Authors: Sean Longden
Blitz Kids (10 page)
The question of where bombed-out families could be rehoused was a constant problem and the establishment of rest centres offered some solution. During 1940â41, one sixth of all Londoners were bombed from their homes, either temporarily or permanently, and were moved to what were effectively refugee camps for the victims of the Blitz. For the Morris family, rest centres were not an option: âThere were rest centres, but people in the East End had their pride. They wouldn't go to them. They would rather go to relatives or close friends. It was a very close-knit community. So we stayed with a friend for the next night.' In many cases, the reticence to move to rest centres was understandable. Some were so overcrowded people were forced to use buckets as toilets. Also, they were in blitzed areas, meaning they offered no safety. Hundreds of ârefugees' were reported to have been killed when one such rest centre was bombed.
With so much damage in the East End, Alf's father found a house a few miles away in Leyton:
But my Mum said, âI'm not living in Leyton!' So he said, âLiz, please. I'm trying to get us sorted.' So we went to Leyton, but a little while later a bomb landed behind the house. It didn't hit us but it dropped in the gardens. So we were bombed out again and moved back to Bethnal Green. We stayed in the crypt of St John's Church. It had been opened up as a shelter. The crypt was full of lead coffins. So we slept on the floor between them. At night we could still hear the bombs falling.
Within days his father had found them another home, a two-room flat in the nearby Gretton Houses, a short walk from the church crypt that continued to be their shelter. Alf was in the block next door to the one from where Reg Baker had been evacuated the previous year.
By the end of October 1940 some 60,000 homes in London had been destroyed, with a further 130,000 suffering bomb damage. In the borough of Stepney three quarters of homes had been wrecked and across London some 250,000 people had been made homeless. One unexpected side effect of the bombing was that the impact of explosions sent expectant mothers into labour. In the south London suburb of Thornton Heath, the local midwife found herself increasingly busy, as her niece recalled:
As soon as she heard the warning siren, she knew she'd have to go out. That was when babies were born. She was always out in raids. When Thornton Heath baths were bombed she had to deliver two babies out on the pavement. She was out in one raid on her way to a call, when an incendiary bomb went off right beside her. After the delivery she came back home and our mum said to her â you look different. It was then we realized what had happened â the shock of that bomb going off beside her had sent one of her eyebrows totally white. For years she had one black and one white eyebrow.
Although the East End initially suffered the most intense bombing, the Luftwaffe soon spread its attention. Perhaps imagining there was little left to destroy in east London, the bombing spread out across the capital. Suddenly, entire areas that had so far escaped unscathed faced shocking destruction. Whilst some poor areas had experienced what
seemed like extremely violent slum clearance, the next stage of bombing also hit the city's more modern suburbs.
The southern suburb of Shirley, an area of mostly modern houses built in the inter-war years, was far from the typical image of blitzed London. Yet, like many other suburbs, it saw its share of the bombing, as the Luftwaffe brought terror to the entire population. One teenage girl recalled the bombing:
I was in a house which was badly damaged by a German land mine which was dropped. You couldn't hear those coming as they came down by parachute. My father was on Home Guard duty and my mother, her friend and my younger brother were in the house. That house didn't have a shelter but my father had reinforced the windows with tape â that was what saved us.
Without a shelter, the children slept behind the sofa in the living room that their parents thought might offer some protection:
All we heard was a crack â we thought whatever is that? Next moment there was a blinding flash â all the windows and doors were blown in â the ceilings came down â all the windows were smashed to smithereens. The tiles came off the roof and the house was completely wrecked. I didn't feel frightened. Suddenly we could see all the way down the garden â it was filled with lights where something was burning. It turned out to be the embers from the fire in one of the bombed houses. My brother and I weren't injured but we were covered in muck. My mother had slight wounds and bruising and our friend broke her arm. She was up at the time and had gone to the lounge door. It came off its hinges and knocked her down.
Within minutes, Canadian troops who were stationed in the area arrived to check on the family:
They bandaged my mother and took the other lady to hospital. They took my brother and me to a house across the road which had a big shelter, and we stayed there until the raid was over. My father was on Home Guard duty nearby, he got the news and came down to find us. I
don't know what he thought when he saw our house wrecked. For the next few days I was terribly shaky and I couldn't sleep â my body reacted. I couldn't believe it: suburban Shirley had been bombed!
In Ealing, ten-year-old Roy Bartlett had grown used to long nights sheltering beneath his parents' shop. As the days and weeks passed, the people who used the shelter put up curtains to give privacy to their bunks. Family photographs appeared at bedsides and a new community began to emerge. Then the inevitable happened. On 19 October 1940 the shelter filled up with its normal residents, who were joined by a few new faces, including some soldiers who were trying to get back to camp, when the sirens had sounded:
I was sound asleep in my bunk in the corner of the cellar. My first conscious awareness was that my head hurt. Why was everything dusty? Why was I on the cold stone floor? It was total confusion. I couldn't hear. I suppose my head hit the brick wall to my side. Everyone had been thrown out of their bunks and deposited on one side. As I was thrown forward, my leg jarred against the wall and crushed the cartilage in my ankle.
As he regained consciousness he could hear frantic voices calling out through the darkness: âThe coal dust from our coal chute had been sucked up. There was dust and dirt filtering everywhere. We were coughing, choking, spluttering. Handkerchiefs were being passed around to cover faces.'
Upstairs, his father found that all the windows had been shattered but that the blackout curtains had caught the glass. Along with the two soldiers, and a policeman who had been sheltering in the cellar, Roy's father stepped out from the shop-front. As he did so, he stepped carefully over a woman's severed hand. They were immediately confronted by a thick fog of dust and realized that the shop's stock was spread all over the road. Looking up, they saw a red glow opposite: two houses on fire. They quickly burned to the ground whilst the owner of one of the houses continued to shelter beneath the Bartletts' shop. Out in the street, they discovered the cause of the devastation: a parachute mine had fallen nearby, demolishing a row of seven shops,
killing seven people and wounding twelve. A further three people simply vanished without a trace, obliterated by the blast.
Down in the cellar, Roy Bartlett was unaware of the destruction that had happened in the street outside. All he wanted to do was escape the dust and get out into the fresh air: âI realized what had happened when I tried to stand up. I fell over again.' Staying in his bunk until morning, Roy then tried to reach hospital for treatment. At first he and father tried to get a bus, but none were running due to the rubble blocking the street. Then they tried to get a lift, but there were no cars moving. So they walked, the youngster hobbling and hopping as he supported himself on his father's arm. Once at the hospital the youngster realized how lucky he had been. It was crowded with the wounded. He watched trolleys going past with bloodied people being wheeled in for treatment. One of the passing stretchers carried a body completely covered by a blood-soaked blanket. He soon realized his injured ankle was far from a high priority. By the time the doctors came to treat him they had run out of plaster and could not set his lower leg in a cast. Instead, it was wound with a thick, sticky bandage and he was told to rest it for a couple of weeks. With that he returned home, just glad to be alive.
In south London, another youngster found himself sheltering in the cellar of his home. For seven-year-old Fred Rowe, a self-confessed âstreet urchin', the sudden arrival of war on his local area had an immediate impact. He was pleased that his mother refused for him to be evacuated, but missed his father who was away in the Army. He also enjoyed the disruption that meant school opening times were haphazard. Too young to really understand what war meant, it was only when the bombs began to fall that he realized war was not a game. He watched German fighters swooping down on shopping streets firing along the middle of the road, watched anti-aircraft guns firing from nearby Battersea Park and began to taste the warm, dusty air that swirled through the streets in the aftermath of air raids.
With the start of the Blitz, summer had come to an end and everywhere seemed dreary and dull:
All of sudden there were bombs going off. These planes would come along, drop their fucking bombs and there'd be these explosions. The ground would shake and rumble as the bombs exploded. The noise was
like something from another planet. Your ears were ruined for days. It was all new to me. I thought this was going to be it for the rest of my life. I was in a permanent state of fear.
As the bombing spread, Fred experienced the terror of modern warfare:
We lived in a house with a coal hole underneath. It had a hole in the pavement, where the coal was put in. We used it as a shelter. Mum kept a few tins of food, a can-opener and some water down there in case we got trapped. One night the house two doors along got a direct hit and the debris covered over the pavement. Our house was wrecked. There was tons of masonry against the cellar door. So we were trapped in there. We couldn't get out through the coal chute and we couldn't get up the stairs, 'cause of the debris. Mum told me to start singing, so the ARP would know we were trapped in there.
With the house collapsed on top of them, the family had no idea what would happen next. They were beneath tons of rubble, that much was clear, but was it burning? Would anyone come to rescue them? Or might another bomb hit them? As he sat in the dim candlelight, Fred Rowe realized their predicament:
The whole place was vibrating. I started crying, so did my sister. Eventually the all-clear went and we could hear movement above â ARP blokes. Then we heard muffled voices. Mum started singing loud. Then they shouted, âAre you down there?' She shouted back to them that we were in the cellar and they could reach us through the pavement. They cleared a way through and then we saw the torchlight through the dust. It was total fear. I thought I was entombed there and I was going to die.
Yet there were worse things than being rescued from the rubble of your home, as he soon discovered as he passed through bombed streets, looking up at homes that had the front sliced off, leaving rooms open to the world:
It was fucking horrible. There was a bloke next door who lived in the basement. A bomb had dropped on the house behind him, and he was
blown out of his basement on to the railings outside. The railings had ripped him in half. All his guts and gunge were hanging out of him. I thought âFucking hell, Percy!' I was choking when I saw him. And his son, fifteen years old, was killed. He was lying in the road with no head, no arm and a bit of his shoulder was gone. I didn't recognize him. And I saw a body all blown apart, mixed into another body. It was a young girl blown into her mum or her dad, blasted together.
Though just seven years old he became horribly familiar with death: âWhen you saw the dead bodies, their face was all blue. The skin was mottled. It was fucking awful.' More than ten years later, whilst serving in the Army in Korea, he was to discover one effect of the horrors of the Blitz: âIt prepares you for war.'
Whilst high explosive bombs had the obvious power to destroy buildings, smashing their walls and throwing debris all around, and incendiaries were able to set fires wherever they fell, there was a third weapon in the enemies arsenal: blast. This was the most curious of all results of the bombing. Buildings that were untouched by bombs had their windows blown out. The awesome surge of air unleashed by high explosive could lift people from the ground and deposit them on the opposite side of the road. Bernard Kops recalled being lifted off his feet and dumped to the ground as he played in a passageway near his home. He had felt a rush of air but not heard a sound. He soon discovered it was the blast from a bomb that had fallen 200 yards away, destroying an air raid shelter in Columbia Road.
In some cases unwounded corpses were discovered with no sign of the malevolent force that had killed them. As Sylvia Bradbrook â having returned to London from an unhappy evacuation â recalled, she was always frightened to walk past a local fire station. Rumour had it that the entire crew had been found sitting around the table playing cards. Every one of them was still and silent, as if time had stopped. But it was no illusion: blast had simply stopped their hearts. However, it was another sight that intrigued her: âA man in our neighbourhood was blown to bits â and afterwards an air raid warden had to go up a ladder with a bucket and pick all the bits of flesh up off the building.' Watching from the upstairs window of her friend's house, she saw the warden scraping lumps of flesh from the brickwork and scrubbing to remove the bloodstains.
More than anything, blast played bizarre tricks. Trees were found with their branches full of items that had been blasted into them. In one case a family looked out to see their garden trees had seemingly grown a new and bizarre fruit â cabbages that had been blasted out of the ground. When one rescue worker searched for a man known to have been in a bombed house, he could find no sign of him. Eventually the man's body was located: blast had sucked it up the chimney.