Blitz Kids (33 page)

Even the younger children were affected by the changes. Born in 1937, Anne Paton had already experienced the anxious conditions of life in Jersey in the final days before the German invasion. Accompanied by her mother and sister, she had escaped on one of the last planes out of the Channel Islands. Yet, as a three year old, her main concern had been to get the necessary documents to be allowed to take her pet cat with her. The family settled in west London, where they were joined by Anne’s father, Angus Paton.

It was Mr Paton’s involvement in secret war work that brought Anne one of the most curious memories of her young life: ‘We had an au pair. She had her own room in the house. I remember her standing at the top of the stairs – the telephone was in the hall on a table. I could see her shadow – and when the phone rang she’d be out on the stairs.’ Even as a child, Anne thought it strange that the au pair would stand in the dark, halfway up the stairs, to listen to telephone conversations. The reason for her strange behaviour was finally revealed:

The reason for the au pair’s interest only became evident in later years when Anne discovered that her father had been the chief engineer on the construction of the Mulberry Harbours, the prefabricated concrete ports that had been secretly constructed and towed to Normandy to act as temporary ports on the invasion beaches.

For Yvonne Vanhandenhoeve and her sister, Julienne, the
circumstances of being trapped in Belgium made life dangerous. They were British citizens living in an enemy-occupied city, never knowing what their fate might be. The uncertainty of life in an occupied city was magnified when she noticed children arriving at her school wearing the Star of David and ‘J’ insignia that identified them as Jewish. Initially, she did not know the implication of these signs – except that they signified the religion of the girls. Eventually, they disappeared from classes, never to return. As she recalled: ‘It was known what was happening but there was nothing you could do about it.’

For Yvonne there was some measure of excitement in this life. She recalled how, as she travelled by tram to school, people would demonstrate their opposition to the occupying Germans by surreptitiously using cigarettes to burn holes in the German’s clothing. It was a small but symbolic sign of resistance. This excitement was undermined by the genuine fear of what the Germans might do to them. Their English mother, a keen pianist, would open the windows of the family home and play patriotic songs like ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Tipperary’. Again, it was a small – but dangerous – sign of defiance. Added to the burden was the fact that their step-brother returned illegally from a forced labour camp in Norway. He was pushed into a lawless existence of living on forged papers. It was an experience, his younger sister recalled, that sent him ‘off the straight and narrow’, since he had no choice but to live a rootless, and dubious, existence in order to survive. For Yvonne, her greatest fear was that she would reach her eighteenth birthday with the Germans still occupying Antwerp. In those circumstances, as a British national, she would have been interned and sent to Germany.

Yet these concerns were submerged under the daily fight to find enough food to survive. As the war progressed, rations diminished, forcing the family to take risks to feed themselves. Their only choice was to buy food on the black market or smuggle it into the city. As the elder of two teenage girls, Yvonne assisted her father in hazardous trips to purchase food:

It was an experience that she had to be careful about, never telling her friends what she had done in case they informed on them. Yvonne learnt to trust no one – in particular the Flemish nationalists – not even her classmates. Only family members or very close friends could be confided in.

Above all else, the lives of children in wartime were shaped by the changing roles of their parents. It was not unnatural for fathers to be away from home on military service. For many children, fathers were often remote figures who worked long hours, played little role around the house and seemed distant from their families. War service just seemed like an extension of that distance. Yet mothers had been a constant factor in the lives of the majority of children. It was mothers who gave them their meals, bathed them, took them to school and sent them on errands. With so few women in full-time employment pre-war, the housewife – stereotypically scrubbing the front step or beating a rug whilst chatting over the fence to a neighbour – was a bedrock of British society. But war changed the balance, meaning that for many children their mother became a figure almost as remote as their absent father.

There was a rapid expansion of day nurseries as working mothers needed somewhere to send younger children. By early 1943, a total of 1,800 nurseries had been opened or were in the planning stage. For a small fee, working mothers could drop off their children who would receive breakfast and then spend the rest of the day alternating between playing games, doing basic lessons, eating lunch and resting – all under the gaze of trained nursery staff. There were also residential nurseries which could house children whose fathers were away at war and mothers were working in factories. Another experiment that distanced children from their parents were ‘County Camp Schools’. There were 38 residential schools, in which 250 children and their teachers lived in rural camps. In addition to their normal school lessons, children learned gardening and looking after animals. They were also taught to look after themselves, keeping their dormitories tidy and making their own beds.

For some of the children, although they had less contact with their mothers, war had positive benefits. For children of poorer families, whose pre-war diets had been woeful, nurseries provided wholesome well-balanced meals. Similarly, the National Milk Scheme gave free or subsidized milk to more than four million children, ensuring they received a daily dose of calcium at schools or nurseries.

It was not that women wanted to neglect their children: it was simply that they had too much else in their lives. The daily routine, regardless of work commitments, involved long hours queuing outside shops. When water supplies were cut off by bombing, there was the queue at the standpipe. Then there was washing and cleaning, with far less soap than pre-war. Not forgetting trying to feed a family on limited rations. Then when clothing was rationed, women had the added burden of patching, darning and swapping clothes with friends and neighbours as children grew, and unpicking old jumpers to reuse the wool. Others had allotments and vegetable gardens to tend. Add to this the burden of salvage collections and knitting ‘comforts’ for the troops, and it was clear that the women of the nation were fully engaged with the war effort. It was little wonder, with their worlds turned upside down by war and their parents occupied for so many hours just to get by, that some of the nation’s youth began to run wild.

With war engulfing the entire nation, it began to touch everyone’s hearts. There was hardly a family who did not have one or more family members in uniform. Whether they were at sea, above the clouds in fighters and bombers or out on the battlefields, millions were on the front line. Big cities, small towns, even villages had been blitzed. Death was everywhere and the fear of receiving bad news became an accompaniment to everyday life. As such, there were no more unpopular figures in wartime Britain than the messengers who delivered telegrams. Whether the telegram boys were delivering innocent messages or the ominous envelopes announcing the death of a loved one, nobody wanted to see them in their streets. As one later joked: ‘Everybody was pleased to see the back of me.’

Peter Richards was one of those selected for the burden of being a telegram messenger. He had applied for a transfer to a position that would allow him to ride a motorcycle. In January 1941, aged just sixteen, he was transferred to a depot at Mornington Crescent, not far
from his home in Camden, north London. Receiving a smart new dark-blue uniform, leather gauntlets and a motorcycle, he was tasked to deliver telegrams around the streets of the area. He could feel a sense of deepening gloom each time he entered a street. Many women gathered in their front gardens to chat, yet as he passed he could sense a deadly silence descending as they watched to see where he might draw to a halt. As he passed them he could sense the women’s relief as they told themselves: ‘Thank goodness, it’s not for me.’

Though most of his messages were innocent, there inevitably came a time when he was resigned to being the bearer of bad tidings: ‘When I first started I didn’t realize the effect I would be having on people’s lives. But I quickly learned. The trauma was delivering telegrams telling people their husbands or sons had been killed.’ The first recipient was a woman to whom he handed a telegram informing her that her son had been lost at sea. It was an awful experience for Peter, he could show no emotion even though he knew exactly what the telegram contained. It was a horribly formal way of breaking bad news. Following protocol, he waited to see if there was a reply, watching as the distraught woman collapsed in hysterics, with another son attempting to console her as tears streamed down his own face. The sixteen-year-old messenger was haunted by the sight of the hysterical woman collapsing to the ground and screaming: ‘
No, no, no!
’

It was a terrible burden for a teenager to bear:

A few months later he was on duty on a Sunday morning, delivering messages around the Mill Hill area. He approached a house in a leafy suburban street where a middle-aged man was tending his front
garden. Peter handed over the letter telling him his son had been killed in an air training accident that afternoon. In contrast to the woman who had collapsed in tears, with quiet dignity the man thanked the young telegram boy and then turned to go inside to break the news to his wife. It was an awful spectacle that remained with Peter throughout his life: ‘That was sixty-odd years ago but I can still remember him – it just sticks in your mind. It had a real effect on me. It made me realize the terrible cost of war.’

The boys of the Merchant Navy became the unsung heroes of the Second World War. Whilst war saw the evacuation of thousands of fourteen year olds, taken to the safety of the countryside, hundreds of their former classmates escaped the dangers of British cities for the far greater perils of the sea. The continual need for new boys to go to sea with the merchant fleet was shown by one stark figure: despite being civilians, the merchant fleet suffered a higher casualty rate than any of the armed services. Whatever their status, they shared the common experiences of a life – and often death – at sea in wartime.

Some of these youths were already experienced sailors. Not disheartened by the sinking of his first ship in late 1939, Bristol-born Ron Bosworth soon signed on with another ship, the
Port Dunedin
, sailing to Australia in early 1940. In the months that he was away, the British Expeditionary Force was defeated in France, Britain stood alone facing invasion and then it defeated the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. In almost five months at sea, Ron’s luck had held. It continued to hold after he returned to England. The
Port Dunedin
docked in London’s Victoria Docks on the second day of the Blitz. The whole of the docks seemed to be on fire, hundreds of ships were hit by bombs, yet the
Port Dunedin
suffered just minor damage when an
incendiary bomb landed on a forward hatch. And through the chaos, Ron Bosworth was discharged from the ship, crossed London and headed back to Bristol by train – all in the lull between the bombing raids.

His next trip, on the Atlantic convoys, saw Ron witness an infamous incident. In November 1940, as it returned from Canada with a cargo of meat, Convoy HX-84 encountered the German pocket-battleship
Admiral Scheer
. An escort ship, HMS
Jervis Bay
, took immediate action. Knowing the odds were hopeless, the captain of the
Jervis Bay
gave orders to attack. It was a suicidal action, but the sacrifice was not in vain. Ron watched as the
Admiral Scheer
bombarded the
Jervis Bay
. As the German warship mercilessly pounded its escort, the convoy scattered, escaping the scene in a desperate bid to reach the safety of home. With the Germans focusing their attentions on the Royal Navy, all but six of the merchant ships were able to escape. Ron, like all his fellow seamen, could not forget the price paid by the sailors who had sacrificed their lives to allow them to escape.

After a short break, he returned to sea on the
British Fidelity
in early 1941. This time his luck changed:

Fortunately for seventeen-year-old Ron, the ship – a tanker – was empty, as it was making its way across the Atlantic to collect fuel. The mine did only minor damage and the ship was saved. The captain dropped anchors and used them to steady the vessel, allowing time for the pumps to work:

Less than two weeks after being paid off, Ron found another ship, the
Port Townsville
, a modern ship – a far cry from the banana-boat he had started the war in. The crew slept two to a cabin, not twelve to a room. The luxury did not last long as they headed out into the Atlantic. He was at the wheel when they came under attack. Looking up into the sky, he could see two aircraft approaching: ‘Suddenly two German bombers came out of the sky. I remember the first bomb – it went down through the fore-part of the bridge. It killed one of the passengers. The skipper said, “You’d better go down and get your mate out.”’ Ron raced below decks to his cabin where he found his friend asleep in his bunk:

Braving heavy seas, they managed to get clear of the ship before she slipped beneath the waves. The next question was, how long would they be left in the sea. Fortunately, there were two vessels in the area: ‘There was a coaster coming. The skipper said, “That’s an Irish boat. If it picks you up, you’ll be interned” – ’cause the Irish were neutral. But there was a French corvette coming, so we rows to that. You’d never credit it, but the French crew gave us vino to drink.’

Having seen his last two ships sunk from beneath him in just a matter of months, Ron returned to the
Port Dunedin
– a vessel he considered a ‘lucky ship’. He spent his eighteenth birthday at sea and then left her on his nineteenth birthday, already a veteran of convoys that had taken him around the world.

With so many ships sunk in the opening years of the war, controversy arose over the treatment of merchant seamen. As thousands discovered, they had their wages stopped as soon as they left ship: regardless of whether they had been paid off in port or torpedoed in the middle of the Atlantic. It had become a source of great disquiet that men who spent days – sometimes weeks – adrift in lifeboats, did
so in the knowledge that their wages had been stopped. The seamen felt they were being neglected and their sacrifices were unappreciated. After all, a pilot did not have his wages stopped once his plane was shot down, nor did a soldier lose pay if his unit ran out of ammunition. To remedy this, a new act went through Parliament to make life more bearable for them. The ‘Essential Work Order for the Merchant Navy’ (EWOMN) came into effect in May 1941. Once the new law was in effect, the men had security of pay, but were effectively in the job ‘for the duration’: as essential workers they could no longer pick and choose when to work. Instead, they joined a Merchant Navy ‘Pool’, which found crews for ships using the men available in the area. They were allowed to reject two ships, but if they rejected a third they were called up for military service.

All new boys shared the experience of joining their first ship with little idea of what to expect. Even if they had attended sea schools, the world of an ocean-going ship, with its crew of old hands, was a daunting prospect. For those going to sea as cadets or apprentices with shipping companies, there were formalities to be observed. Seventeen-year-old Alan Shard was indentured as an Apprentice to the Counties Ship Management Co. of London on 18 June 1940:

As Alan noted, his wages were too low to indulge in such luxuries.

Apprentices had one final port of call before they joined their ships as many shipping companies had strict dress etiquette. They were sent to an approved outfitters, which provided them with everything they needed. One sailor recalled entering a shop as a sixteen year old and being kitted out in an astonishing array of clothing that he took
onboard in a large travelling trunk. First came a formal blue doeskin uniform, which looked incredibly smart until he moved or attempted to do any work, then it creased beyond belief. For formal occasions in winter he received a greatcoat complete with shining brass buttons. For winter work, there was a duffel coat and ‘whites’ for use in the tropics. His tropical kit even included a ‘solar topee’. As he later recalled, most of these items remained unworn throughout his wartime service. As the most junior member of the crew, he spent most of his service in overalls.

First-time sailors had to settle into a life that was different to anything they had previously known. Yes, those who had been on training ships knew all about the cramped conditions on a sea-going vessel, but they were still unprepared for the combination of this with having nowhere to go and nothing to see except sky and open waters.

For all the dangers and privations, life onboard a merchant ship was a fantastic experience for the boys. They were thrown into a world of men the like of which most had never met before. The crewmen were from all over the world: Lascars, Chinese, West Africans, West Indians and Norwegians were all common on British ships. Some boys sailed on foreign ships, which were working from British ports after the Germans had occupied the ship’s home ports. Many boys found working on them a difficult experience as the men were often withdrawn. Unable to return home, and in enforced separation from their loved ones, they were prone to depression and bouts of melancholy.

Seamen who had already travelled the world were used to exotic tastes unknown to teenagers, like Christian Immelman, from the London suburbs: ‘That first breakfast had me wondering whether I had made the correct career choice in coming to sea, the main item on the menu being called curry and rice, it’s main ingredient being reconstituted dried salt fish.’ The curry was not the only exotic commodity onboard. Many of the ship’s crew were Chinese and he discovered they had unexpected tastes: ‘I had to pass through their accommodation to get to the steam pump: I still remember the smell of opium some of the older seamen used.’ Glasgow-born Bert Taylor had a similar experience when he joined his first ship: ‘There was a South African in our cabin who smoked hashish – I didn’t even know what it was – I just thought it was a funny smell. This guy was always away with it.’

Whoever they served with, the boys spent many long hours listening to tales of the sea, especially those told by the men who had been at sea in the days of sailing ships. Bernard Ashton listened in awe to the stories of an ageing Norwegian seaman who recounted the tale of how he had once got drunk and woke up at sea to discover he had been shanghaied on to a four-mast sailing ship. The same Norwegian pointed out the blue-eyed, black-skinned children in West Indian ports, describing them as ‘Norwegian Fucks’.

Despite the differences in expectations, once aboard, the apprentices shared much the same experiences as other crew. Though the cadets and apprentices were there to learn a trade, with the aim of becoming an officer, there was plenty of hard work to be done along the way. Before they could advance, they had to sweat with the rest of the crew and ‘learn the ropes’. If they had expected to be swanning around in a navy blue jacket and white silk scarf, they had a shock coming. Christian Immelman, joining his first ship aged fifteen, described how he and the other apprentices, ‘lived as officers but worked mainly with the crew’. As Alan Shard recalled of joining his first ship:

For seventeen-year-old Norval Young, his arrival as an apprentice on a fuel tanker, the MV
Athelvictor
, was similarly inauspicious:

It was not long before he received another shock when the mate heard the noise his boots were making:

He later admitted that his youth meant such incidents did not worry him as much as they should have:

Another teenage seaman serving on a tanker also realized the dangers of a gas-filled tanker:

However, he found there was a good side to the experience: ‘You’d go down into the hold and there’d be gas down there – it was better than taking drugs, you’d be light headed. When we came up, the mate gave us a bottle of rum: it helped clear your system.’