Blitz Kids (29 page)

The insular world of a military base was far different to the discipline of school. Even those who had been raised in poor neighbourhoods were not ready for the atmosphere in a barrack room. Len Chester recalled how difficult it was to adapt:

Such was the impact of this unfamiliar world, that Len felt homesick: ‘When we went to sleep, all you could hear was boys groaning, breaking wind, talking in their sleep and – if you listened carefully – you would have heard me softly crying. What had I let myself in for?’ When Robin Rowe arrived at Eastney Barracks – still aged thirteen – he did not have the same sense of uncertainty as other boys in a similar situation. He had been a pupil at a number of boarding schools and was used to being away from his family, living amongst other boys.

All new boys were taken for haircuts, given the ubiquitous short back and sides that was no more than an inch long on top. Next came the uniform. When Len first joined, he was just four feet eight inches tall. At that height, he had to wait until a uniform and a pair of boots could be specially made for him. With uniforms fitted, recruits were given a stamped identity disc and a ‘type’. This was a wooden strip with their name carved into it, used to mark their kit.

New buglers had much to learn, including the unfamiliar language of the sea. If they asked what ‘the heads’ were, they heard the terse reply ‘the shithouse’. Words had strange meanings: ‘shit in it’ meant ‘shut up’. Swear words and curious words for body parts had to be memorized. They had to get used to drinking from deep
round-bottomed
bowls that were used instead of cups. They had to learn how to make their beds up in the correct manner. The iron ‘truckle’ beds came in two sections, meaning it could be broken down and stored in daytime, with the straw palliasse and straw-filled pillow stored on top. Just filling the palliasse with straw was an art that had to be learned, filling it with just the right amount so that it could still be folded but was thick enough to be comfortable. As one young marine described it, sleeping on a mattress of fresh straw was like sleeping on a hedgehog.

Life in the barracks was fast paced. There was little time for introspection. Each morning they were roused from their beds at 6 a.m., with just minutes to break down their beds and store them correctly. New recruits were surprised when reveille sounded at 6.30. They were woken half an hour early each morning in order to clean their room to the highest standard. Next the floor had to be polished and the whole room cleaned, with each boy allotted a task. One would be cleaning out and polishing the fireplace, another cleaning the windows, whilst the rest of the boys got down on their hands and knees and polished the floor until they could see their faces in it. The wooden table and stools were scrubbed white. Cleaning was followed by a wash, then breakfast, then it was time to polish buttons, buckles and badges, shine their boots and be on parade by 8 a.m.

After all these duties, there were endless bugle calls and drumbeats to be memorized. Every part of the day’s routine was sounded on a bugle: when to get up, when to eat, when to parade, when to go to sleep. The buglers needed to recognize all these commands just to be
able to function in the barracks. And that was before they themselves began to learn all the calls they would give – both in the barracks and on ship.

Before they could think of boarding a ship, the boys needed to master the bugle. Len Chester recalled that becoming proficient as a bugler was done without learning to read a note of music. Everything was learned by rote:

Instruction was often given by older boys who had already earned the right to wear tassels on the end of their bugle cords. First the trainees learned how to position their lips, almost spitting into the bugle to get the required sound. To learn the individual calls they remembered a set phrase: if they could remember the phrase, they could remember the call. One favourite was the ‘Rum Call’: ‘Oh Lucy, don’t say no, For under the table you must go, Up with your petticoat, down with your drawers, My little winkle just fits yours.’
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Drum training added to their burden. They had to learn to keep time and also to march whilst playing a drum. That was made difficult by the swinging of the drumas they walked. Some developed a swing of the left leg to ensure the drum stayed in place. This gave thema gait recognizable to all in the Royal Marines. The method for learning drumbeats was sometimes harsh. One recruit recalled the instructor beating out the rhythm on to his shoulders, ensuring that he could not forget it. Similarly, when the boys did flute practice, the instructor kept a cane handy for whacking the hands of those whose fingering was incorrect.

There was always a certain amount of violence between the boys, although the sergeants quickly clamped down on trouble. Most boys were eager to pass on their knowledge to others, advising them on the best types of polish to use and how best to get a mirror-like shine on the toecaps of their boots. Len Chester soon noticed that life in barracks had changed him: ‘You gradually absorbed things and eventually you got to be like them. If you don’t change you won’t
survive.’ As he put it: ‘If you go into Fagin’s kitchen, you learn to pick pockets.’ Part of the rite of passage in joining up for service was to abandon childish ways and adopt a man’s lifestyle:

Whilst training, the only way the buglers could get cigarettes was to wait outside the ‘wet canteen’, where beer was served to the senior marines, and scrounge them as the men left.

The boys noticed there was little sympathy for the sick. If they could stand, they were expected on parade. The treatment given in the sick bay was also guaranteed to prevent any malingering. Len Chester recalled how his treatment consisted of a nurse administering an enema. Just like the medical he had been given when he signed on, he found the experience embarrassing: ‘That matron had the biggest fingers you’ve ever seen. I’m only glad she kept her fingernails short. I wonder how many children nowadays have even had an enema.’

The boys of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines were genuinely proud to walk out in their uniforms. Whilst Army uniforms were drab and shapeless, the Royal Navy continued to be dressed in its traditional outfit of flared trousers, blue smock, Trafalgar collar and white cap. Similarly, the bugle boys of the Royal Marines wore a formal blue tunic and cap when on leave. The smartness of their clothing was impressive for the others and a mark of pride for the boys. As Len Chester recalled of his first leave, aged fifteen: ‘I felt like a man when I went home. In barracks I’d felt like a boy. But after a few months onboard the ship, you grew up. You felt like one of them. You were there to do a job. You had lost your youth. You’d seen man’s things and become a man.’ Despite this sense of pride, his wages remained so low there was little he could do. His old school friends were mostly working and he spent most of his leave at home.

However, being in uniform meant that – despite his youth – his father could take him to the pub:

In December 1939, Len Chester travelled to Scapa Flow to join his first ship, HMS
Iron Duke
. The twenty-nine-hour journey north by train became a regular feature of his life in the period he was based at Scapa Flow:

The biggest shock upon arriving onboard ship was the smell of oil that seemed to pervade it. Each morning he had to tour the ship, sounding ‘Call the hands’ to raise the sailors from their hammocks. His arrival was usually greeted with a barrage of swear words, with which the youngster was becoming increasingly familiar. When he first arrived onboard the
Iron Duke
, Len found it difficult to remember all the necessary bugle calls. The first time the ship came under air attack, rather than sound ‘Air Raid Warning Red’, he called ‘Alarm to Arms – Repel Boarders’. It hardly mattered, within seconds a bomb had hit the ship and no one needed to be warned they were under attack.

The
Iron Duke
remained at Scapa Flow, meaning that Len Chester did not go to sea for almost two years. However, living onboard a
battleship, with few onshore facilities, meant he went for almost a year without setting foot on dry land. When this was discovered, the captain sent him ashore with a sergeant-major who took him on a ten-mile route march. There was one problem: as a growing teenage boy, Len’s feet had outgrown his boots, meaning he was soon in agony. By the time he returned to the ship his socks were red with blood and within days he’d lost a number of toenails.

During this period, Navy boys still faced corporal punishment. Len Chester faced the prospect after he was put on a charge of mutiny for refusing to clean the ship’s bell. He had already cleaned it once but the damp weather meant it tarnished almost immediately. When taken before the captain he was given the option of taking the captain’s punishment or being punished by warrant. He chose the captain’s punishment since ‘punishment by warrant’ meant being caned. Instead, he was punished with extra cleaning duties.

The Royal Marines’ policy of recruiting fourteen-year-old boys meant that the former buglers eventually became the youngest veterans of active service in the Second World War. Someone who was an eight-year-old schoolboy at the outbreak of war could be on active service by war’s end. One such boy was Stuart Henderson. Born in March 1931, he had been evacuated from Middlesex to Scotland, where he lived near the Royal Navy dockyards at Leith. Seeing the large ships, armed trawlers and minesweepers moving in and out of the Firth of Forth influenced his desire to join the Royal Navy: ‘In those days wherever you were uniforms abounded and like most young boys they fascinated me.’

In 1945, a chance encounter with a sixteen-year-old marine gave him an opportunity to get into uniform:

Just days before the war in the Far East came to a close, Stuart reported for preliminary training.

While it was relatively simple for boys to change their age to join the Army, the Royal Air Force was rather a different proposition. The glorious and glamorous antics of ‘The Few’ meant there was no shortage of eager recruits for pilot and aircrew training. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to share in that glory. For most, the issue was that pilots required a certain standard of education. While the Army seemed prepared to accept anyone with two eyes and a full complement of limbs, the RAF needed volunteers who could operate intricate technical equipment, navigate by the stars and react with lightning reflexes, and have the physical strength to handle the controls of a heavy bomber and the mental strength to command a crew on long operations over enemy territory. As a result, the selection process was more rigorous than that for the other services. Whilst a recruit to the Merchant Navy had to do little more than turn up at port and look for a ship, most would-be RAF pilots needed to have their paperwork in order. For most, this meant examination certificates, showing the attributes they had displayed whilst at school. For those who had not passed their school leaving certificates, let alone matriculation papers, this was a hurdle. It effectively prevented any boy whose family could not afford for him to remain at school until the age of sixteen from being accepted for pilot training. As a result, a majority of pilots were from fee-paying or grammar schools.

Despite the entry requirements, plenty of boys brazenly attempted to join the RAF while underage. One sixteen-year-old recruit lasted all of ten minutes in the RAF. The problem came when the recruiting officer asked for his date of birth: ‘I gave them the date, got a thick ear for my trouble and was told to come back in about nine months’ time.’
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Others were luckier. Having already lied to his girlfriend about his age, telling her he was eighteen when he was really fifteen, John Osborne saw no reason why he should not do the same with the Royal Air Force. His decision to join was a simple one:

The film got him thinking: he wanted to do something for the war effort and, just as importantly, his parents were on the verge of breaking up. The atmosphere at home meant it would be good to get away: ‘So, out of the blue, I presented myself at a recruiting office near Euston station. The film was still in my mind so I plumped for the Air Force.’ They asked what he did for a living and telling them that he was employed as an electrician’s mate they put this down on his enlistment papers. He was exactly what the RAF thought they needed, a trained electrician. They didn’t realize they had got an unskilled sixteen year old who had added fifteen months to his age. The limit of his skills was not yet apparent. He was told to go home and he would be sent for: ‘I went home and told my parents. I rather fancy I had done them a favour by going into the RAF. It saved them from having to stay together for my sake.’ He expected to receive his papers, be called for a medical and selection board, then be sent home to await the call for training. His papers soon arrived, but events did not play out as expected: ‘I said to my girlfriend, “I’ll be back in three days.” I didn’t get home for five months.’

Arriving at RAF Cardington for training, John was lucky; since he was tall for his age he was able to pass as an eighteen year old and was careful not to mention the truth to any of his fellow trainees. However,
he soon met a serious hurdle to any hope of becoming a skilled member of the ground crew. During initial tests he was discovered to be colour blind. He was told that he could not be an electrician since the mass of colour-coded wiring within modern aircraft would confound him: ‘The medical officer hinted that it would be better if I joined the German Air Force!’ And so he was selected for general duties. He was not disappointed: he had not joined the RAF out of any desire for glory and he already knew his lack of education would prevent him being selected for aircrew, let alone pilot training. Instead, he was simply happy to ‘do his bit’.

For some, the decision to join the armed services was not borne out of patriotism and the desperate desire to contribute. In many cases youngsters had much simpler reasons to volunteer for service. For John Cotter, now seventeen years old, the decision was made in February 1941: ‘It was miserable winter – so miserable that I decided to join the Air Force.’ An influencing factor was that John had attended a party and met an old friend in RAF uniform, who was training to be a wireless officer. John asked him one question: ‘Can you get cream cakes and buns in the RAF?’ For a youngster with a sweet tooth, who yearned for the luxuries missing from wartime shops, it was an important question to which he received a positive answer: ‘The NAAFI is full of them!’ He decided the Air Force was the place for him.

He spoke with his fifteen-year-old brother Paul, who was working for a film production company in Soho, and told him of his plans. Paul immediately decided he would also volunteer. The decision made, they marched off to the recruiting office, declining to tell their mother what they were doing: ‘I had to falsify my age to accommodate my brother. The minimum age was seventeen-and-a-half – my age – so I had to put my age up to nineteen so that I could have a seventeen-and-a-half year-old brother. The RAF knew what we had done.’ Together with an eighteen-year-old friend, the brothers signed-on: ‘They accepted my brother and myself without a birth certificate but sent the eighteen-year-old home to collect his birth certificate. The recruiting sergeant obviously knew what was happening.’

At the office the sergeant asked John Cotter what he wanted to do in the RAF. He told him he wanted to be a pilot and was then asked to what level he had been educated. John replied: ‘Matriculation level.’
It was almost true: ‘I had been educated to that level but I hadn’t passed it.’ The lie clinched it and secured his future as a trainee pilot. However, Paul had only been to the elementary school so he was selected for air-gunner and wireless-operator training. The next day the brothers took a bus to Uxbridge, attested and were put on deferred service. In July 1941 John received his papers and was called to Lord’s cricket ground to report ready for duty. A year later Paul Cotter, just sixteen years old, received his papers and commenced his training.

From July, John Cotter waited at Lord’s, taking his meals at London Zoo, until he was called to RAF Brize Norton where he began initial training. Later he was moved to a hotel in Brighton where he got used to living in a crowded room, sleeping on mattresses crammed into every available space. It was an eye-opener for him:

It was a period when his life began to change. His new mates started taking him out to pubs and advising him on what to drink. He also started to go to dances: ‘But I still didn’t have any luck with the girls!’ He was then sent to Canada to commence pilot training. There was a certain irony to this: he had joined the RAF because of a miserable winter in London; now he was in Canada in the midst of a freezing winter. There was one consolation: on the first night on the base he sat down to a large plate of bacon and eggs. He knew he had made the right decision.

One result of this widespread desire to join the RAF was a burgeoning of membership in the Air Training Corps (ATC). The organization had started life pre-war as the Air Defence Cadet Corps (ADCC). Cadets received general instruction on how to dress, how to behave, physical fitness and, of course, basic air training. In the early years of the war, cadets volunteered at RAF bases, working in offices, acting as messengers, filling sandbags and handling stores. In 1941 the
ATC was established as a replacement. Eventually one in five sixteen to eighteen year olds joined the ATC. As Mr Lindsay, the Member of Parliament for the Combined English Universities, later noted, why did boys of sixteen work a nine-hour day, then cycle for two hours to reach a class in navigation? ‘It was because they wanted to pin “wings” on their breast, preferably with the DFC beneath.’
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Having moved from Staines to Plymouth, Reg Fraser gave up Army Cadets and joined the Air Training Corps. Like so many youngsters he had been attracted by the glamour of the ‘flyboys’ and thought he would try to join the RAF. However, on a weekend course at an aerodrome he soon discovered it was not the life for him. Taking him for a spin in a training aircraft, the South African pilot brought the plane down: ‘He crash-landed the plane. Afterwards, he said to me “So, are you going to join the RAF?” After that landing, I thought, no, I’ll join the Army. So I went home and joined the Plymouth Dockyard Home Guard.’ Another boy who was unable to progress in the ATC was Bernard Ashton. Whilst on two months home leave following the sinking of his ship, sixteen-year-old Bernard started going to Air Cadets training with some of his old school friends. On a visit to a nearby RAF aerodrome, he got a close look at a Hurricane fighter. As he looked over the plane, one of the Air Training Corps instructors approached him. He asked about the badge he was wearing on his lapel. Bernard pointed out it was a Merchant Navy badge and was immediately told he should quit the ATC since, as a serving seaman, he would never be allowed to join the RAF.

As the war progressed, the RAF remained the most attractive service for youngsters. In 1940 it had been the pilots of Fighter Command that had been seen to save the nation, then, while the Army was seemingly still impotent, Bomber Command had begun to strike back at the enemy’s heartland. It was a long, slow, costly campaign, but the public enjoyed the spectacle of German cities sustaining the same horrors that had been endured across Britain. There was a glamour attached to their blue uniform that was seldom shared by the other services.

And so RAF recruitment levels continued to be high, with sufficient volunteers replacing the casualties endured on the long, arduous flights across Germany. As the war progressed, and with flight training schools turning out replacements in sufficient numbers, the RAF found
itself less eager for recruits than the other services. This had an impact upon the youngsters who hoped to learn to fly. One willing volunteer was Eric Davies of Carmarthen, south Wales. A grammar-school boy from a modest home, Eric had flown in pre-war pleasure trips from Heathrow airport when visiting London with his grandfather. Like so many of his contemporaries, he had ignored the lower age limit and joined the Home Guard in 1940 aged fifteen. He had also volunteered for fire-watching, carrying out his duties from the roof of a local shop where he worked part-time. Those early pleasure flights had inspired him to make the decision to join the RAF. Mindful of his father’s wounds from the Great War, which had caused his premature death in the 1920s, he thought flying preferable to being an infantryman.

In February 1942, having just turned seventeen, Eric Davies went to his local recruiting office and applied to join the RAF as an air-gunner/wireless operator:

Eric found himself immediately called up and sent to an Army training camp. It was a decision that would have a long-reaching effect.

Whilst many young soldiers waited to be drafted overseas, or continued with years of training in preparation for the eventual opening of a ‘second front’ in Europe, the young volunteers in the RAF were able to immediately strike at the enemy. From bases across southern and eastern England, the bombers of the RAF were able to attack German cities. Returning to England in autumn 1942, eighteen-year-old John Cotter had got his wings and was ready to take the final steps to being a bomber pilot. Back in September 1939 he had wondered whether the war would last long enough for him to get involved. Three years on he was fully trained and waiting to take responsibility for a bomber and its seven-man crew. It was a heavy burden and one he felt he was lucky to have been allowed:

Having slowly increased in confidence, he joined Bomber Command as a Pilot Sergeant. He became the pilot of a seven-man crew, flying a Halifax bomber in 158 Squadron, arriving in June 1943. He was still nineteen years old and had the responsibility of taking his crew to war: