A Child's War (2 page)

On 7 September the Luftwaffe turned its attention to London. On that day, called ‘Black Saturday’ by the Londoners, the docks were pounded in the first of almost three months of nightly attacks on the capital. With the onset of autumn, the fear of invasion receded, to be replaced by the threat of aerial assault, and London was not the only target. The industrial towns and ports of Britain were also targets, and on 14 November Coventry was severely hit in a concentrated attack that paralysed the city. The year ended with the ‘Second Great Fire of London’ when the historic City of London was all but destroyed in a fire-bomb raid, which produced some of the war’s most memorable pictures of St Paul’s Cathedral ringed with fire and smoke.

The spring of 1941 re-awakened invasion fears, but in June Germany turned her attention to the east. The occupation of Russia also marked the end of the Big Blitz, as the massed raids of the previous nine months were called, although not the end of raiding, which continued in one form or another for the next two years. August saw the formation of the National Fire Service and the Fire Guard in response to the fire raids of the Big Blitz; millions of civilians not already involved in voluntary service in the Home Guard or ARP were ordered to attend compulsory training in incendiary bomb fighting, followed by stints of fire watching. In 1941 clothes rationing was introduced and the USA entered the war when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December.

In April 1942 the Baedeker raids on Britain’s historic cathedral towns and cities began. Cities such as York, Norwich and Exeter, among others, were badly hit in a series of heavy raids that continued until July. At this point the ‘tip and run’ raids began, which as their name indicates were fast raids preceded by little or no warning, continuing until January 1944. In 1942 the first American troops began to arrive in Britain in the build up to the invasion of Europe.

In January 1944 there began the first of a series of intense incendiary bomb raids, known as ‘the Little Blitz’, and these continued until March of that year. In June 1944 came the Normandy landings and in the same month the first V1s landed in Britain, followed three months later by the first V2.

The Normandy landings were followed by a series of fiercely contested battles. Those who had predicted that it would soon be over were proved wrong as another wartime Christmas came, although by then the end was clearly in sight. By the end of the year the threat of a German invasion was gone; the Home Guard was stood-down on 1 November.

Attacks by German aircraft on Britain had ceased and the numbers of civil defence workers were cut back, except in the south-east, where V weapons continued to fall. The last V2 landed in Orpington, Kent, on Wednesday 27 March 1945, and one woman was killed, becoming the last civilian death of the war, and twenty-three were seriously injured. The last V1s were launched on the evening of 28/29 March. Most were shot down, but one landed at Waltham Abbey, one at Chislehurst. The very last doodlebug touched down somewhat fittingly, in a sewage farm at Datchworth, near Hatfield. The Civil Defence were wound up on 2 May and held a final parade on 10 June in Hyde Park, where they were reviewed by the King. On 2 May the newspapers announced the death of Hitler, and four days later Germany surrendered unconditionally, the following day being declared VE Day.

Japan fought on, but the dropping of two atomic bombs in August resulted in their surrender, and VJ Day. The war was finally completely over.

I was 13 when the war started. The week before it broke out my family – me, Mum and Dad, and my little sister Eileen – went to Weymouth on holiday. We went to the cinema to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and on the newsreel they were saying that war was coming. We came home on Friday instead of Saturday – the train was packed – there were sixteen in our compartment instead of eight.

Iris Smith, Bristol

On the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939 it was announced that the Prime Minister would make a radio broadcast to the nation at 11.15 am. Everyone held their breath; would Neville Chamberlain once again manage to turn certain war into peace at the last moment, as he had done at Munich the year before?

At the announced time the Prime Minister spoke:

This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

The Second World War had begun. Roy Coles, also from Bristol, recalls listening to the broadcast: ‘I was eleven when the war started. That Sunday morning I listened to the radio with my Dad, we listened in silence as war was declared. We had to go and see my Grandmother and my Great Aunt, we walked in silence down to my Gran’s – there was virtually nobody about. My Gran didn’t have a radio so we told them.’

The news rapidly filtered through to those who, like Roy’s gran, did not hear the broadcast; Vivien Hatton from Bermondsey remembers: ‘We were in church when the vicar told us that we were at war.’ Almost immediately after Chamberlain’s broadcast, an air-raid warning (a false alarm as it turned out) was sounded in London and large parts of south-east England. Sylvie Stevenson from Chingford was 4 at the time: ‘The first I knew was when the air-raid sirens went, we were at the top of Hall Lane – everyone just stopped. I remember dad coming home that evening, saying he was going to join up – Mum went berserk.’ Charles Harris, also from Chingford, was aged 7; he too remembers that first air-raid warning: ‘When the sirens went I went down into the public shelter, it was dark inside – there were no lights. Down in the mud on the floor I found 6
d
, when I came out I bought three tubs of ice cream with it – they were 2
d
each – my brother and sister and me all had ice cream that afternoon.’

Although some of the changes that the war brought to the lives of children did not come about immediately (rationing, for example, only came in later, as the war dragged on), others had already been introduced before the outbreak of war, such as gas masks, or followed almost immediately, as with ID cards and the spread of Anderson shelters.

* Catchphrase of the contemporary comedian Rob Wilton.

As the threat of war had increased during in the late 1930s, the government had begun laying plans for evacuation. These directly affected children, especially those living in London, the industrial cities and the great ports.

There had been air raids on Britain in the First World War and people were very concerned about the danger they posed. In the summer of 1938, it was decided that, should war come, those least able to fend for themselves – children, the elderly and the disabled – should be evacuated from those places most under threat. In September, at the time of the Munich crisis, plans were drawn up splitting the country into three types of area: Evacuation; Neutral; and Reception. Evacuation areas were mainly those places where people were thought to be in the most danger of air attack, although some places were cleared of civilians to provide training areas for the forces. The first Evacuation areas included Greater London, the Medway towns, Merseyside, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Reception areas were safer parts to which evacuees – those being evacuated – would be taken; they were mainly rural areas such as Kent, East Anglia and Wales.

Schools were to be evacuated
en masse
, the children and their teachers moving all together to the same area, where they would usually share the neighbourhood school with the local children. Children from the same family would go together, with the younger ones going with the eldest’s school. Pre-school children were to be evacuated with their mothers.

On Monday 28 August 1939, before the summer holidays had actually ended, London schoolchildren went back to school to take part in an evacuation rehearsal. Many of the children had assembled by 6 am, carrying their kit. A government leaflet outlined what this should comprise: ‘a handbag or case containing the child’s gas mask, a change of under-clothing, night clothes, house shoes or plimsolls, spare stockings or socks, a toothbrush, a comb, towel, soap and face cloth, handkerchiefs; and, if possible, a warm coat or macintosh. Each child should bring a packet of food for the day.’ Every school had been given a number and had been told when to go to which railway station or where to board the coaches. The cost of the journey was paid for by the government.

On the morning of 31 August 1939, three days before war broke out, the order was given for the evacuation plans to be put into operation, and during the next four days nearly 1.9 million people were evacuated, including almost 1.5 million children, over half of whom were in school parties. Parents of schoolchildren were told when their children’s school would be leaving, although they did not learn the destination until after the children had got there; mothers of younger children were told where and when to assemble. From the London area alone 376,652 children and their teachers, 275,895 pre-school children and their mothers, 3,577 expectant mothers and 3,403 blind adults were transported out of the capital. Any operation involving these vast numbers could easily have lapsed into complete confusion but overall this phase of the operation was surprisingly successful.

Vivien Hatton was evacuated from Bermondsey

I was 9 years old when the war broke out, A few days beforehand I had been evacuated along with my older sister Audrey with her school, Aylwyn High School, to Worthing. I was terribly frightened. My mother made us sandwiches for the journey. We carried our gas masks round our necks and had a badge pinned to us to say who we were. We were billeted with a family I didn’t like, they were quite dirty – we arrived there about nine o’clock but were given no food, so we lay in bed and finished our sandwiches. I cried but my sister told me not to be such a baby.

We had some friends who were billeted with a Salvation Army couple, Mr and Mrs Crump, and they said they could arrange for us to transfer to them. The Billeting Officer said we were very ungrateful children.

On the children’s arrival at their destinations, the first real problems began to appear. It had not always been possible to transport schools to places where suitable, or even sufficient, school accommodation was available. The teachers set about putting things in order. Soon village halls and large buildings of all sorts had been put to use as temporary schoolrooms, and by Christmas almost all the evacuated children were receiving full-time education. At the beginning of the war Alan Miles, who was 9 at the time, was evacuated from New Cross to Brighton. His mother kept the letters he sent home, and they make a fascinating record. This is his first letter (spelling mistakes and all):

Dear Mum,

I am having a nice time. I went to school on Monday and in the prak [park] in the Afternoon. Do you know that I have tow [two] shillings and nine pence and I buot [bought] two commics one is Larks and the other is tip Top. I hop Tinker [his cat] is all right and reads this letter out which I am just going to write miow miow miow for the cat. Is dady making some more guns and I hop dady’s foot is better. Is mumy still finding the cat on my bed. Mrs bodmin went to the pictures and Enid and I went to fech Mrs bodmin and Mr bodmin.

Love from Alan

Another letter dated 2 July 1941 shows how contact with home was ensured – ‘I am at school writing this letter as every Wensday morning Londers [Londoners] have to write letters home.’

One particular problem sprang up in North Wales, where some children were placed with Welsh-speaking families, but with the ready adaptability of youth, many soon picked up enough Welsh to get by, and their schools arranged for Welsh to be included in their lessons.

The months that followed soon came to be known as the ‘phoney war’. Hitler had not expected Britain and France to go to war at this time and was not ready for a full-scale attack on them. Throughout the winter of 1939/40 the German U-boat assault on merchant shipping was pressed ahead, but on land and in the air almost nothing happened. The expected air raids failed to materialise and in Britain more civilians died in black-out traffic accidents than soldiers were killed by enemy action. Many evacuees were homesick, some had been hurriedly placed in the most unsuitable billets, dirty and insanitary, or with people unwilling or unable to look after them properly. Barbara Courtney from Nunhead remembers: ‘We were evacuated to Salisbury, you always tried to be nice, tried to please. The woman where my brother and I were billeted, she said she’d burnt the rice pudding. I said I didn’t mind, then I saw it – it was black. She cut all the bits off and put them on my plate. Her husband said, “You can’t make her eat that!”, but she said I’d said I liked it, so she made me.’

Many parents missed their children dreadfully, and as the precautions seemed to prove unnecessary, more and more evacuees came home – after only a few weeks the Minister of Health was advising mothers of young evacuees not to bring them back to the cities, but by Christmas nearly half of all evacuees had returned.

Alan Miles wrote home on 26 January 1940: ‘Mrs Gatehouse said to me that I am being moved but I do not want to move I want to come home. If you want to know why it is because I am getting a bit tired of being down here by my self and another thing is because I want to see my dear little Tinker. I think my teacher Mrs Howard has gone back and all my friends have gone back like Lawrence has gone back so that it is not very nice not to have friends.’

Sylvie Stevenson from Chingford, aged 4 when the war began, remembers:

I was evacuated for about two weeks, somewhere near Bedford. I’d never had cream before, and the lady said; ‘Would you like some cream?’ I said ‘Yes’, so she gave me kippers with cream! I hated being away from home and Mum and Dad came down and got me. Dad was in a reserved occupation, making ammunition boxes for the army.