while I was peeling spuds, perched in a kind of balcony projecting from the ship's side about half way between the waterline and the flight deck, that I first realised how slow and extensive was the ship's motion.

The sequence tended to be like this. For ten or fifteen seconds we would be almost on an even keel, as the carrier moved along the line of a trough between two swells, two or three hundred yards apart. As the next swell, always from the west, approached the vessel, she would begin to heel to starboard, and the water surface in front of my balcony would come nearer as I was tilted over more and more towards it. For a moment or two I would be struggling to hold myself on my stool, my feet strongly braced against stanchions at the balcony edge, as I peered down into the blue-black waters only about fifteen feet below. Then the swell would lift the great mass of the carrier on its shoulders, and pass underneath it. The Victorious would begin to right herself, come back to vertical, and then, as she slid down the back of the swell, roll slowly over to port. Now I would be raised on my balcony sixty or seventy feet above the water, and look out into the sky, or across at one of our escorting destroyers rolling and butting her way through configurations of minor waves that complicated the overall pattern of the swell. The huge mass would finally smash down into the next trough, and then sluggishly right herself, before running on an even keel for a while and then recommencing the same sequence.
As I was out in the open air, and on the lee side of the vessel, I was able to withstand this motion better than I had feared. I think I vomited briefly a couple of times, and then learnt how to adjust my breathing to counteract the effect of the roll, taking in air as she fell away under me, and expelling it steadily as she rose. I found it easier to stand than sit, for then I could tilt my body against the ship and remain more or less upright. So I placed my two buckets between my feet - one bucket with the unpeeled spuds in, the other with rinsing water and peelings in it. Facing forward to help me gauge the ship’s movement by the swinging of the bows, I did my share of the work as a scullion, becoming increasingly proficient at it.

Another skill I acquired was the art of going up and downstairs in heavy weather. I learnt that it was a pointless expenditure of effort to try to climb up the metal stairs of a companionway when the deck was rising, for my body felt twice as heavy as normal, and each step was heavy labour. If I waited till the deck was dropping away, all I had to do was kick my feet in and out smartly as the near vertical stairway feel away below me, and run my hand up the chain at the side to steady myself - and in a trice I would reach the top. The same trick worked in reverse for descending: wait for the ship to be rising under me, and kick my feet in and out as the ladder passed by - and I was at the bottom. In each case I had hardly moved through the air: the ship had changed her position in respect of mine.

Provided the weather wasn't too rough, we were allowed on the flight deck, with lifejackets on. I felt strangely exposed to be walking on that tilting platform, without any guardrail protection at the edge. In sunny spells Coates and I, with others from the fo'c'sle messes on the Manchester, would promenade up and down the length of the deck. In part this was simply for exercise - the Navy made a virtue of moving your bowels once a day - but it was also to give ourselves the space to move more freely than we could between decks, as well as to chat and chaff each other the meanwhile. Some bravado was also involved, for some of us would see how close we dared go aft to the stern edge of the flight deck. There the heaving and movement was accentuated, and staring down into the heaving swell and the ship's wake could induce a sense of vertigo and make you feel as if you were about to be pitched overboard into those powerful waves.

The further north we went, the fewer were the sailors walking the windy flight deck, and the more were the rumours passed around about which port we were making for. Liverpool, said some, but Glasgow seemed more likely. Crewmen of the Victorious believed she was due for repair, which increased speculation, but did not point clearly to where survivors would be disembarked — which was all that interested the sailors in transit. But day after day went by without any land heaving into sight. We knew from the sun we were travelling east, and should therefore see something soon.

When at last the cry went up, we all rushed up on to the flight deck, hunching our shoulders and clustering together against the wind. On our starboard bow was a great green headland, with one whitewashed lighthouse and a small cottage nearby. Surely we had seen that before ...
'It's Cape Wrath!' shouted one of the Manchester men. 'Back to bloody Scapa then!'
There was a groan of disappointment. Rumours flew about wildly: we were going into Scapa to be kitted out on Hoy, and then kept ashore there to await posting to another ship; we were to be transferred to a troop carrier and taken down to Glasgow … But everyone was proved wrong when the Victorious steamed on the whole night. Next morning we were still making way; land lay on our right hand, but the sun told us we were now moving south. Scotland's east coast! This was confirmed when around midday we found ourselves passing Aberdeen, identified by a sailor whose home was in that city. I had been on deck since mid-morning, for the chance to see more of the coastline of Britain was something I didn’t want to miss. Also I was aware that mines might have been sown by an enemy submarine in what was supposed to be a swept channel, and I did not want to be trapped below decks when we were so close to safety.

Home

Around tea-time we anchored off a port. The ship's tannoy told all survivors to gather in the aircraft hangar to await transfer ashore to Arbroath, where a train was said to be ready to take us further south. We were taken away in barges hauled by tugs, and made fast alongside a simple jetty. Dry land again underfoot, and Britain: I had made it. The adventure was complete. But there were no welcoming bands to parade us victoriously into the town: only surly Petty Officers dragooning us into squads to be marched along the dockside and into a railway siding where a number of carriages were drawn up waiting. These looked as if they had been taken out of some dusty storage shed. As we clambered up into them from ground level, we found that we would have to travel four a side, crammed together into the space meant for three. Once we had got in, the doors were locked on us; the temptation might be too great for some to make a break, especially as none of us had any movement papers and thus there was no efficient means of checking on us. So we waited, and waited, until at last an engine came and coupled up and slowly began easing us out of that siding.

The journey south had begun, but we found ourselves stopping frequently, for we were a special train and had to fit into the gaps between scheduled services. Several times we were shoved into a siding to let other trains pass; as they did so, we jeered at the driver and passengers, shouting:
'Yaah! Civvies!'
'There's a war on — ain’t you heard?'
The passengers looked back in alarm to see so many ruffianly figures hanging out of the railway carriage windows, only half dressed as seamen. Then we would hear the whistle from our own engine and it would reluctantly puff and sigh and clank, as it again took the strain of the old coaches and their charge of ragamuffin sailors.
We noticed too that there was no question of pausing at any station. We trailed through Perth and then Stirling, many of us casting longing eyes at the railway buffet. The vision of tea and buns grew gradually into images of much more substantial meals, as we approached the border and the evening lengthened into night. Our headway was still desperately slow, and hunger was becoming a major concern; thirst too.

But the train merely dragged on, southwards. Soon sailors were spreading themselves out on the floor for the night. This move, once begun, spread so swiftly that the only bit of flooring I could find was immediately outside a toilet. Throughout the night, as the train clanked on and stopped and started again, men stepped over me, or in their half-awake condition stubbed their toes against me, or kicked me in anger at being in their way. They seemed to come every few minutes to use the loo. By morning I was stiff and bruised, hungry and very thirsty. My tongue was thick and furred, and I felt that the train was some kind of prison, out of which I might never be allowed. We could be shunted into a siding somewhere, and forgotten. Then we would climb out through the windows, I reasoned, and all go absent without leave, or AWOL.

Nevertheless we must have made considerable headway during the night hours. By daylight names on hoardings gave clues that we must by now be somewhere in the home counties and apparently making for London. The mood in the train, however, was becoming quite rebellious, with ugly outbursts of temper between men. We had had nothing to eat or drink since late afternoon in Arbroath. As we shuffled into the outskirts of London around eleven in the morning, we hung out of the windows, trying to attract attention from anyone we could see. At windows of three-storey houses backing onto the tracks women appeared, roused by our shouting:
'How about a cup o’ char, then, love?'
'Just throw us down yer teapot, then!'
'Got a crust o’ bread for a shipwrecked sailor?'

Finally we pulled in at a derelict-looking station somewhere in the Willesden area. There was no-one about but Petty Officers, equipped with keys to unlock the carriage doors.
'Out yer get, then. Look smart! Fall in on the platform!'
Stiff and famished, we stretched our limbs at last in the unwonted space of the platform, ignoring the harrying of the Petty Officers. 'How about some grub, then, Chief?'
'Some char - we ain't drunk since yesterday, not a drop!'
The PO’s looked incredulously at us. It was clear they had no idea what our journey had been like. It soon came out that they had simply been told to stand by for survivors who needed re-kitting. The sailors, especially the older hands, lost no time in telling the PO’s just what the score was, and all pretence of trying to discipline us into three ranks disappeared.

Not far from me a PO was speaking to a group of sailors.
'All the gen we got was to take you from the station to the pusser's stores - that's nearby, only a few hundred yards down the road - and get you kitted out.'
'They got a canteen there, then?'
'Yeah, or a NAAFI?'
The PO hung his head. 'Not that I've seen.'
'Gawd Christ!'
'Come back from the Med, and this is the way they treat yer!'
By now sailors were breaking off here and there and going to the station toilet, where some cold taps had been found.
'Once we're kitted out,' a Leading Seaman asked, ‘what then?'
'You get a pass for indefinite leave home,' replied the PO.
There was a gasp of satisfaction. 'Home leave!'
'What are we waiting for!'
'Come on - fall in then!'
'The sooner the kitting out's done, we can all get away!'
'Roll on six o' bleedin’ clock!'
'I can just feel that pint goin' down me throat!'

Within minutes we were walking, not marching, along a drab back street of London in some industrial zone, and turned in to a large warehouse. There we shed our survivors' garments (though I kept the paint-stained overalls as a kind of memento of the Manchester) and were issued with the full set of clothing and equipment, just as had happened on my second day in Collingwood. In the warmth of late August we had to try on all the articles to get the right size. But this time the men behind the counter couldn't bully us as they had when we were raw recruits. It was we who did the choosing, and satisfied ourselves that we were getting what suited us. Yet the boots were stiff and squeaked as I walked; the socks were too thick for summer wear; the cap was stubbornly round and would not yield easily to my attempts at wrestling its brim into the shape of my head. The kitbag, filled with all the bits and pieces, was heavy and lumpy. Bearing it on my shoulder, and wearing full uniform for the first time since leaving Scapa for the Med, I moved through to the pay office, was issued with a fresh identity card - retaining my Official Number of PJX 294798 - and paid arrears for July and August, the sum being entered in a new paybook. Last of all I got a travel warrant for the underground journey to Turnham Green station, and a pass saying 'On indefinite leave'.

I must have had a cup of tea and a bun at a station somewhere; I have a feeling I passed through King's Cross. That would have meant taking the tube to Hammersmith, and then the familiar District Line train passing through Ravenscourt Park - a glimpse of Latymer, my old school - and of Stamford Brook — crossing the bridge under which I used to walk as a schoolboy every morning and evening - and so to Turnham Green.
It felt strange to be carrying a whole kitbag down the station stairs, so familiar from my adolescence, and turning into Bedford Park again. I had forgotten my parents' new address; all I remembered was that it was close to Mrs Brunsden's house. I recalled that this was 13 Fairfax Road, from visits paid there in the mid-1930s. So I rang the bell.
Mrs Brunsden - long nose, enormous spectacles, tall and bony - opened the door, and gasped.
'Hallo, Mrs Brunsden. I'm looking for my parents' house.'
'Along there,' she managed to say, scarcely able to find her voice at the shock of seeing me suddenly at the door, and in sailor's uniform. 'Nineteen.'
'Thank you.' She stood there, stupefied, so I went down the path and shut the gate behind me, nodding a goodbye to her.

Strangely enough I can hardly remember anything of the moment of home-coming itself. I have the impression that it was my sister who opened the door, and on seeing me whooped for joy. But no memory remains of how my parents responded to my reappearance. I know that they had heard that the Manchester had been lost, and that most of the crew had made their way into internment in North Africa; I am not sure any information had been given about survivors getting back to Britain.

I reached home late in August. The Manchester had been torpedoed on the 13th of that month, and so the journey back must have taken about a fortnight. I remember telling them about the exploits we had been through, and feeling proud to have covered already both the Arctic and the Med. But it felt very strange to be back in Chiswick, where I had spent my early teens in another house, and living again for a while with my father and mother, now a little aged, but still basically unchanged.

Teenage Memories of World War Two
(only then they were NOT called teenagers!)

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

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

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

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

When WW2 was declared on September 3rd 1939 I was a boy aged 9. There was a mass evacuation from London that day. I lived in Chiswick west London. My parents took me to my school Hogarth school where double decker buses were awaiting to take us children out of London to the safety of the countryside.
We set off not knowing our destination. The bus I was on arrived at Tring Berkhampstead about 35 miles from London. From what I can remember it was a large house like a manor size house as quite a few of us children were billeted there. I was not there long perhaps a couple of weeks. I cannot remember the reason why my parents came and took me back home. It might have been panic over from the supposed imminent attack.
While I was away an Anderson shelter had been delivered to our address. I helped my father dig the hole in the garden to fit and erect the galvanized corrugated curved sheets to protect us from the air raids that were to come.
When the shelter was finished there was some more digging to be done. We were told to Dig for Victory the slogan at the time. To help with the forthcoming food shortage due to the war. Directly behind our house was a recreation ground which would be used for allotments. My father was allocated the one nearest to our back garden.
At the outbreak of war my father who was aged 30 volunteered for aircrew in the Royal Air Force had the medical and exams but told me he was not accepted. Men were being called up for active service in age groups it was up to 25. My father then volunteered to be a war reserve policeman as due to the call up there was a shortage of policemen. He became P.C.808 stationed at Askew Road Shepherds Bush.

When the air raids began we would go to the shelter when the air raid siren sounded. We would not come out until the all clear sounded which was the long continuous wail as opposed to the up down warning sound.

As the police force was a 24-hour service my father worked a shift system, which was 6am to 2pm one week the next week 2pm to 10pm then 10pm to 6am rotating. He would come to the shelter with us at night when he was on the early morning shift.
After a heavy air raid with the anti-aircraft guns blazing away most of the night my father left the shelter at about 5am to go indoors to get ready for his early shift. He came straight back to the shelter and warned us not to go in the house as there was a big hole in the stairs. He said it could be an unexploded bomb.

My father’s brother lived in Ealing so we stayed at his house until the bomb disposal squad could dig and disarm the bomb. It turned out to be an unexploded anti-aircraft gun shell from Big Bertha as we called it, sited in Wormwood Scrubs prison. After the raids and the all clear had sounded I used to search the roads for shrapnel from the exploded anti-aircraft shells some of the pieces still felt warm when you picked them up. I had quite a collection after a while. It eventually went with all the other scrap iron, the iron railing fences and gates that were confiscated for the war effort. I remember the dustcarts had a trailer, kitchen scraps such as potato peelings etc. had to put out separate which the dustmen put in the trailer for the pigs.

Because the majority of children had been evacuated with some of the teachers the schools were closed. Us children still at home only had a few hours tuition a week at a house chosen perhaps at a teacher’s house that had remained. I think I must have missed at least 9 months schooling before I was evacuated again due to the intensity of the blitz.

Some of my school friends were evacuated to Cornwall in the next batch that went. I went with David Reid his brother and sisters Ted Brown my best mate at the time a few weeks later to Rushden in Northamptonshire. David and I were billeted together with the same family a Mr. Mrs. Jenkins. I remember he worked in a shoe factory that was the dominant industry in that county. While I was there he made me a pair of shoes.

This was one of the unhappiest times of my childhood I was very homesick crying myself to sleep most nights. My foster parents were quite concerned and wrote to my parents telling them of my plight. My father visited and I thought he had come down to take me back home, but to my disappointment he explained that the air raids were still happening most nights and was not safe yet to return. To give me something to look forward to he promised to send my bicycle by train. A week later I picked it up from the station.

Sometime later David and I were reallocated to different foster homes as I think the Jenkins circumstances changed so they could not look after us. I was billeted with Mr.Mrs.Brookes who had a son Colin about my age and a daughter about 18 as she volunteered for the women’s A.T.S.and left home for her basic training. Mr. Brookes was in the Home guard.

I cannot remember how much longer I stayed as an evacuee in Rushden but I know I returned home to Chiswick before the war ended.I must have been about 13 years old I was still at school at Stavely Road Secondary.I remember Ted Brown and I had to walk through Chiswick Park grounds. We used to time it that if the air raid siren went off before we arrived we would stay in the park untill the all clear sounded.If we were in school we had to go down the shelter.
The air raids were not so frequent thats why I suppose we returned home when we did. I left school at 14 which was 1944. Thats when the flying bombs (Doodlebugs) as we called them started.When you heard one approaching as long as the sound of the engine kept going you knew you were safe but when the engine cut out and stopped it was coming down some where.I remember one morning at work my first job was to clean up the swarf and metal waste from under the machines and put them in the waste bin in the yard.I heard a flying bomb quite near the engine suddenly stopped hearing a rushing sound I threw myself to the floor next to the bin, with the explosion I looked up and saw a blast ripple shoot skywards.I ran to the entrance of the yard to the road which was the Bath road Bedford Park Chiswick looking down towards Turnham Green the flying bomb had impacted in the middle of the road outside the Chiswick Technical College.The time must have been just after 8am luckily before school time.I cannot remember the details but I suppose it was recorded.I shall have to look it up some time.

It was September 8th 1944 my mother's birthday I had taken her to the cinema, the Dominion in Acton for a treat.As we were
leaving after the afternoon performance
there was a big explosion that shook the
exit doors as we left.Once outside we looked around but could not see any signs
of where the explosion took place.When we returned home to Chiswick several miles away,we were told that Stavely Road had been
hit.It turned out to be the first V rocket to hit London.Winston Churchill and some of his war ministers came to the scene that very afternoon to inspect the damage.It had landed in
the road but demolished some houses which were semi-detached if I remember correctly.

As VE day approached Ted Brown and I visited the local bomb sites collecting
wood to build a large bonfire on a site to celebrate.My father made a large wooden V drilled holes at intervals to insert fairy lights.He fixed it outside our upstairs frontroom window switching it on to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

I cannot remember the exact time a few years later I had bought a tandem bicycle.
Ted Brown and myself decided to cycle to Rushden one weekend and visit our foster
parents.We packed a tent and a couple of blankets.I cannot remember wether we did find our respective foster parents.What I do remember was the sleepless uncomfortable night we spent on some waste ground where we pitched the tent.The fifty mile cycle back to London is a blank in my memory.

WW2: WAR and WORK

I was born on the 16th September 1918 and christened Eileen Alice Charlotte Jagelman. My parents were William George Jagelman and Cordelia Elsie Jagelman (née Penny).

My father was born in South London to John Jagelman and Alice (née Crockett). He was one of six boys. He excelled at school and on leaving was accepted for the Civil Service. He started as a boy clerk in the Home Office, rising to Assistant Secretary. At the time of his retirement he was Prison Commissioner in the Home Office. During his service he received the C.B.E.

My mother was born in Gravesend, Kent. Her parents were Thomas Penny, who worked in Chatham Dockyard, and Charlotte (née McLeod). My mother came to London to work and in 1917 married my father.

At the time of my birth we lived at 19 Malwood Road, Balham. I had a sister Elsie Florence born on the 25th October 1919 and a brother Kenneth William born on the 25th August 1922.

At approximately the age of four and a half years we moved to Leytonstone in East London. I attended the local council school named Kirdale and was fairly bright. At 12 years I went to Coborn School for Girls in Bow. Having started a year late for various reasons, one being time lost through ill health, I found keeping up was difficult in some subjects and began to lose interest in schooling. My one desire was to leave and work in a store. My father said if that is what you wish you are going to work in the best store in London!

I was apprenticed for three years at Debenham and Freebody in Wigmore Street, W.1. I enjoyed my time there very much as it was interesting meeting all sorts of famous and well known people.

Then in 1939 it all came to an end. War had been threatening for two or three years. In 1938 Neville Chamberlain met Hitler and came back promising peace. No one really believed it, but at least it gave us a year to make some preparation, for in 1938 we were totally unprepared.

Having been born at the end of the first World War and hearing the many stories, seeing films and knowing that it had lasted four years, we were quite frightened when on 3rd September 1939 we found we were at war with Germany. Almost immediately the sirens went. However this turned out to be a false alarm.

This was on a Sunday morning. We had just returned from a holiday in the Isle of Man and were all gathered together. Arthur's parents also being with us. Monday morning we went to work but were told to return home unless we lived near enough to walk or just a short bus ride.

However, after a week of idling, most people decided that life had to go on, despite war and so far we had not been attacked. Consequently I reported for work and life for a bit carried on as usual.

We were losing a lot of shipping and things were going badly on the continent. Finally Germany overran France, Belgium and Holland. The troops fell back to the French coast and we had to get them back to England. Every available ship was commandeered and the biggest rescue operation of all time took place. It filled us all with a great pride of country, but also we knew that we were now alone fighting the might of Germany. Quite frightening. We do not know why Hitler did not attack us at once, but thank God he didn't. Instead he declared war on Russia.

However, the daytime air-raids began and they were very frightening. We continued working and as soon as the sirens sounded we went to shelters, where we spent many hours. I remember one day we spent all day there. Damage was very heavy in some areas, certainly the docks were targeted, but the Germans were not too fussy if the bombs dropped on hospitals, churches, etc. Fortunately our RAF pilots were wonderful and gradually the daytime raids lessened.

Arthur during this time had gone into the RAF and was being trained to be a Wireless Operator. He was moved all over the country and when he came down to Wiltshire in a camp at Compton Bassett he was able to get leave. He arrived home on a Saturday in September and we were going to get engaged, the sirens went which meant all the shops closed, so we could not get out to buy the ring. Fortunately, late afternoon, the all clear sounded and we flew out of the house, caught the bus into Wembley High Road, selected the ring and got home just as the sirens went again. We were determined to celebrate and in the evening went to a dance hall just near to us and despite gunfire and plane noise, managed to enjoy ourselves.

It is now some months later that I open this book and carry on the story. I am afraid after so many years trying to think back becomes difficult and many things may be out of sequence.

Life carried on with day and night raids. We were losing ships, Rommel was winning all the battles in N. Africa - not much joy anywhere.

It was felt that Hitler might invade us, but this did not happen, then he made the fatal step of going to war with Russia which took the threat of invasion away.

My sister and I were called upon to fire watch. Elsie had returned from being evacuated with the firm she was working with. She went into the Air Ministry.

March 1941, Arthur was given leave prior to going overseas. We decided to get married before he went. It was a great rush around but it was all accomplished. Two days later Arthur left, finally ending in Iraq. He returned home three and a half years later in September 1944.

Women were being called up at this time for the forces and war work. As I was married I did not have to go in the forces. My friend Peggy Davies and myself were interviewed for a job in the Air Ministry, a section called A.I.D. (Aeronautical Inspection Department). We trained for three months at the Aeronautical College in Wimbledon. A very "condensed" engineering course! I ended up with Bush Radio at Chiswick and Peggy went to Handley Page at Cricklewood.

We lived through flying bombs, V2's and everything that Germany could throw at us. We lost friends but fortunately escaped in the family with no loss of life.

After the Japs bombed Pearl Harbour the Americans came into the war. We had stood quite alone for the period after Dunkirk which was a terrible period. However, the bravery of all the people at that period should never be forgotten. No one thought that Europe would fall so quickly to the German advance.

Gradually the tide turned and we pushed Rommel back into North Africa and then pushed on into Italy. Mussolini was defeated and we began to look forward to the prospect of peace, though still a long way to go.

Japan was busy on the Eastern front, taking Singapore and many other places. Our troops were then being sent there. My brother by this time was old enough to be called up and went into the Tank Corp; very soon he was in Burma. This was a terrible area of fighting and the cruelty of the Japanese was appalling. Prisoners suffered badly and those men on the Burma road, those that came home, were never the same again.

In Germany people were rounded up, especially Jewish people, and were herded into gas chambers. Millions died this way. How can humans treat each other this way?

Finally on 6th June 1944 we opened the second front and soldiers landed in France. It was a hard long struggle but advances were gradually made until May 1945 when Germany capitulated. Such joy for us all. We had parties in the streets, to be free at last was shattering but wonderful.

However for some the war was still going on in the East and the men were having a very hard time. They thought of themselves as the "forgotten army". Finally the Atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a terrible thing, but it ended the war in August 1945.

All that terrible time was to bring peace to a world which really never wants peace. Though we in Europe have been free since for 60 years, there have been other wars going on all over the world. Peace is a dream we all want but seem unable to find.

Eileen Atkins

~~~~~~~

Reading this through, so much is left out. One should keep a diary of events as they happen.
However I hope it gives a true picture of what it was like.