Polly (12 page)

‘It's over at last then,' said I, all bright and breezy.

‘Sorry,' she said, ‘I can't celebrate. My brother is a prisoner of war with the Japs. I can't celebrate.'

And she went on her way. She had such hatred in her eyes and voice, I really couldn't credit it. It knocked me back on my heels and knocked me down for the rest of the day. I never saw her again and I've got no idea what happened to her brother, even whether he ever came back. The way the Japs treated prisoners was unbelievable and nothing is enough to pay them back for their behaviour. I have often felt I would like to meet the man who dropped the atom bomb on them and shake him by the hand. That must have been the best thing that was done in the whole war. Even that was a better death than they gave to PoWs.

I
get really sick of all the rubbish about the Blitz and the cheerful East Enders who refused to be downhearted. It wasn't like that at all. It was bloody awful and the authorities were just not prepared. As always, it was the ordinary people who just had to put up with the suffering and grief caused by the mistakes and stupidity of those who claimed to know best. Poor bloody devils.

I remember the first day of the Blitz. We were living in Keogh Road then, and I was expecting the first boy so I was a great lump. Fred was at work. You worked every hour God sent then; you just went into work and stayed; you didn't have any option. My friend Chrissie came round to see me and said that if we went up the Point [Editor's note: Maryland Point] to the wool shop she would buy some silk and crochet a dress for the baby. It sounded a good idea so I started to get ready.

Just then, Fred walked in. He looked awful. He told us that he had just had enough – I cannot remember how long he had been at work by then – and he couldn't carry on any longer, so he had come home. I got in a bit of a flap because I hadn't got any dinner ready, in fact I hadn't even thought about it yet and was only just getting ready to go shopping. What could I do for him? What did he want? and all that. But he didn't care, he couldn't care less, he just wanted to rest and told me not to bother but go shopping. He went
into the front room (we were ever so posh because we had a front room with some decent furniture) sat in an armchair and almost instantly went to sleep. I finished getting ready and, with Chrissie, went up the shops. When we got back Fred was still in the chair asleep. I don't think he had moved a muscle while we were out. He must have been absolutely knackered.

I was about to start preparing some food when the warning went. Chrissie flew into a panic about getting down the shelter. We didn't have our own shelter but Aunty next door had an Anderson shelter and we shared that. We had even knocked down a section of the wall between the gardens so that we could go in and out easily. It had been quite useful really because Uncle had been having some medical trouble and I had been able to nip in and help when he had one of his ‘attacks'. I had even been up to the hospital with him a couple of times. Anyway, Chrissie was flapping up and down about the warning and the shelter, but of course she worked out of London all week and only came back at weekends so she didn't understand how we had got used to it during the Battle of Britain. The warning was always going but nothing ever happened because the Germans were attacking the airfields, not London. After a while we had stopped taking notice of them and got on with our lives as if nothing had happened, just like I wanted to start getting the dinner ready. But she went on and on, so in the end I said that I would go down the shelter. First, though, I had to wake Fred, which wasn't very easy. When I eventually managed and told him what was going on he started on me too – I should have gone straight to the shelter, it didn't matter about the false alarms, there was no time to hang about, and all the rest. Anybody would have thought that the warning was all my fault!

So nursing my lump I picked my way over the rubble of the wall. Chrissie was already down in the shelter, she had shot out there as soon as I had said the word, and Fred was behind me fussing. I got to the door and was just about to take the first step down when there was an almighty thump and I found myself laying flat on the lump in the middle of the floor. A bomb had landed about 50 yards away! Luckily it hadn't exploded, but just the force of hitting the ground had made the thump and there was a crater in the road. Boy did we jump into that shelter. There was only a dirt floor and nothing to sit on. I mean, up until then we had not taken it very seriously so there were no preparations or efforts to make it comfortable.

We weren't there long, because once they realised about the unexploded bomb we all had to move out. They tried to move us down to the local school which had been opened to provide emergency accommodation, but I did not
fancy that. Instead Fred took me down to my mum's which was on the other side of Stratford.

We hadn't been there long either when my brother came in from work. He worked in the same place as Fred, down in the docks area, but because of the bombing they had been sent home. He was an amazing sight, ever so scruffy and untidy, but BLACK! Because of the bombing there were no buses so he had to walk home. But that meant walking all the way through the docks which had been the main target. Wherever he went there were fires and wreckage, and many of the roads had been closed but the firemen let him through because he was trying to get home. By the time he had walked in, through and past all these fires, he was totally black.

He was going out with a girl in Canning Town at the time, and of course that had got more of a pasting than us even. As soon as he got cleaned up he wanted to go out again to see if she was alright. Mum started kicking up a fuss about the danger and how he should stay at home. In the end Fred came up with the solution – he put a saucepan lid inside my brother's cap to protect him! It did not fit in very easily and goodness knows how he kept it on his head. I do not think I had laughed so much for years but it made Mum happier so he left.

Then the warning went again. We did not mess about this time but headed straight for the shelter. To be honest, Mum's shelter wasn't worth the bother. It was only set a few inches into the soil and there was barely any soil on top of it, just about enough to grow some lettuces later in the war if I remember rightly. Still, we got into it, or would have done if it had been big enough. Just like Aunty's back in Keogh Road it had no furniture or other comforts, though they would have made it more cramped. Fred stood just outside and whenever he heard a bomb coming close he would squeeze inside the door.

We spent the night like that. It was the most terrible night. Next morning we went back home but they still wouldn't let us in because the bomb hadn't been dealt with. I cannot remember what we did but we must have got back sometime that day. That was the first day of the Blitz.

It was all a pretty terrifying experience and I must admit that after a little while I thought that we had really had enough. I just couldn't see how we could possibly carry on having hell knocked out of us every night and I was all in favour of Mr Churchill asking for peace on whatever terms were available. I even said as much to Fred, but he didn't reply. Then one day I went up to London with him. The Swimming Club had all sorts of silver cups and trophies and it had been decided that these should be put into safe custody in some big
bank up in the City. There had been a raid the night before and as we travelled I remember looking at some of the grand buildings all battered and smashed, and suddenly I got angry. In that moment my mood turned round completely, and I still remember thinking that we weren't going to let that ‘bloody barbarian' destroy everything. We would stop him and punish him, whatever it took.

My sister-in-law Doll was in her shelter on the night when the sewer-bank [Editor's note: the Northern Outfall Sewer which runs through an artificial embankment to the Beckton Sewage Works] was hit. All the lights went out as well, which added to the confusion. Suddenly water started flowing into the shelter and it quickly reached a few feet deep. It was time to get out and Dolly started to feel her way to the door. Her hand came against something floating so she carefully picked it up and held it until she got outside. Then, in the better light she looked down and saw she was carrying a turd. She rushed indoors to wash her hands but found the lower floor also flooded. The water drained away fairly quickly but, when she opened the knife drawer in her kitchen cabinet, she found another turd nestled nicely among the cutlery.

In the end she was bombed out of the East End but managed to get half a house in Roding Valley, away from the real bombing. Doll was really pleased to find somewhere that was so much safer than London and always wanted me to stay with her or at the very least, whenever I visited, to delay my return from there until the last possible moment. I used to visit her at least once a week. It was quite a performance, especially with the baby. I used to have to walk through to the Point and get a bus up to Leytonstone High Road. There I would get the train out to Buckhurst Hill and walk from there to Doll's. The return journey was simply the reverse.

One day there were all sorts of hold-ups along the Leytonstone Road, hangovers from the bombing I suppose, and when I reached the station the train was already in. I could see it at the other side of the platform, but from the bus stop I had to walk all round the outside of the station to come in from the other side. I shot off as fast as I could and halfway round met a railwayman. I was pretty desperate so I asked him if there was any way he could hold up the train while I got round the outside.

‘Don't bother,' he said, ‘follow me,' and he led me through a little tunnel straight up onto the platform. It struck me right away what a useful short cut it was, and how it was a pretty good shelter in an emergency. Anyway, I caught the train.

As the afternoon wore on I decided to leave early. Doll was ever so upset and wanted me to stay longer. Fred always encouraged me to stay as well,
he always thought it was too dangerous for me to go back into town. But, somehow, I felt I had to get Robert into bed early and I was determined to get him to bed. So I left a bit earlier than usual, getting home earlier, and putting him to bed earlier.

The next week I set off as usual to visit Doll. Having found the short cut there seemed no reason to go the long way round the station. Only, when I got there, the entrance passageway to the tunnel was blocked by a barrier. So, once again I walked around the outside. Still, I had plenty of time, and when I eventually reached the platform I asked the porter why the tunnel was closed.

‘Bad business' he said. Apparently the week before the warning had gone just as my ‘later' train reached the platform. For protection, all the passengers had been ushered down into the tunnel. That is where they were when it received a direct hit and everybody was killed. Of course, it was wartime, and we had heard nothing about it in the news or local papers. It was just coincidence that I met somebody able to tell me the story.

After the Blitz it all went rather quiet, the raids more or less stopped and life sort of got back to normal. That was, until the doodlebugs towards the end of the war. I can remember the first couple ever so clearly. The first was completely unexpected – the warning went but it had been ages since there was any sort of raid and nothing seemed to be going on in the sky so we didn't take it seriously. Suddenly there was a loud bang, obviously a long way away, but obviously very big. That one fell on Upton Park, but of course no official explanation was given. The next day there was another warning. Fred was around for some reason and doing his air raid warden routine. He kept saying it was alright, this was an exercise because ‘they' were worried that air raid drill was getting slack. It was only an exercise so it was important for everybody to go through the routine for practise. The more he said it was an exercise and very important the less interested everybody else got. Then somebody called us out into the street. We ran out and looked up, and there was a small aeroplane flying over ‘on fire'! We watched horrified as it went out of sight and a few seconds later came that same bang we had heard the day before. That was the first doodlebug we saw. It fell on Bow and killed a woman and her five children.

After that we started following air-raid drills again.