Blitz Kids (4 page)

After arriving in Oxfordshire, Reg Baker and his schoolmates had a similar experience as the children were separated, although in farming villages the emphasis was slightly different: ‘The big boys were chosen first, for the farms. Then good-looking girls were next. The scruffy ones – like me – were left to the end.’ Finally chosen by a blacksmith and his family who lived at the village forge, he began his new life. As they walked to his new home, Reg was shocked by his surroundings: ‘It was a world I’d never seen before.’ There was a village green with the obligatory stocks on it; the village pub faced the green. It was quiet, he could hear birds singing and the air was strangely clear. There was a vacant bus stop, where buses stopped every few hours: nothing like Bethnal Green, with its busy roads, constant noise and smoky air.

Those who assisted with the allocation of children – many being members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) – found themselves scrubbing the heads of children who gleefully admitted to having nits. Others – including women and girls – were appalled and insulted at having their heads shaved. One woman was upset to see her young child having her teeth examined, calling out: ‘Hold up – she’s not a horse.’ Foster parents were shocked to encounter children without night clothing, who insisted on sleeping in their clothes, or refused to take a hot bath. Despite such complaints about the incoming children, the evacuees also complained about their hosts. Children from ‘respectable’ homes were appalled to be housed in draughty country cottages. One girl noted how she was unable to wash her hair for months and had to fetch all water from a pump at the bottom of a hill. Others found themselves billeted with drunks, the physically abusive and even paedophiles.

Having moved from Streatham in south London, nine-year-old Sylvia Bradbrook’s experience of evacuation was unremittingly miserable. She was housed with a family where the mother ruled the house:

Sylvia found she was treated like a servant rather than foster-child:

In later years Sylvia realized her foster-mother’s mood swings were a symptom of the menopause:

Her hen-pecked husband seemed frightened to confront his wife, spending the evenings in his chair, smoking his pipe and desperately trying to avoid her wrath.

Sylvia also found she was given different food to the rest of the family: ‘The sandwiches I had were made out of something called tomato jam – a bit like ketchup – it was so bad I used to throw them in a stream on the way to school.’ They were so unpleasant that she was relieved to open her bicycle basket one day to find a rat was eating them. The situation made Sylvia yearn to be back in London – bombs or no bombs:

It was culture shock for both sides. Roy Bartlett was nervous of his guardians until he spotted the man’s uniform: he was a member of the village’s voluntary fire brigade. More importantly, the fire engine was kept in a shed at the end of the garden. However, when time came for their first meal, Roy and his mate refused to eat what the fireman’s wife had prepared. As he later recalled, corned beef, biscuits and homemade jam was a less than appetizing meal. The nervousness of the boys continued that evening when they were told to have a bath. At first they refused to undress and then hid behind the bath: ‘No way was a strange lady going to see our bits and pieces.’ One foster mother was shocked when her new wards refused to sleep in a bed with clean white sheets. The children were from a poor home and, as they explained, their family only used crisp white bed linen for laying out corpses.

Bath-time also caused some consternation in Reg Baker’s new home as the culture clash continued. When he was told to write home to tell his parents where he was, his adopted family were shocked that the nine year old could not spell his own name. Next, the blacksmith’s wife was shocked when it was his turn to have a bath: as he undressed, and prepared to climb into the old tin bath, she realized he wasn’t wearing any underpants. This was normal for the boy – he had never owned any. The situation was soon rectified.

Whilst the more nervous children, and those who were homesick, sat quietly in their new homes, others explored this unfamiliar habitat. They marvelled at the animals they saw in the fields. They had seen such creatures in picture books or at the cinema, but these were living, breathing creatures that seemed to be everywhere. New arrivals had to learn the way of the countryside, needing to be warned not to chase chickens since it would stop them from laying eggs. Reg Baker loved this new world:

He started to learn about birds and flowers, and discovered how to grow vegetables. Back home their only garden had been a window box
that was unable to support any life. When he first saw a hedgehog he thought it was a hairbrush. He climbed conker trees, ran in the fields, drank from streams and had fights with the local kids. Eventually, as the two sides – townies and yokels – learned to understand each other’s accents, they settled down, played together and became friends. One of Reg Baker’s highlights was being taken out for a drive by a local man who allowed the children to ride around in his car: ‘I’d never been in a car, let alone a sports car!’

With so many children sent from the cities, there was an inevitable conflict between the hosts and the visitors. Bad manners, bad language and bed-wetting were among the many complaints heard by those who monitored the evacuees. Children complained of being mistreated by the children of the house in which they had been placed, whilst foster-parents struggled to cope with the strange habits of the evacuees.

Having helped administer the evacuees at Bedford Town Hall, Jean Redman was asked to continue working for the council. The fifteen year old had intended to go to a teacher training college, but with colleges closing after the outbreak of war, her options were limited. With her own school only giving lessons part-time, due to an evacuated school occupying the classrooms for half the week, she spent the rest of her time in the council offices, helping deal with the welfare of evacuees. She was soon asked to work full-time: ‘The town clerk asked if I could go full-time at the council a few days a week. The Head said as we were only doing half-days schooling we weren’t learning much so I may as well go full-time. So I did.’ At first she assisted the billeting officer, dealing with issues raised by both the evacuees and their foster parents. In reality she spent much of her time acting as a messenger and making tea, hardly using the shorthand and typing skills that had been the reason she was originally selected for the task.

The most interesting part of the job was learning about the behaviour of people with whom she would never have mixed pre-war:

She also dealt with cases where evacuees were moved between families. One example was a local woman who was unable to cope with the family she had been sent and turned them out into the street. The family, a Jewish woman from London and her young children, was left standing in the street until a local woman took pity on them and took them in. Although Ivy Woodard had three children of her own to cope with, she happily made space for the homeless Londoners. This constant mixing of people had a considerable influence on all those who experienced it. Mrs Woodard’s six-year-old daughter Margaret was fascinated by their guests. She watched in awe as they carried out their Friday night preparations for the Sabbath. All crammed into the small front room of a council house, the family lit their candles and said their prayers before retiring. For a child living in a small market town, it was exposure to a world she had no idea had existed.

Some children found themselves in curious situations. One boy was sent from London to the Surrey countryside, where he billeted with a blind man. However, the man decided to move to London and took his evacuee with him. In 1940 the boy found himself, supposedly in a place of safety, actually living in a heavily bombed area of south London.

One of the private evacuees was Terry Charles. Born in June 1927, twelve-year-old Terry was the son of dancers and had spent most of his young life travelling around the UK. Wherever they had worked, he had gone with them, attending some fourteen different schools by the time war broke out. With the coming of war he was taken out of school and ‘evacuated’ to Cornwall. It was a private arrangement made by his mother:

For others evacuation simply meant their entire family moving from London and continuing their lives from a new base. In many cases, couples moved in with their parents and wherever possible fathers still commuted into cities to work. For the children, it was little different from spending a summer holiday with their grandparents. One of the children in this situation was ten-year-old Colin Ryder Richardson. In the summer of 1939 he was staying with his mother’s parents in Lingfield, Surrey. His parents had kept the children in Surrey as a preliminary precaution as the war clouds gathered. The location was convenient: his barrister father was still able to travel into London for work. On 3 September Colin had been helping his grandfather to dig out an air raid shelter when the sirens sounded: ‘Jesus Christ! Where’s my gas mask?’ were his first thoughts – war really had come swiftly.

The decision was taken that Colin would not return to London or to his school, which was being permanently evacuated. Instead he would stay in Surrey and attend a local school. This worked until he returned to school one day to discover that it too had been evacuated – to Cornwall. The school hadn’t been able to contact his parents and was forced to leave Colin behind. He was unconcerned about the interruption to his education:

The coming of war was not greeted by a wave of overt patriotism and portraits of the King and Queen were conspicuous by their absence. There was little flag-waving jingoism; instead, the people remained calm and, in many ways, stoical about their situation. This muted response was hardly surprising. So many factors influenced the emotions of a country that had endured four years of war, followed by twenty years of political, economic and social turmoil that inspired a wave of pacifism. Yet as one writer noted: ‘the worst mistake of the Axis was to confuse the attitude of the mild, easy-going people of Great Britain with spineless selfishness’.
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In the first month of the war, the British people might not have been fired-up into a patriotic fervour but they were not about to submit to the aggressive intentions of the enemy.

But there was so much more to the story. Maybe it was the sudden change in the street scenes, with vast numbers of children already removed to safety. Maybe it was the horrors of war engrained in the minds of a whole generation of men who had survived the Great War only to see their sons threatened with the same fate. Or maybe it was simply the acceptance of war generated by years of waiting for conflict to come. As one diarist noted of Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia: ‘So now we shall fight for England not, as I used to say, in Czechoslovakia, but in Middlesex.’
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Children, like their parents, threw themselves enthusiastically into the necessary preparations for war. As the entire country became covered in mounds of sandbags, boys eagerly joined their fathers in digging holes to fit air raid shelters and fill sandbags. Helping prepare and fit blackout curtains was a joy to children who wanted to be part of the war effort. When asked to put tape across windows to prevent the glass shattering when bombs fell, some children soon got carried away. They ignored the regular criss-cross network and instead stuck the tape in childish, random patterns that seemed so much more interesting.

It was not just the houses that were transformed. Within days the entire scenery of the country seemed to have changed. Suddenly men – and increasingly women – in uniform seemed to abound. Barrage balloons began to fill the skies. One of the first changes noticed by ten-year-old Colin Ryder Richardson was that female soldiers began inflating barrage balloons opposite his grandparents’ home to protect Lingfield racecourse, where local units of the Territorial Army were being mobilized. For a child, it was a fascinating sight and watching these changes became entertainment for the youngster. He watched as pillboxes were built in the North Downs, ready to hold back an invading army intent on heading north into London. At his greatuncle’s shop in Reigate a machine-gun post was set up on the first floor since it commanded a good field of fire along the High Street. A large triangle of cement was set beneath the window to act as a mount for the weapon. When their work was done, the soldiers thanked the bewildered shopkeeper and told him someone would return if and when the invasion came.

Even when he returned on day trips to London Colin was confronted by the new reality, watching taxis pulling water pumps for use in fire-fighting and seeing museum-piece fire engines out on duty. As he recalled: ‘Already our lives were being totally changed.’ One particular blow was felt by pet lovers: with dogs banned from air raid shelters there was a rush to have animals put down. In the first days of war some 400,000 domestic pets were killed by vets.

It was not just the military situation that changed the face of the country. It was the beginning of what seemed like a vast, if enforced, social experiment. The rattle of pram wheels on the paving stones and
tarmac were conspicuous by their absence. Elsewhere, in country towns and villages, former city-dwelling mothers who had been evacuated with their young children tried to coax their prams along the rough roads and grass verges of the new homes. From the mud of the countryside to the steeply cobbled lanes of fishing villages, Britain’s mothers had to learn to adapt.

Mothers brought the ways of the city to the villages. Shocking as it was for their hosts, some of the evacuated women tucked up their children for the night and then made their way to village pubs. Heads turned as the locals were surprised to see women casually ordering drinks just as they had done back home. In one Essex village London mothers changed the look of the whole area as the influx of more than 500 mothers and babies almost doubled the population.

It was not just the evacuees who changed the face of the countryside. In sleepy villages there was a wave of activity as the young women of the ‘Land Army’ arrived to take up the work of men who had gone to war. The arrival of these young women was a breath of fresh air in villages unchanged for so long. Likewise, families began to arrive in the countryside, spending their holidays engaged in agricultural labour. Village children were also drafted into the war effort, with over 30,000 working on farms, earning great praise for previously concerned farmers. Ken Durston – twelve years old at the outbreak of war – recalled the effect on rural Somerset:

But if the arrival of children changed the face of the countryside, then the lack of children changed the cities. Though thousands had defied the order to evacuate, the authorities had made little provision for those left behind. Their schools had closed, their teachers had left for
the countryside and their classrooms had been taken over for civil defence purposes. In London alone, two thirds of schools had been converted to civil defence facilities – such as first-aid posts and fire stations – by authorities who believed all school-age children would be successfully evacuated. More than 100,000 teachers had followed the children from the capital. In Croydon, every school in the borough was closed for a full six months from the start of war. Across the country, some one million unevacuated children found themselves with no school to go to. With nowhere to go, in the first weeks of war the children left behind experienced a new freedom – an extended holiday that most relished at the time.

For Alf Morris, what started as a welcome break became a lifetime regret:

Even when the schools reopened, with crowded classrooms catering for an often transient population of children, education was sporadic. Even when schools were open, absenteeism was recorded at rising some 50 per cent on pre-war figures. This rupturing of normality was lost on the children, but was later of significance for boys like Alf Morris: ‘That was the one thing in my life that I regret. Education was hit-and-miss. Sometimes you could go, sometimes they didn’t let you in. I don’t mind admitting it, I was a dunce when I left school at fourteen.’ He was not alone: one pupil reported that every member of her class failed a scholarship exam. In Scotland pupils recalled their teachers assisting them by giving them the answers to exam questions: after all, it was not the children’s fault they had not been in lessons.

Whilst boys like Alf happily played football and hung around in local parks, others were less innocent: in the early part of the war juvenile delinquency rose by 40 per cent. With just fifteen of 900 London County Council schools open in early 1940, there were attempts to bring wayward children under control. Many churches and
social groups opened their facilities to local children, offering games and lessons in such curious subjects as Esperanto, in an effort to keep children occupied. Some councils opened dedicated rooms for children within their libraries, where children could listen to the broadcasts but also be encouraged to read the available books.

Yet whilst so many children were slowly attempting to settle into their new surroundings or enjoying their new-found freedoms, others were already embroiled in war. For some youngsters war immediately entered their lives, catapulting them into the front line. While history books reflect the ‘Phoney War’ that supposedly lasted until spring 1940, truth was far different and the cabin boys, galley boys and deck boys of the merchant fleet were suddenly at the forefront of the conflict. The Merchant Navy played a vital role for the UK. The country relied on exports to raise revenue and imports of food to sustain its population. In peace and war, it was the merchant fleet that fulfilled this task. As the Germans knew, if they could prevent the Merchant Navy from carrying out its duties, then Britain would surely fall.

As they began their dangerous mission they were protected by the Royal Navy, the one arm of the British military that could claim to be the equal of any service in the world. Just like the merchant fleet, the Royal Navy was home to numerous boys under the age of eighteen who, despite their youth, were considered old enough to be at the forefront of war. Kenneth Toop, who had joined the Royal Navy in 1938 aged fifteen, explained the most common reason for youngsters joining the Navy:

After initially working as a presser in a cleaning firm, Ken left Basingstoke with two mates and joined the Royal Navy.

Though most ‘boys’ in the Merchant Navy were aged between fifteen and seventeen, some were far younger. Among the youngest was twelve-year-old John Chinnery. Born to a teenage, single mother
in Edinburgh in April 1927, John had known the depths of poverty through the 1930s. Despite the hardships of the time, he didn’t let his situation affect him. He worked hard, delivering bread rolls around his local area at 5.30 each morning, before handing over his wages to his mother and going to school on an empty stomach. Yet he accepted his situation – after all, there were plenty of others around him experiencing much worse – and enjoyed spending long hours in a library, whiling them away alongside the older, unemployed men.

For John, the turning point came in the summer of 1939, just after his twelfth birthday. One day, he wandered down to Leith docks to look at the ships. As he stood on the dockside, staring at a ship, he was spotted by the ship’s cook. Leaning out over the rails, the cook called him to come aboard and take a look around the ship. Out of curiosity, he accepted the offer. His escort soon realized that John was hungry and asked him to join the crew for a meal. The boy eagerly accepted, quickly emptying his plate. Then the cook spoke: ‘We need a boy. Would you like to join the crew?’ The offer had come out of the blue, John hadn’t been looking for a job – after all, he was still at school. However, he went home and explained it to his mother: if he went to sea, he would be earning money and there would be one fewer mouth to feed. She agreed and happily signed the necessary papers allowing him to go to sea. And so, aged just twelve, John Chinnery made his first trip, sailing on a vessel that worked the Scottish coastal waters. Yet, just months after he joined the ship, war was declared and the schoolboy found himself heading off around the world at the mercy of enemy submarines and surface raiders. In the years ahead he sailed the Atlantic, the North Sea, Arctic and Mediterranean.

At first it seemed war did little to alter the ship’s routine and it still travelled along the east coast of Scotland. Then one morning a German reconnaissance plane appeared overhead. The next day it returned, until it became such a regular occurrence that the sailors began to wave at it. One day the reconnaissance plane did not appear and in its place came a bomber that unloaded its deadly cargo towards the ship, with one bomb striking the funnel. For John Chinnery one thing was certain: his war had started.

More typical of the youngsters at sea was Ron Bosworth. Born in Bristol in May 1923, he had first gone to sea in 1938, making two trips
to Jamaica on a ‘banana boat’. For fourteen-year-old Ron, the sea was a natural choice. His father and grandfather were both sailors and his mother was used to life as a seaman’s wife: now she needed to get used to life as the mother of a deck boy. Like many youngsters, he had attempted to get an apprenticeship with a shipping company only to discover his family couldn’t afford it. So, instead of going to sea to train to become an officer, he took the first job he could find. He later recalled joining his first ship, the SS
Carare
:  

Heading off on his first voyage to the West Indies, he had watched as his mother cried on the quayside. Yet he had no fears as his mind was full of stories of adventure on the high seas: ‘I was going to where all the pirates came from.’  

Through 1938 and 1939, Ron was untroubled by the political crises engulfing Europe. As a teenager with money in his pocket, travelling back and forwards to the West Indies on a monthly basis, bringing home presents for family and Jamaican rum for his father, he was enjoying life. The storm clouds of war were of far less importance than the real storm clouds he encountered in the Atlantic. Just one day after the declaration of war he embarked on his fourteenth trip to the West Indies, returning a month later. On that first trip under wartime conditions there was little to report; they did their job as normal, sailed for the West Indies and returned laden with bananas. Next month he made a final visit to the West Indies before joining a new ship. It would be some years before the merchant fleet again found room for a luxury product such as bananas.