Blitz Kids (11 page)

One morning, following an air raid, Terry Charles awoke and stepped into the corridor of his basement flat. As he looked towards the front door he was surprised to see it open. He then looked more closely: ‘We had no front door. I looked outside but couldn't find it. I thought no more of it and thought I'd better get ready for school. I went to the bathroom but couldn't open the bathroom door. I thought that was funny.' Bemused, he went outside and looked through the bathroom window: ‘Our front door was in the bathroom. The blast had blown it in, along the passage – without marking the walls – the bathroom door had opened, the front door had gone through and then the bathroom door had closed on it.'

The power of blast also became apparent to Roy Bartlett. Returning from school in the pouring rain, he noticed that water was spilling from the gutters at the front of his father's shop. He informed his father, who sent for a local handyman:

Faced with terrible scenes, Londoners desperately searched for any place of safety. What they wanted was to get as far underground as possible. For those in central London, there was one obvious place of sanctuary: the Underground railways. The tube stations soon became the favoured place of refuge. Starting on the fifth night of the Blitz,
when locals crowded into the tunnels and platforms of Liverpool Street station, the tube stations became a vital part of the fabric of wartime society. Although the practice was frowned on by the authorities, people began crowding into the stations, marking out a spot and settling in for the night. Staff tried to keep the crowds back from the platform edge as commuters got on and off trains. Every space was filled by families looking for somewhere safe for the children to sleep. Night after night they filed underground, into a subterranean world without beds or toilet facilities, where trains rattled past until late at night, where rats and mice scuttled around once the lights had gone out, running across the sheltering people as they tried to get a night's rest. One child who slept in a tube station later recalled how the noise of the trains kept them awake until the last train had gone. Then, with the movement of trains sucking air through the tunnels, the smell of the open toilets took over and made sleep difficult. None of that mattered: at least they felt safe.

For the people of Bethnal Green, the local tube station was a godsend. The station was unfinished, part of an extension to the Central line which had not yet opened. With no track yet laid, there was no dangerous live rail, meaning the people were not confined to the platform, but could also sleep in the pit intended for the tracks. Night after night, the locals queued up to enter this sanctuary. Alf Morris was among them, sent by his family to secure a space for them:

With the opening of the tube station as a shelter came a new concern. Families sleeping on the tracks and platforms needed several blankets to keep themselves warm at night. This meant trudging around the area carrying piles of bed linen. A solution was found by two enterprising
locals. Renting an empty shop near the station entrance, the men erected a sign, ‘The Bundle Shop'. There, for a few pennies a day, families could store their bedding, receiving a ticket each morning for bedding that could be redeemed in the evening. This soon became part of the daily routine of children's duties. They would queue at the station, rush down to claim their spot, then they would return to the surface to fetch their bedding from ‘The Bundle Shop'.

Alf Morris and his family remained regular visitors to the station for many months to come, watching as the station developed from a bare, unfinished tube station into a properly organized shelter that, for many, became a home-from-home. At first it was nothing more than an underground space, somewhere far safer than the railway arches or church crypts far above them:

Whatever the conditions, people had to sleep there. The scuttling of rats was preferable to the crash of bombs. If the men and women didn't sleep, how could they work? If they couldn't work, how could the country produce the weapons with which to fight the war? During the night one of the disruptions was the ominous sound of the station superintendent calling for men to volunteer to rescue people from bombed houses.

It was during a heavy raid that Alf Morris witnessed an incident that led the local authorities to develop the space to make it more amenable to its inhabitants:

When they emerged the following morning they could see the vast crater where the bomb had landed and smashed through the road, destroying the sewer. The pub had been reduced to a pile of rubble. One thing was certain, they had been very lucky. The tunnel had survived the impact, but whether it could survive another one was anybody's guess. There had already been enough loss of life inside tube shelters. On 15 October 1940 a German bomb had landed directly in the road above Balham Underground station. The bomb opened a crater that soon collapsed, the earth falling through into the station where hundreds of people were sheltering. People scrambled for the exits as torrents of water entered the tunnel courtesy of a burst water main. Yet the falling earth had blocked an exit, trapping people within. Sixty-four people were killed, many of them drowned in the rising waters.

One person who narrowly missed the disaster was Royal Marine Bugle Boy Len Chester. On his way home on leave to his parents' home, his train was stopped due to the bombing:

The fifteen year old realized that London was more dangerous than being onboard a ship:

Just over two months later another Underground station was hit, with 111 people dying when Bank station was bombed. To insure against a similar tragedy, but much to the consternation of those who took shelter there, Bethnal Green station was closed. However, they soon discovered the shelter was to be refurbished, turning it from an empty space into a modern shelter. When it reopened, the shelter had been fitted with concrete plinths to support the roof. A thick door had been installed to protect the platform from blast that might rush down the stairs. The gully for the tracks had been covered over, creating a flat concrete floor. The area had been divided by walls into three sections. In each section, three-tier bunks had been installed, as had toilets which, although they stank of chemicals, were preferable to open buckets hidden behind a curtain. Furthermore, every bunk had been numbered, allowing the would-be troglodytes of Bethnal Green to be allocated their own spaces. For Alf Morris this was ‘a
home-from-home.
No more lining up, no more fetching your bundles.' The old chaos had gone and been replaced by a new subterranean order.

Although the people of Bethnal Green felt safe in their subterranean shelter, their homes continued to be bombed, burned and blasted. For Alf Morris who had already been bombed out of two houses, it was only a matter of time until it happened again:

For their family, the situation was aggravated by Alf's father's refusal to shelter with them:

Luckily he was safe: he had escaped the area as the fires took hold. For the fourth time, he had to find the family another home.

Once in the new home, the routine continued with Mr Morris taking the family to the safety of the station before returning home to bed. As Alf explained, the whole family was frightened for him, but he had made his choice and intended to stick with it: ‘One night there was a raid at about eleven o'clock. A stick of three bombs landed near my house where Dad was asleep.' The following morning Alf, his mother and his aunt came home fearing the worst. There was wreckage everywhere and the local area had been flattened. Approaching the house they realized it was not badly damaged, but all the windows had been blown out.

Making their way inside, Alf's mother began the search:

It was only when he looked outside and saw the destruction that he realized how lucky he had been. As with every near miss and lucky escape, it made Alf Morris consider his situation: ‘I realized we were lucky to still be alive.'

His father's reluctance to use tube shelters was understandable. For Peter Richards his local tube station became less attractive after he watched an old man empty a chamber pot on to the lines. He chose never again to sleep there. The overwhelming smell of body odour and stale urine was enough to convince him that Underground shelters were not the place to spend the night. He remembered the mass crowds and thought it was a good place to spread disease. The
pandemonium as people fought for space was not conducive to a good night's sleep. Similarly, he was unimpressed to see his uncle heading to the tube station to shelter each night. His uncle had long told of his adventures in the trenches during the Great War. To the youngster it seemed wrong that a man who had seemed so heroic was reduced to sheltering in the stench of an overcrowded tube station. However, Peter later admitted he had been wrong to consider Uncle Bill a ‘fallen idol': ‘What a fool I was, and it was not long before I learnt that one only has a limited amount of courage and can only stand so much … I had not yet experienced the gut-wrenching fears that were to come as situations became ever more frightening.'

Rather than use the tube station or public shelters, Peter Richards and his father chose to take cover in the cellar of their home. For Peter the question was whether it was safer to sleep in the cellar and risk the house collapsing on him or sleep upstairs and risk falling with the house. In the end, he used both methods and counted himself lucky that his home was never bombed. One night, after returning from the youth club, Peter and his father took shelter for the night. Soon, the whole house was shaken by a nearby bomb that seemed to threaten to bring their house crashing down on them. Minutes later a neighbour entered, leading another man who was obviously dazed. It soon transpired his home had taken the brunt of the offending bomb: ‘I remember him sitting in a chair and waiting for news. Of course, all the news was bad.' The man sat shocked and motionless, a glazed expression on his face, until the bombing lifted and he was able to make his way home to where the corpses of his wife and daughter were buried under the rubble.