Blitz Kids (24 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
Disillusioned with the Home Guard, in February 1941, aged sixteen, he returned to the recruiting office: ‘I didn’t tell my mum. I got there, and it was the same bloody sergeant! “Hello, son, wanna join the Army?” By that afternoon I was up at Ipswich with the Royal Suffolk Regiment.’ Once there, he restarted the training that had been curtailed the previous year. He saw the medical officer for a series of injections – not telling him he had been inoculated just months earlier – received a new rifle, uniform and kit, and headed to the barracks:
I sorted my kit out quickly. I put the webbing together, banged in two nails and hung it tidily on the wall – that was the correct method. So I was sitting there doing nothing. All the other blokes are cursing, ‘Where does this go? What do I do with this?’ In walks the sergeant, ‘Come on, Scott, get your gear sorted out!’ ‘I’ve done it.’ ‘Who taught you to do that?’ I said, ‘Dad was in the Army, he taught me.’ ‘Well, don’t just sit there, go and help the others!’ I helped them sort their kit, sewed on my badges and then charged the others to do their sewing.
It wasn’t long before the sergeant realized that Stan had previous training and soon began to give him extra responsibilities. The first job was to march the platoon up to the mess hall for their dinner. He soon found himself as a ‘local unpaid lance corporal’. This was exactly what the Army had hoped for: the enthusiasts shone through and were
promoted in order to form a future cadre of non-commissioned officers.
Having been thrown out of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, Ted Roberts tried hard to adapt to life in Civvy Street. But with the Blitz underway, life in London was none too comfortable:
I didn’t like air raid shelters. I just stayed upstairs and went to bed. If you got a direct hit on the shelter you were done for. If you got a direct hit on the house, it was the same. So what was the difference? If you are doing to die, you are going to die. You can’t do nothing about it.
Bored with civilian life, he decided to rejoin the Army. He returned to the recruiting office, signed up as a ‘Young Solider’ and was called up into the London Irish Rifles.
For a second time, Ted went through the paces: relearning the drill, reacquainting himself with infantry weapons and learning to ‘hold his own’ in the barracks when confronted by older boys. Restarting his training, he went through all the same routines as before. He never told anyone he already had six months’ training. There were two good reasons for his silence. Firstly, he did not want to alert anyone to his true age. Secondly, he didn’t want to set himself apart from the other volunteers: ‘I didn’t want people to think I was showing off. I didn’t want to seem big headed. I thought if I showed what I could do, the others wouldn’t like me.’ However, once again, his dreams of being a soldier were thwarted: ‘There was a rumour that we were going overseas. So I told my brother and he told my mother. She said, “You’re not going overseas at your age.” So, she wrote to the regiment and that’s how I got kicked out for the second time.’
In the aftermath of the Blitz there was plenty of work for youngsters in the cities. With the initial fury of the bombing having subsided, labourers set to work clearing the bombsites. Demolition gangs pulled down the blasted and blackened walls of ruined buildings. Whatever could be salvaged was salvaged. Reusable bricks were pulled from the rubble and stacked up, the few surviving sheets of glass were carried away. Buildings that might be saved were shored up to await the attention of builders. The overall impression was that the blitzed cities were undergoing a transformation.
For sixteen-year-old Fred Walker this was a perfect opportunity to make some money. From a poor family in London’s King’s Cross, Fred had left school with few job prospects. He found work at Smithfield market and gave most of his wages to his mother. In 1941, armed with pick, shovel and sledgehammer, he started working for a local company, pulling down bombed buildings around the City of London, clearing the sites ready for future development. The work was hard and heavy but it was summer, the weather was good and he was working outdoors. There were dangers – collapsing buildings and the possibility of unexploded bombs – and there was the chance of unexpected encounters – packs of rats or unmoved corpses – but the money was good for a youngster.
It was whilst clearing a bombsite near the Old Bailey that something occurred to change the course of his life:
It was a very hot summer and me and my mate were sunbathing, trying to get our little bodies brown. The foreman came along and he said ‘Oi, you two! Go and get your cards!’ We were sacked for sunbathing. We wanted to have a go at him, but he would have murdered us. So off we went and had a cup of tea at Lyons Corner House near the Angel. I said to my mate. ‘Come on, we’ll go and join the Navy.’
It wasn’t just being sacked from the demolition gang that had spurred Fred on. He was an only child, whose stepfather was a violent man who had often beaten the youngster as he was growing up. At the age of fifteen, Fred had struck back at him but this had only served to strain the relationship. It seemed an obvious opportunity for a change of scenery:
So we went to Euston Road where the recruitment office was. We went in and saw this sergeant sitting there. He said, ‘Hello, boys.’ We told him we wanted to join the Navy. But he said, ‘Don’t join the Navy, lads, get into the infantry.’ We didn’t know what he was talking about.
They were not asked to provide proof of their age, only needing proof that they were not in reserved occupations. Having received their ‘cards’ at the building site, they were ready to join.
However, first came a medical examination. This proved a stumbling block for Fred. The examination revealed numerous scars on his body, the result of childhood operations that seemed to rule him out from military service: ‘I wasn’t passed because I only had one kidney. I was devastated.’ However, the doctors were sympathetic and allowed him the chance to prove his one kidney was working. He was sent to a doctor’s surgery in Harley Street. Over the course of the next few days he was made to drink water and then have his urine tested. He was passed fit for service: ‘So I was in. It was a funny time. In those days they wanted anybody.’
Officially, Fred Walker should never have been employed in clearing bombsites in any case. According to the Ministry of Labour, such employment was not considered suitable for under-eighteens. In 1941 contractors working for London County Council were informed that youth labourers were not to be kept on. Another youngster working on bombsites was sixteen-year-old Walthamstow boy, Ron Leagas. His job was working as a plumber’s mate, however with the plumber called up into the Army, Ron was given other tasks such as clearing damaged roofs. It was after a day’s roofing that he made the decision to join the Army:
It was a shop with painted slates on the roof – they spelled out the name of the shop. I had to replace the tiles after a bombing. I got fed up, it was like jigsaw. It would be bad enough if you knew what you were doing – but I knew nothing, I wasn’t a roofer. It was a hot summer’s day. I thought, I’ve got to do better than this.
Thoroughly disillusioned with his work, he soon had another experience that convinced him he needed a change. Arriving home from work, he asked his mother what was for dinner: ‘It’s stew,’ she told him. ‘Mum, I don’t want stew, I want egg and chips!’ His mother protested, telling him that eggs were rationed and such a meal was impossible: ‘We only get one egg a week!’ He then offered her his wages to buy him eggs. She refused, asking again: ‘So you don’t want the stew?’ he shook his head. Disgusted, she shouted: ‘If you don’t want to eat it, you can wear it!’ Recounting the incident, Ron laughed: ‘So she picked it up and threw it over me. I was covered head to foot in stew! It was
made from tinned soup and pearl barley. I told her, “That’s it, Mum, you’ve done it. I’m going to join the Army!” And I did.’
With his mind made up, his next problem was actually joining the Army without revealing his true age. But he had a good plan:
He asked, ‘How old are you, son?’ I told him I was eighteen. ‘You don’t look it. Have you got any proof?’ I didn’t have anything so I had to start telling lies: ‘When we were bombed out we lost all the papers.’ So he told me to go home to get my father to send a letter confirming his name and date of birth.
Having fought in the trenches and become a prisoner-of-war in the Great War, his father was very anti-war and Ron realized he would not sign the papers. He was also certain his mother wouldn’t sign, so he decided to forge the letter. Sitting in the cubicle of a public toilet, he took a page from his work notebook and wrote: ‘To whom it may concern, This is to certify that my son, Albert Ronald Leagas of 5 Exmouth Road, Walthamstow was born on the 1st June 1923.’ He then went to the Post Office, purchased an envelope and delivered the letter to the recruiting office.
He was again confronted by the doubting sergeant:
He said, ‘Where do you live, son?’ I told him and he said, ‘How did you get there? Did you have a bleeding Spitfire?’ I think he knew what was going on. I pointed across the road and told him that Dad was across the road having his break from work. That’s why it wasn’t on proper paper. I had to make lots of excuses. The sergeant said, ‘All right, in you go.’ I had my medical and was told I’d be called up in six weeks.
The next step was to break the news to his father.
I sat in the front window of the house, I was shaking – I was dreading him coming home. He had a temper, more than once he’d chased me up the road with his belt. I was dreading it when the door opened. Mum said, ‘What do you think Ron’s done? He’s joined the Army?’ Dad said, ‘Get off – he ain’t old enough!’ So she showed him the paperwork. He read it and said: ‘He’s made his bleedin’ bed, let him lie in it!’ That was it. Nothing else was said.
Another boy whose father had held anti-war sentiments was Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes. Born in December 1925, he was the son of a Great War veteran whose death had been hastened by war wounds and whose mother had died soon after. A bright child, he could have gone to college to continue his education except that his small bursary was insufficient to meet the costs. He found employment in a factory making Army uniforms, but this was not enough to satisfy him. As an active and headstrong youth, with no parents to deter him, there was one outlet for a youngster with limited educational or employment prospects.
In summer 1942, at the age of sixteen, Bill travelled from his Huddersfield home to nearby Leeds. His first port of call was the office of the Royal Marines, where a towering sergeant told him: ‘You’ve changed your birth certificate, lad. Come back and re-apply when you’re eighteen.’ The forgery had been an obvious ploy, one used by many eager youngsters, but the unmasking of his efforts had not dampened his spirits:
Being a somewhat street smart kid, I wasn’t going to be deterred by what I considered to be so insignificant a thing as a birth certificate. So, I walked along a passageway into the Army recruiting office. There sitting behind a desk was a very relaxed and amiable recruiting sergeant. The warm glow emanating from this very red-faced individual attested to the fact that he was obviously feeling no pain from his encounter during the lunch period with several pints of the local brew.
The sergeant looked up at him and asked: ‘Come in, son. Do you want to join up?’ Bill asked if he needed to show his birth certificate but was relieved to hear the reply: ‘No, son, you look old enough to me. Just sign on the dotted line, here, here and here, – here’s your five shillings, you are now a member of His Majesty’s Forces.’
In some cases, recruiting sergeants seemed unconcerned about the truth of a boy’s age even when presented with reliable evidence that a boy had deceived them. In 1943, having been an Army Cadet, an ARP messenger and a Home Guard, seventeen-year-old Roy Finch took the next step: he added a year to his age and joined the Army. His thinking was simple: his elder brother had fought at Calais in 1940, had lost three fingers and four toes, and then been a prisoner-of-war for three
years. In late 1943 he had been repatriated to the UK with other disabled soldiers. With his brother home, Roy was set on doing his bit, and getting some measure of revenge for what his brother had gone through:
I’d gone stupid, so I went to the recruiting office and joined the regular Army – seven years with ‘the colours’ and five on reserve. When my brother heard about it, he took me back to the recruiting office and told them I was too young. But they said, ‘Sorry, he’s signed the papers and taken the King’s shilling, he’s now a soldier.’ He gave me hell. But I told him, he’d served in the Queen Victoria Rifles, I was going to serve in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. We did it because we were patriotic. I never regretted it.
With his brother having failed to convince the recruiting sergeant to release Roy, the next step was to tell their parents. The reaction was surprisingly positive: his mother accepted that since her elder son had returned safely, it was only fair that Roy, despite his age, should replace him in the Army. His father chose his words carefully, telling him: ‘If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Keep your head down and your braces up! Behave yourself.’
When Roy Finch arrived in York to commence basic training, he assembled at the station with a group of other volunteers. He noticed that four of them had, like himself, reported for training wearing their Home Guard uniforms. They were immediately singled out, called to the front and told they would lead the rest of the lads on the march to the barracks: ‘So we marched smartly at the head of the column with all the others shuffling along behind in their civilian clothes.’
With his papers in hand, sixteen-year-old Fred Walker took the forty-five-minute train journey from St Pancras station to Bedford, where he was to join the 70th Battalion of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. Arriving in the town, he walked to the somewhat daunting, Victorian, red-brick, Kempston Barracks. Safe in the knowledge that he already had a mate who was two weeks into his training, Fred approached the entrance where he was met by a guard who called out to the fresh-faced boy: ‘What are you doing here?’ Putting down his case and pulling out his papers, Fred – bold as brass
– answered: ‘I’ve come to join the Army.’ As he later recalled: ‘I was a little bit cocky – well, you are when you’re a kid.’