Blitz Kids (16 page)

As the warship came alongside, the children looked up to see sailors smiling down at them. Within minutes they were hauled to the decks and were soon ensconced in the mess drinking tea and orange juice,
and eating porridge. Next came warm baths and a change of clothing, wrapping themselves in baggy uniforms offered by the crew. In a short time it seemed the boys, except Paul Shearing who was being treated by the ship’s doctor, had recovered their spirits. To onlookers it appeared they had forgotten their experience. Like so many children growing up in wartime Britain, they seemed to be able to forget how much they had suffered. In their minds all that mattered was that the ship had come, and they had now moved on to the next stage of their adventure. They were saved. More than that, they had come back from the dead. Nine-year-old Billy Short was reunited with his parents and discovered a memorial service had already been held for him, but the true tragedy was that the service was also for his brother, Peter, who had been lost when the
Benares
had sunk.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the true price of war was evident. With the survivors safely returned to the UK, the staff at CORB began the ominous task of informing the families of the child victims of their fate. In Sunderland, eleven children had been sent overseas on the
Benares
, yet just one returned. Just two of the twelve Liverpudlian children had been saved. Twelve children from Wales had sailed, none had survived. Fifty-nine homes soon received the terrible news that the children they had believed were being sent to safety had been lost at sea. Seventy-seven children had lost their lives, with a number of parents receiving the grim news that more than one of their children had been lost.

For one family, it was particularly tragic. The Grimmond family from Brixton in south London received the terrible news that five of their children – Violet, Connie, Lennie, Eddie and Gussie – had perished on the
Benares
. Their parents, Eddie and Hannah Grimmond, had only sent them away after their home had been destroyed by bombs a week before the
Benares
had sank. Initially Hannah had been reluctant to let the children go but her husband, who had fought in the trenches of Flanders and knew the true horrors of war, had been adamant. He won the argument but lost five children. Following the disaster he immediately volunteered to rejoin his old regiment, hoping to avenge his loss. He was refused frontline service and instead joined the RAF, serving throughout the war. However, in 1943 the
Grimmonds
received further bad news: another of their children had been
killed on active service. Of a total of eleven children, six had been lost to war.

The sinking of the
Benares
had one significant impact: on the 2 October 1940 the CORB evacuation scheme was cancelled. In the aftermath a few details emerged. The convoy’s Royal Navy escort ships had left the merchant ships in mid-Atlantic, leaving them unprotected. More importantly, in the aftermath of the sinking, acting under standing orders, no ships had deviated from their course within the convoy and left the Royal Navy to pick up survivors as and when it could. To some it seemed this was unfair: hundreds of people, including many young children, were left adrift in the sea. The time it took for the Royal Navy to reach the survivors cost the lives of many of those aboard the lifeboats. It was a cold and seemingly heartless strategy but rules were rules. As the Admiralty explained in reaction to the criticism, ‘We do not think it would have been proper to depart from orders on account of the children as this would possibly have endangered other ships.’
1
The words made one thing clear: this was total war and children were in the firing line. If they had to die in pursuit of victory, so be it.

As London reeled from the shock of bombing, the Luftwaffe spread its targets to cities, towns and even villages throughout the country. Within a week of the first heavy raids on London, both Liverpool and south Wales were hit. The march of violence was unstoppable: Southampton, Portsmouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Belfast, Hull, Coventry, Swansea, Manchester, Sheffield, Plymouth – all were changed forever by the hail of high explosives and incendiaries. The later ‘Baedeker Raids’ – named after the famous German guidebooks – saw the historic centres of towns and cities such as York, Bath, Norwich and Canterbury devastated by bombs. If anything, whilst London faced the heaviest bombing, its size meant the destruction was spread over a wide area. In small cities, the destruction was concentrated, in many cases almost completely obliterating the central areas.

There was one city whose fate came to symbolize the horrors of aerial bombing ; the East Midlands town of Coventry. The destruction of the city even gave birth to a new word, ‘Coventried’, which was later used by the airmen of Bomber Command to describe German cities they flattened. With London still facing nightly attacks, Coventry was chosen as a target because of the preponderance of armaments factories that had been established in the engineering works around the
city. It was to be the biggest attack of the war so far, bigger even than those raids that had flattened swathes of London.

It was already a cold and crisp winter’s evening on 14 November 1940 when the bombers made their first appearance in the moonlit skies over Coventry. Some of the children in the city beneath them were evacuees from London, children who were supposed to be in a place of safety. At 7 p.m. the first aircraft were overhead and, accompanied by the crash of anti-aircraft fire, explosions were heard across the city. At the start of the raid no one had any idea of what awaited them. Many youngsters were still outdoors when the sirens sounded, with some remaining there in hope of adding to their collections of shrapnel. One thirteen-year-old boy was outside in the hope of finding the brass timing device from an anti-aircraft shell – one of the most sought-after pieces for shrapnel collectors. Instead, he found himself in the middle of the raid as incendiaries rained down around him. Seeing the vivid glare of an incendiary bomb fall into the gutter, he ran out and dropped a sandbag on top to smother the blaze. As he did so it exploded. He was blinded by the explosion and within minutes was on his way to hospital in a neighbour’s car. After a series of diversions he arrived at the hospital and was taken to a ward. Still unable to see, he heard a voice shouting that the ward was on fire.

All over the city buildings were burning and some children doing their utmost to keep their city alive. Teenagers helped the wardens by smothering the incendiary bombs, whether they landed in the streets, gardens or homes. Some boys were even brave enough to dismantle incendiary bombs that failed to explode, ensuring there was less work for the bomb disposal squads. Yet, for all their efforts, there were more victims than heroes that night. For all the desperate desire to assist others in their time of need, the most important thing was for people to look after their own families. One nine-year-old boy recalled being pulled from the rubble of his home by a man he did not know. The man picked him up and offered to take him to his own home to give him shelter. As they approached the man’s home, that too was hit, disappearing into a cloud of flame and dust. The child was left in the middle of the street, abandoned by his saviour who suddenly had more pressing concerns – the safety of his own family. The boy soon found his own parents and they took the decision shared by so many that
night. There was no point remaining in Coventry, so they walked into the countryside to seek shelter. However, sanctuary was still not found. They were dive-bombed as they walked through the streets, took shelter in a rat-filled bakery and then moved on to spend the rest of the raid in a pub cellar.

In the aftermath of the raid, Coventry was a changed place. Not only were so many buildings now little more than charred shells, and the roads blocked with rubble, and the air filled with the stench of smoke and death, but the people had changed. Many, quite simply, packed up their remaining possessions and trudged through the ruins, abandoning the town in search of safety. There were many heroes, whether those who rescued children from the rubble, fought the fires or simply helped collect the dead. Following such horror, simply keeping a shop open was an act of sheer defiance. But there was more. As one thirteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a policeman, later recalled, her father came home three days after the raid. He had not rest, slept or eaten for seventy-two hours. In an era when emotion was not readily shown, he did the unthinkable and burst into tears. It was the first time she had seen a man cry. Whilst grown men were reduced to tears, children came to help. The Girl Guides from local towns came to the assistance of the stricken population of Coventry. The Guides in nearby Leamington Spa collected clothes for people who had been bombed out. They also distributed socks, hats and gloves that they had knitted. Nationwide, the Guides used their magazine to promote the collection of relief supplies for bombed-out families. In many bombed towns Guides were active in civil defence work. In Cardiff – where nearly 300 people died in air raids – two girls, aged twelve and fourteen, spent a whole night fighting fires with a stirrup-pump. In some towns Guides showed people whose homes had been damaged how they could make brick ovens, using materials salvaged from bombsites. Other Guides cooked for people who had been forced from their homes into rescue centres. One troop converted a horsebox into a mobile canteen that travelled between bombed cities to offer relief to rescue workers and bombed-out civilians. The girls were also employed to collect the sphagnum moss used to make natural wound dressings. Others collected sheep’s wool from barbed-wire fences, sending it to be used for stuffing cushions for the Army, or collected
acorns used as pig feed. However, probably the greatest contribution made by the Guides was the fundraising they carried out to purchase ambulances, including twenty presented to the Royal Navy and two air ambulances.

In some areas people tried to make the best of the horrific destruction of their towns. Whole slum districts were wiped out in air raids. Rather than dwell on this destruction, some local politicians looked to the future. As the mayor of one south-coast city said:

Then it was Liverpool’s turn. Living in a port city that faced westwards into the Atlantic and was vital to the convoy system that was keeping Britain alive, the people of the city could not have expected anything other than to face the full fury of the Luftwaffe. For seven nights the bombing continued without reprieve, setting alight areas that burned for days. The bombing of a school shelter killed 160 people, whilst there were 60 casualties when a hospital was bombed. A whole swathe of the city centre was simply obliterated and more than 1,400 people lost their lives. By the end of 1941, more than 4,000 people had been killed on Merseyside. As in London, the bombing caused a mass exodus as families streamed out of the city each night.

For thirteen-year-old Tony Sprigings, the war finally began to have an impact upon his life. At first he had been excited by war, and then unimpressed since nothing had happened in his area. Even after Dunkirk, with the threat of invasion looming, he never felt threatened. As he told himself, even if the Germans invaded, surely they would be stopped before they reached the north of England? In later years he found it difficult to explain to people that for much of the time war had been a non-event, hardly affecting his day-to-day life. Yet in 1941, things began to change. He kept away from the city, believing the bombing too dangerous to risk taking the Mersey ferry. From his
hilltop bedroom he could watch the city burning and soon realized the horrors of what was happening just a few miles away across the water: ‘Looking across I could see miles of fire. It was amazing. I thought nothing could survive. One ship in the port blew up when it was carrying ammunition. It was the most enormous explosion you’ve ever heard.’ The exploding ship caused six other vessels to sink and parts of the ship were found up to two miles away. Despite the suffering inflicted on Liverpool, Tony recalled that he remained excited by what was happening: ‘It was a terrible period. But as little boys it was very exciting, even though a lot of my friends lost their parents and relatives.’ In the city, some 70,000 people were made homeless by the bombing.

Then the dangers came closer to home as the Nazi bombers inflicted their share of suffering on the people of the Wirral. It was Tony’s turn to face the enemy bombers:

Despite the bombing, life continued and Tony Sprigings made his way to school as usual, cycling quickly through the streets of Birkenhead, ready to share his experiences with his mates: ‘I was all excited about this stick of bombs that had landed. The next morning I went to school to tell them all about this, only to find that all the roads on the way to school had been blasted. So I had nothing to say.’ A few nights later, his father returned home during an air raid and shared a macabre story. He had been on duty at an air raid wardens’ post as the bombs fell on the area. Concerned about his family, he rushed through the streets to check they were safe. Just as he reached the front gate a bomb fell nearby. As he reached out to push open the front gate, something flew past him. He looked down and found a severed hand resting on the front gate. He went indoors and told the family. It was a story that remained in his son’s mind for many years.

The country’s ports remained the focus of the raids. In Hull, air raids killed more than 1,000 civilians and left some 40,000 people homeless. In March 1941 Ray Peat and his brother Jim, who had joined the ARP as messengers after local Boy Scouts were asked to volunteer, were called out in heavy bombing. Ray Peat later admitted he was terrified as he cycled through the bombs to reach his destination: ‘I set off in thick fog; the guns and machine-guns were firing and you could hear the shells going over you and bombs and shrapnel were dropping’. Arriving at the site of the bombing, he soon realized it was nothing like training, which he had found to be fun: ‘My brother handed me a bundle – it was a dead baby – and asked me to look after it. I was now horrified as well as terrified.’ He had to put the baby into the back of an ARP car then move to the next incident.

It was a terrible night for the teenager. He saw a frightened youth trying to rescue a woman trapped in rubble. The youth ran off as Ray approached. He then set to work to pull both her and her baby free from the ruins of their home. The terror continued: he went to bombed houses and found dead people. At a bombed shelter he helped the injured to leave. As he did so, one lady was so badly injured that her daughter saw her and had to be taken to hospital in shock. Whilst they were working, a wall collapsed, injuring two of the ARP workers. It only got worse. Hearing screams, he went into a house:

Such experiences were difficult for all who lived through them, regardless of age. It was made worse when the casualties were fellow rescue workers. In May 1941 Ray Peat found the corpses of men who had been killed whilst fire-watching. He also saw the corpse of an ARP man lying dead in the road. When Ray arrived back at the ARP base he watched as his fellow workers sat around crying. After an awful night, the youngster went home and then had to go to work.

Things only got worse. Early in the morning of 11 June 1941, the sirens sounded so Ray and his brother Jim made their way to the first-aid post to await instructions. They were there when a bomb hit:

As he lay trapped in the rubble, he wished for a bomb to drop to blow away the debris. He could hear screaming from another room but there was no sound nearby. Eventually rescue workers dug through to where he was. Water was poured over his face to clear the dust and dirt that had been making it difficult for him to breathe. A doctor then gave him a shot of morphine. As Ray’s leg was dug free from the rubble it started to bleed again. With the wound now dressed, the rescue worker had to sit on him to work free his other leg. He was lucky: his brother, and six others, had died in the bombing.