A Child's War (3 page)

We had a boy called Bernard Muggeridge at school, he didn’t turn up for a long time – someone said he’d been killed in an air raid, someone else said he’d drunk the school ink and died. Later he came back – he’d been evacuated.

Then came the German invasion of western Europe, the ‘Blitzkrieg’. With the fall of France in June 1940, Britain became the next target. Invasion was expected on the south coast of England, which was hastily changed from a Reception area to an Evacuation area. Hurriedly over 200,000 children in the area were evacuated, or, in some cases, re-evacuated to Wales or the Midlands. Some were sent to America, but this was stopped when in September the
City of Benares
, a ship carrying evacuees there, was torpedoed and sunk. Apart from this, evacuees were relatively safe; in the first two years of bombing, the heaviest part of the Blitz, only twenty-seven evacuees were killed by enemy action.

On the whole, most of the evacuees who were part of the official government scheme came from the poorer and more crowded parts of the big cities. The children of the urban middle and upper classes often went to live with relatives or schoolfriends in the country. Vivien Hatton recalls: ‘The school asked the girls who lived in the North of England if they would take one of us to stay for the summer holidays; I went up to Birmingham with one girl – I hated it. I wrote to my mother saying “Please, please, can I come home?” She wrote back saying that there was only the kitchen and shelter left to come back to – we’d been blasted!’

The countryside to which the official evacuees had been moved seemed a different world from that of the inner-city tenements and slums many of them had come from, but on the whole they soon adjusted. The streets were exchanged for the fields, city dogs and cats for cows and sheep, packaged food for farm goods. With the open air and fresh food many flourished. Alan Miles (July 1940): ‘Every night when I come home from school I get the eggs for Mrs Colwill. Mr Colwill is letting me milk the cow tonight. There is another thing I do at night that is getting the cows and driving them home half a mile.’

Parents were expected to pay towards the keep of their evacuated children; in London this was set at 6
s
(30p) a week each, although poorer parents were charged less. People taking in evacuees were paid more, from 8
s
6
d
(43p) up to 16
s
6
d
(83p), depending on the age of the children, the difference being made up by the state.

Evacuation was not just a one-way process. In June 1940, 29,000 civilians were evacuated to mainland Britain from the Channel Islands, and in September 1940 about 2,000 children from Gibraltar were evacuated from there to London. Few spoke any English, but they soon settled in, with several Scout groups being set up for them. They eventually returned to Gibraltar in the summer of 1944. And they were by no means unique; refugees from all over Europe had come to Britain seeking safety, starting with German Jews in the early 1930s, among them many children.

At about the same time as the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, a new air assault began, first from the V1s, the ‘doodlebugs’, then from the V2 rockets. A new wave of evacuation took place between July and September, although before it could even begin more than 200 under-16s had been killed. In the first two weeks 170,000 official evacuees left, along with half a million who made their own way out of the target areas, but again many soon returned as the threat proved less serious than expected.

Children who had stayed in the cities, or whose parents had taken them home again after they had been evacuated, were to find themselves with ringside seats when the air raids began. But in the first winter of the war, 1939–40, enemy aircraft activity was confined to attacks on shipping in the English Channel, or mine-laying around the coast. The first civilian air-raid death in Britain was during an attack on the Orkneys’s naval base on 16 March 1940, and the first in England was not until the end of April; even then it was caused by a German mine-laying bomber crashing at Clacton-on-Sea, killing its crew as well as two civilians. In the two years before the outbreak of war a series of measures had been introduced to counter, or at least minimise, the threat posed by bombing. These soon became part of everyday life.

In May 1938 the government had set out a system of air-raid warnings which would be sounded to warn of an imminent air attack, giving the public time to take cover. The warning would consist of a two-minute signal from a siren, rising and falling in pitch; the ‘All-clear’ signal would be given in the same way, but at a constant pitch. The up-and-down noise of the warning siren led to its becoming known as ‘Wailing Willy’ or ‘Moaning Minnie’. The ‘Alert’ sound itself became hated – some people found it more frightening than the noise of the actual raids. But most felt like Christine Pilgrim of Peckham: ‘When you heard the siren, it wasn’t so much that it frightened you – you knew what you had to do – it was, “Oh no, not again!”’

The siren was followed by a second type of warning, which indicated what kind of bomb was being dropped. For poison gas the air-raid wardens sounded a gas rattle (a kind of huge, old-fashioned football rattle), to warn people to put on their gas masks. The gas ‘All-clear’ was given by the ringing of hand-bells. If incendiary bombs were dropped, wardens or police sounded a series of short blasts on whistles, or, in some areas, banged dustbin lids, like gongs. This signalled that people should come out of their shelters and put out the fires. In
The City That Wouldn’t Die
, Richard Collier describes one such occurrence: ‘at Kennington, Station Officer Walter Bunday stopped short for a strange sight: a deserted street . . . a shower of incendiaries . . . every front door opening as one, and householders, silent and purposeful, whisking out to deal with them . . . men, women, small children, armed with sand and buckets of water. Then every front door shutting again like clockwork and not a word exchanged – “Like something out of Disney”.’

There were several tests of the warning system in the months before war broke out, so that everyone recognised the sound immediately. From 1 September 1939 the sounding of sirens, or of factory hooters, which were used to back them up, was made illegal for any reason except for air-raid warnings.

In just about every cowboy film ever made, there is a point in the shoot-out when somebody suddenly stands up, and is just as suddenly shot – it’s pretty obvious that the rule is ‘Get down and stay down’. A similar rule applies to being bombed: ‘Take cover’. At first simple measures were used to provide cover, such as digging trenches, or the use of sandbags to make defensive walls, but these were clearly suitable only as stop-gap measures. Christine Pilgrim remembers: ‘Dad putting bunks up in the cellar so that we could go down there in a raid.’

At the beginning of 1939, the government had announced the introduction of a small air-raid shelter which could be put up in the back garden of a house. The ‘sectional steel shelter’, as it was officially known, soon became universally called the ‘Anderson’ after the then Home Secretary, and was supplied free of charge to the poorer inhabitants of danger areas, and for a small fee to anyone else. It was delivered in sections and had to be put up by the householder. This entailed digging a large hole, in which the shelter was half buried, and the leftover earth was then piled on top to give added protection. Barbara Courtney remembers the arrival of an Anderson at her family’s home in Nunhead: ‘I was almost 5 when the war broke out. The first I knew about it was when they delivered our Anderson shelter. They delivered it in sections and you had to put it up. I helped my dad, well, I did a bit of digging – he did it really.’

Being half buried certainly added to the safety of the Anderson, but it also caused its chief problem; during wet weather it tended to fill up with water. Still, damp and uncomfortable as they were, although no shelter could survive a direct hit, there is no doubt that they saved many lives. Charles Harris from Chingford, then aged 7, remembers: ‘There were three land mines came down near us, one went off in the reservoir, one failed to go off, and the third one caught in some telegraph wires and came down on a shelter about 100 yards down our road. They were all killed. We were in our shelter and the door came in and I got hit over the head. Three houses and two bungalows were wrecked, and all the rest had their windows blown out.’ By mid-1940 over 2.25 million Andersons had been supplied.

However, many people did not have back gardens; for them the government produced a booklet, ‘Your home as an air-raid shelter’, which showed various ways of using mattresses, old doors, etc., to strengthen one of the downstairs rooms as a refuge. Other common practices were to use the cupboard under the stairs or to get under a table, but neither of these was completely satisfactory. Barbara Daltry from Windsor remembers one incident when she was 16: ‘Once I was walking home in the black-out, it was 3 miles, when I got there Mother said, “Get under the table, there’s an unexploded bomb in the back garden!” I told her I was too tired – if I was going to die, I’d die in bed. Actually the bomb was in the woods some way away.’

At the end of 1940, the government introduced a shelter for indoor use. Nicknamed the ‘Morrison’ after Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Home Defence, it was a low, steel cage, which, when not in use, could double up as a table.

Like the Anderson, the Morrison was delivered in sections and had to be assembled. A shortage of council workmen meant that people were encouraged to put up their own shelters, but this was often not possible, so youth groups such as the Scouts were brought in to help. Michael Corrigan was a Scout in Bristol:

Later during the war when we had air raids over Bristol many houses were issued with Morrison shelters which were solid metal, table-like constructions which were erected in the home, usually in the dining room, often taking the place of the dining table. The shelters were delivered in pieces and we were informed by the authorities of the addresses and we would then go out, after school, and erect them. This meant finding a suitable place in the house, moving any existing furniture out of the way, getting the solid metal legs in place and placing a very heavy solid sheet of metal on top and bolting the whole thing together. Interlaced metal strips were then stretched across the bottom framework ready for the householder to bring down their mattress and make it their bed as well as their shelter.

Obviously, people had to go out – work, shops, school, church and so on – and could not always be near home when the air-raid warning sounded. For this reason a number of public shelters were set up. These might be converted basements in shops, cinemas, etc., or specially built shelters. They were usually marked with a large ‘S’ in white on a black background, or vice versa, and there would be similar signs, painted on walls or hung from lamp-posts, which showed the way to the nearest shelter. Failing this, when the warning sounded, the local air-raid warden would grab any strangers and push them into the nearest public shelter, or, if there wasn’t one, into the nearest private shelter where there was room. David George recalls the public shelters in Ealing: ‘There were two big surface shelters built in our street. We spent many nights in them. The wardens woke us up and we used to go down for the whole night.’

The councils made use of whatever local facilities existed; in places like Dover and Chislehurst, the caves were used – bunks were set up, as well as first-aid posts, toilets, and other facilities. In London, after first refusing to allow it, the government agreed that the Underground stations be used as shelters; at the height of the Blitz over 140,000 people were sleeping in the stations – so many that special three-tier bunks were put up, and ‘tube refreshment’ trains were laid on, selling tea, cakes, etc. But in the early months of the war, precautions were still makeshift.

One of the weapons introduced in the First World War had been poison gas. As far back as 1935 the government had decided to build up stocks of gas masks to be given free to all members of the public, so that at the time of the Munich crisis many civilians were issued with one. During the summer of 1939 almost everyone else received theirs, except for babies and small children, who needed special masks; these were mostly issued later that year. Posters encouraged people to take their gas masks with them wherever they went – one of the first problems created by gas masks was that vast numbers of them were absent-mindedly left on buses, trains and the Underground.

The gas mask developed for babies was actually called a gas hood, or protective helmet (it was generally known as the baby-bag). It was designed for children up to the age of about 18 months and an official leaflet, produced in July 1939, described it as follows:

The helmet consists of a hood, made of impervious fabric and fitted with a large window, which encloses the head, shoulders and arms, and is closed around the waist by means of a draw tape. A baby when it is in is thus able to get its hand to its mouth. The hood is surrounded by and fastened to a light metal frame, which is lengthened on the underside and fitted with an adjustable tail-piece, so as to form a support and protection to a baby’s back. . . . The metal frame and supporting strap may be varied in length to suit all sizes of babies and children up to about five years of age.

The reason for this higher age of 5 was so that it could be used for children ‘temperamentally unsuited for wearing a respirator’.

Last to be produced was a mask for young children below the age of 4–5 years; officially called the ‘Small Child’s respirator’, it was commonly called the Mickey Mouse mask. Similar in style to the adult mask, it was produced in bright red and blue, to try to make the toddlers more keen to wear it. The official leaflet pointed out that it fastened with a hook-and-eye fitting at the back, to make it more difficult for a small child to take it off. One book, published in 1942, advised parents on how to encourage their younger children to wear their gas masks: