Blitz Kids (18 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
The bombing seemed to continue all night, as Jeanie cradled the corpse. The following morning it became clear why there had been so much dust in the tenement: ‘The top of the tenement, where our flat was, had collapsed.’ She was lucky: had the building not been constructed of solid stone, the bomb might have penetrated to the floors below, killing them all. All she was able to salvage was her own birth certificate – everything else was lost: ‘We knew our house had been destroyed and it was too dangerous to go back. I had absolutely nothing with me, just the clothes I was standing in. I felt nothing about losing my possessions – people weren’t so interested in personal possessions then.’
That morning, as the people of Clydebank stepped out into the street, they were stunned by what they saw. Stone tenements had been gutted by fire, their roofs gone and just their walls still standing. A cloud of dust and smoke hung over the town, making the air thick and difficult to breathe. In the aftermath of the raid, workers rushed around the town trying to shore up buildings that had been damaged and were in danger of collapsing. Their task should have been made easier by the presence of a large timber yard in the town. The only problem was that it too was on fire.
The world had seemed to turn upside down. This small town, far from urban centres, had its heart ripped out by the bombing. Nothing
was normal. Children were carried over the rubble in blankets, looking at the charred remains of their hometown. Policemen helped people break up hoardings to provide wood for boarding up windows. One rescue worker even came across the curious sight of two goats sitting in armchairs within a bombed house.
As daybreak came, Ella Flynn and her family left their shelter:
We went back home – there were no windows and the doors were off their hinges. The new carpet we had just got was standing in the middle of the floor like a wigwam. My mother kept saying, ‘O ma hoose, ma hoose,’ which my dad reprimanded her for – as we still had our lives which was more important. My mum put Sheila and me into bed after shaking off the glass and other debris – but then the siren went again and we had to get up – though this time the ‘all clear’ went shortly afterwards.
In all, around 500 people had perished in the bombing. It was a staggering number for a small industrial town. More than seventy of the casualties had been children, including one teenage boy who died whilst on duty fire-watching. Every school in the town was damaged, with six being completely gutted by fire.
Yet amidst the chaos there was a strange sense of calm and organization. Having finally put down the dead child, Jeanie stepped out to discover that the whole of the town centre was being evacuated:
I was fascinated by the organization the next morning. There were coaches ready for us. They turned up and all the women and children went into them. Again there was no panic. We knew we were being taken away. I thought we were going to the country and that it was going to be beautiful and there would be lots of greenery. I found it exciting – I was an inexperienced youngster. If I’d been an adult it would have been different.
Not everybody left the town that morning. As the buses headed off into the countryside, Ella Flynn and her family tried to settle back to normality. Her father cleared out the brick air raid shelters that had remained unused during the bombing. Certain that the bombers would return, he even found wood to make benches within the shelter. Ella
watched as the firemen continued to fight the flames. Her mother even apologized to the men for not being able to make them any tea: there was no water and no power. The only water the family had was what they collected from the river, ready if the bombers returned.
Whilst Ella remained at home, her sixteen-year old sister decided she had to do something positive:
My big sister made her way down to the Town Hall, where she worked all day witnessing terrible scenes of displaced people and lost children, frightened and bewildered. She told my parents she just had to offer to help in any way she could – and her assistance was gratefully received.
That was one of the greatest horrors of the bombing: children searching for parents and parents desperately searching for missing children. Whenever there was a positive outcome it lifted the spirits of the relief workers; the rest of the time they were numbed by the overwhelming sense of tragedy.
On the night of 14 March the bombers returned. Ella and her family spent another sleepless night huddled in the shelter her father had spent the day clearing. In their exhausted state, it seemed the bombing went on forever, and each blast seemed to emphasize the hopelessness of their situation. The following morning the decision was taken to flee the ruined town:
My parents decided to get out if at all possible. My dad was a motor mechanic and had managed to get a car from somewhere. He bundled us, and everything we could carry, into it. But it was impossible to drive with tram lines in mangled heaps and rubble strewn everywhere. It was a scene of devastation and progress was painfully slow as the path had to be cleared bit by bit.
Eventually they escaped into open country, and drove towards Glasgow where it seemed they had entered another world: ‘What seemed amazing and cruel was that people were out and about their business. Our world had been turned upside down and they were shopping like nothing had happened.’ Although the family home had only been damaged, not destroyed, they never returned to Clydebank.
Her father’s and sister’s workplaces had both been destroyed so it seemed there was nothing to go back to. They settled in Glasgow and attempted to build a new life.
Despite the intensity of the experience, Jeanie felt a sense of relief and excitement. She had lost everything but considered it an adventure to move to the town of Renton. She had spent the night holding a corpse but could only feel pleased her home had only been bombed, not engulfed in flames:
I was in the middle of an adventure – it’s terrible to say that when people had died but that was how you felt as a youngster. It was only after you heard about all the deaths you realized how bad it had been. I didn’t know what had happened to my school friends.
Within days Jeanie returned to work: ‘I still had the same clothes on as when we had been bombed. I was blond and when I got to the office one of the girls said that I suited my hair dark.’ But she hadn’t dyed her hair: ‘I realized I hadn’t washed my hair since the raid and it was clogged with soot, dust and dirt! Things like that are normally important to teenage girls but after the bombing it hadn’t seemed important any more.’ Within a year Jeanie joined the Army, serving on anti-aircraft guns, allowing her to help prevent any more horrifying air raids such as the one that had destroyed Clydebank.
In the days that followed, little news was released about the bombing. It seemed the scale of destruction, on such a small town, needed to be hidden from a population that was already struggling to cope with war. Many parents also attempted to conceal the truth of the severity of the bombing from their children. In the cities that faced the worst of the Blitz, children found themselves being moved from shelter to shelter. They were often confused as to why they should leave a place of safety. Only later did their parents reveal that they had left because the building above the shelter had been bombed or was burning. Yet there were sights the children could not be protected from. As they left the often stinking and overcrowded shelters, they entered a new, and horribly unfamiliar, world.
No amount of parental protection could conceal the glow of burning buildings that filled the skies above Coventry, Liverpool or Portsmouth.
These were visions of hell. There was no hiding the reasons they had to step over endless fire hoses laid out in the streets, or step around bomb craters, or cross the road to avoid flaring gas mains. No child could miss the taste of dust in the air or the stench of shattered sewers. Nor could they avoid the sight of tarpaulin-covered bodies piled at the roadside. There was a realization that their town or city, as they had known it, was gone forever. Most tellingly, there was no escape from the reality of rescue workers – policemen, firemen and ARP wardens, their faces blackened with smoke, who had worked till they dropped – who were now crying over the horrors they had witnessed. For many children, this was the end of their innocence.
In the aftermath of raids, the heroes were many. In Manchester, one eleven-year-old boy awoke some hours after he had been blasted into unconsciousness to find himself buried beneath his own bed. Thinking not of his own condition, the boy dug through the rubble to find his two brothers. First he found his six-year-old brother, and then together – battered, bruised and swathed in dust – they dug out their baby brother. Then the two boys began calling for help, their shouts joined by the cries of the baby. All three were pulled from the rubble, with their rescuers admitting they had thought them all dead. Then they received the news – their mother had been killed.
All through the towns and cities of the country, children had their own way of dealing with the emotional and psychological impact of bombing. Whilst younger children took comfort in their favourite teddy bears or dolls, clutching them to their chests as they listened to the wail of bombs and the crash of high explosives, older children found their comfort elsewhere. Teenage girls retreated to the shelters clutching their favourite dress, or prized pair of shoes, refusing to be parted from the things that brought glamour to their lives and distanced them from the vicious reality of war.
For some parents there was an added issue to dealing with children in air raids. The parents of some teenage girls had not only to deal with the very natural fear of death, but with the way the pressure of air raids added to the everyday issues of dealing with teenage hormones. For teenagers the disruption of everyday life – in particular the lack of sleep – and the way that parental concern over the bombing often curtailed their burgeoning sense of independence led to girls arguing with their
parents. Shelters were the scene of blazing rows between girls and their parents. Some stormed out, others were thrown out by parents. One girl recalled spending the night in the toilet outside the public shelter after the psychological pressure of the air raids caused an outburst of hysteria. It would be the last night her family stayed in the shelter, preferring to seek sanctuary in the cellar of their home.
As the country fell victim to incendiaries and high explosives, new organizations emerged to deal with the ongoing crisis. Civil defence became a national issue rather than a local one. The 1,451 local fire brigades were reorganized into 42 regional fire forces that covered the entire country while a Civil Defence Staff College was opened to train instructors to spread their knowledge. More than 1.25 million men, women and youths served on a part-time or full-time basis in the Civil Defence Services. The full-time men worked a seventy-two-hour week, although at the height of the Blitz time meant nothing and they simply worked until the job was done – or they passed out from exhaustion. By the middle of the war there were more than 2,500,000 places in rest centres. Some were in hutted camps near to locations expected to be bombed. London alone had 140,000 places ready as emergency accommodation. Every town of more than 50,000 people established feeding centres capable of serving at least 10 per cent of the local population, in case heavy bombing destroyed food stores or cut off gas supplies.
By mid-war, London had 2,500 large air raid shelters with canteen facilities, capable of accommodating nearly one million people. Eighty of the city’s underground railway stations had been equipped with canteens and around 25,000 homes in the areas surrounding the capital had been requisitioned to provide emergency accommodation for homeless Londoners.
The ever-spreading bombing meant education suffered across the country, just as it had suffered in London. One Bristol girl was shocked that after hours of doing little at school, a history teacher finally asked the four children who had made the effort to reach school to hand in their homework. The boys made an excuse, claiming that the bombing had stopped them from doing it. The teacher was not sympathetic, telling the boys that they had all weekend to do their homework but there had only been air raids on the Sunday. They were given
detention and made to complete the work. Elsewhere in Bristol, twelve-year-old Alfred Leonard, who had been bombed out from his home, remained philosophical about his situation: ‘As a young person it was quite exciting to be bombed.’ Despite the dangers, the streets remained a playground for him and his mates: ‘We collected shrapnel and we went out picking up unexploded incendiary bombs. We’d swap them with the other boys. It was exciting. It was also dangerous, but we didn’t realize that.’
It was not just the big towns and cities that suffered. Even small country towns like Newmarket suffered attacks. Just as elsewhere, the nation’s youth responded to the challenge. One ARP messenger later recalled hearing the air raid sirens whilst at school. As the rest of his class sheltered, he jumped on his bicycle and raced to his post. With serious damage to the local high street and the destruction of the town’s telephone exchange, the ARP remained on almost constant duty for the next three days. Rather than return to school, the teenage messenger remained at his post, carrying messages around the town. One of his duties was to take a message to the mortuary, where he was confronted with the sight of the air-raid victims laid out in rows.
The burden of the Blitz had been shared throughout the country. Though the population grew to accept its horrors, and found the views across the new inner-city wastelands a familiar sight, others were shocked by how much the country had endured. In Southampton the destruction had been heavy, leaving row upon row of bombed and burned-out homes and more than 500 people dead. Later in the war, American serviceman passed through the city by train. They were all laughing and joking until they looked out of the window and saw the scale of the destruction. The soldiers fell silent as they realized the price paid by the inhabitants of the city and finally understood exactly why they had been sent across the Atlantic to fight a war so far from home.