Blitz Kids (55 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
Then came their salvation:
It was just like the cavalry arriving – up the road came two Sherman tanks. The German tank commander knew he could take out the first one, but then the second one would get him before he could reload. So he withdrew and the day was saved. It was that close. They were trying to drive us back to the river. We would have been overrun. I was terrified.
The tide of battle had turned and the Worcesters continued their advance. The riverbank was held and it was time to begin the advance north towards Germany.
1
. Imperial War Museum archive: T. Osborne (04/35/1).
2
. Imperial War Museum archive: T. Osborne (04/35/1).
3
. German multi-barrelled ‘Nebelwerfers’ fired a volley of six mortar rounds. They were notorious among the Allied infantrymen who grew to fear, and respect, the destructive power of their barrages.
4
. Patrick Delaforce later used his experiences to write a series of acclaimed divisional histories telling the story of the 1944–5 campaign, telling the story from the point of view of the officers and men in the front lines.
5
. Sixty years later, John Longfield and his wife visited York Minster to see his regimental chapel. As he entered he glanced at the Book of Remembrance. There on the open page was the name of the seventeen-year old soldier whose death had haunted him for so long. After so many years, it was a shocking and a moving experience to see the name of the boy again.
6
. Imperial War Museum archive: T. Osborne (04/35/1).
7
. Imperial War Museum archive: T. Osborne (04/35/1).
‘I saw a bloke who’d lost an eye. And a woman with her hair burnt off. It was fucking awful. Before that, we had thought the war was over.’
Fred Rowe, on seeing the damage done by a V2 rocket when he was eleven
Though civilian suffering had greatly abated since the dark days of 1940 and 1941, war remained an ever-present danger – as the children of Bethnal Green had found to their cost. The occasional air raids had continued to strike towns and cities – such as the bombing of a school in Catford, south-east London, that cost the lives of some thirty-eight pupils when a bomb crashed through the side of the building. Out in the countryside there were military vehicles driving on once-peaceful lanes, where children expected to roam in safety. There were large numbers of deadly weapons in homes all across the land. There were unexploded bombs and the risk of aircraft crashing. In West Wickham four boys died when they picked up unexploded mortar bombs from an Army training ground. In the ruined cities, children risked their lives to play on bombsites, with the ever-present danger of buildings collapsing on them. They also swam in emergency water tanks in the basements of ruined buildings. And there were minefields all along the coast that were a particular threat to children who dreamed of being able to play along the nation’s beaches. On Merseyside, one boy – thirteen-year-old Frank Smith – was killed and his friend, Robert Adams, injured after going into a minefield to retrieve a tennis ball. It transpired that the shifting sands had buried a stretch of wire and
obscured the words of a warning sign. In one particularly tragic accident, a young boy died when he was run over by a bus carrying American troops: he was chasing the bus hoping to get some sweets.
Whilst such incidents were a result of war, they were not caused by enemy action. And then, in the summer of 1944, the enemy returned with a fury. On the morning of 13 June the people of east London heard a sound in the sky unlike anything they had ever heard before: a low constant drone, described as being like a motorbike engine without a silencer. Then, without warning, the noise stopped. As the engine cut out, the flying bomb nose-dived and plummeted down towards the ground. Striking a bridge carrying the railway between Liverpool Street and Essex, it caused considerable damage to the bridge and the tracks. A number of nearby houses were destroyed and six people were killed. In nearby Bethnal Green, Reg Baker heard the explosion: ‘It was in Grove Road. I heard the fire engines. So I ran there – they hadn’t blocked it off yet. Six people were killed. It was 13 June 1944. It was the first V1 to land in London.’
Five days later a flying bomb landed at the Aldwych in central London, close to the office where Peg, a south London teenager, was working in an office. Back in the Blitz she had defied her mother by going out into London with her friends. Then she had been lucky; this time war came closer.
The sirens had gone but I needed to go to the Post Office. I went across the road but it was full. I thought, ‘I can’t stand it here’ – so waited a bit then ran across the road to the office. I walked up the stairs and nearly reached the second floor when – Whoosh! Bang! Crash! – I was blown all the way down the stairs to the bottom. I couldn’t see a thing. All I could hear were people screaming, whistles blowing – shouting. There was brick-dust everywhere. What do I do now?
The doors to the building had been blown off so she followed the light and went out into the street:
I was covered in dust, my hair was a mess. I came across a man on the pavement with some corrugated iron on top of him. So I bent down and said, ‘I’ll help you.’ I pulled it off him and saw his legs were missing. I
just froze. I was sixteen years old! A policeman put his hands on my shoulder and said, ‘All right dear, we’ll see to this.’ They took me to hospital. It was full of casualties on stretchers. A doctor asked me how I was feeling. I said I was OK, just shocked. He sent me home. I was on the tube to Tooting Broadway. Everyone was looking at me. My hair had gone frizzy. I was covered in filth and dust. I felt awful. I didn’t get home till about ten o’clock. My mother was going berserk, she’d heard this flying bomb had dropped in the Aldwych.
In the first two weeks of the V1 campaign some 1,600 people were killed and 4,500 injured. The difference between these attacks and the 1940–41 Blitz was that parts of suburban London suffered
disproportionate
damage. The outer London boroughs of Croydon, Bromley, Lewisham, Bexley and Orpington became known as ‘bomb alley’ since the flying bombs approached from the south-east and often cut out in that area. By mid-July 1944 some 200,000 homes in ‘bomb alley’ had been damaged.
The worst hit London borough was Croydon, which was struck by 10 per cent of all V1s. Starting on 16 June 1944 and ending in January 1945, some 148 V1s and four V2s landed in Croydon, killing 215, wounding 2,000, destroying over 1,000 homes and damaging another 70,000. Although thousands of children were swiftly evacuated, it seemed the population could not escape the horror. For the first time since 1940, life became a lottery. Local people stared up into the sky, eager to see the V1s pass overhead, willing them on to land further north. One teenage girl, who had first been bombed out in 1940, recalled her first experience of this new weapon:
You didn’t get any warning of the flying bombs coming. Suddenly you heard a horrible noise. The first one we ever saw came over at night. We wondered, ‘What is that strange noise – it’s not like a usual German plane?’ I looked out and there was a red fire coming out of the tail. Then the noise cut out – and it was coming down – that was the first one I’d seen.
On another occasion, she watched as a V1 sailed towards her:
I noticed a flying bomb coming over – my mother and I ducked into the shelter – then I looked out and I could see this thing coming over. Then it cut out and it seemed to be coming straight towards us – which was frightening. Quickly I ducked back into the shelter but it had turned and it actually hit a junior school not far from us.
Fortunately none of the children were hurt as they were safely hiding in the school’s air raid shelter.
In South Croydon, eleven-year-old Colin Furk experienced the deadly effect of the new weapons. Four years earlier he had witnessed the effects of a parachute mine that had sheared off the back of his home. But this was different: he was older and had acquired a greater understanding of what war was about. However, he was still young enough to find it exciting to be ‘almost clobbered’ by a V2 rocket that landed in a nearby park: ‘It was Sunday afternoon and we were getting ready to go out and everything was silent. Suddenly all the net curtains came flying at me.’ As the blast hit, he heard the sound of the explosion:
I fell to the floor and was wrapped in the curtains. I was covered in glass but the curtains had saved me. My sister had been on the stairs – and the big heavy front door was blown up the stairs and she was taken up with it. It wedged in front of her. A large amount of damage was done to the house. It was a lucky thing as we had no warning.
There was a sudden shout: ‘My father came rushing out of one of the bedrooms just as a heavy light came crashing down from the ceiling, right in front of him. My mother was in another room – and we were all unhurt. I’d have been shredded if it hadn’t been for those net curtains.’
It was not his only encounter with the effects of the new bombing campaign:
My grandfather was living with us – and he asked me if I would go down on my bike and collect some shoes he had in for repair. When we got there – there was nothing – the whole row of shops had been taken out by a flying bomb. We had to go back empty-handed.
He returned to his grandfather, telling him: ‘I think your shoes have had it.’
Just like the Blitz of 1940, this new wave of bombing brought a new understanding of survival. People quickly learned that if they heard the motor running, they were safe – for the moment. Only when the engine cut out did it mean the flying bomb was about to crash to earth. People stared up into the sky, charting the course of the unmanned aircraft, waiting for danger to pass. Then they could let out a sigh of relief – they were safe until the next bomb came over. However, if the engine could be heard to cut and the weapon began to fall, it was time to take action. Just as in 1940, Terry Charles, now seventeen years old, had returned to London from evacuation just in time for the bombing to start: ‘You hit the ground. You developed hair-trigger reflexes. If something untoward happened, you didn’t stand there, scratch your head and say, “Now I wonder what that is?” No way. You hit the ground. It was self preservation.’
As in 1940–41, the children of London swiftly adapted to the new routines. After almost five years as an evacuee, Kathleen Stevens had returned to London in order that her older sister could continue her education. She arrived just in time to experience the devastation that took place near her flat on an estate in Elephant and Castle, where her father was the caretaker: ‘My dad wouldn’t let us go down to the local shelters because they were in such a state – people would shit on the floor.’ Staying in their flat, the family developed a routine for when the flying bombs came over:
It was about teatime and my mum was making doughnuts in the flat. We all had specific jobs to do in the event of a raid. When there was danger we’d go out into the corridor of the block where there were no windows. I had the job of opening the windows in the flat – so they didn’t smash with the blast. I went into the room to open the window and before I could Dad shouted to me to get down and I did. I heard the explosion – and the glass blew in all over the doughnuts – and all this black stuff came through the windows. My dad went downstairs to see what needed to be done and I went with him – and there were all these old ladies sitting out on chairs in the corridor just shaking.
The image of these shaking old ladies became her overriding memory of the period.
By summer 1944, fourteen-year-old Roy Bartlett had left school and taken up employment in the stores at the nearby AEC engineering plant. His job was to drive around the factory delivering parts to where they were needed. He was forbidden to carry passengers, but he liked carrying the young post girls around the factory. They would sit on the back and dangle their legs over the side. As he later admitted: ‘They were much more attractive goods to carry’. Whilst working there he grew used to the arrival of the V1 flying bombs:
I was very brave one day. There was an open space between the buildings. I was trundling along, carrying this very pretty girl, and a flying bomb was approaching. We could see it in the distance. We knew that if it cut out it could glide for a while until it landed. It kept coming and kept coming. I had one eye on the flying bomb and one on the girl. Then it stopped. I didn’t wait to see where it was going to land. We both jumped off on to the side of the road. I gallantly threw myself on top of her – and remained there for the next half an hour. You have to be chivalrous. That happened several times – but not always with the same girl.
On another occasion he had a strange encounter with a flying bomb while he lunched outside. The workers could all see the ‘doodlebug’ approaching but ignored it. They waited to see if its engine was going to cut out before taking cover. To their relief it passed overhead and disappeared. Suddenly a shout resounded across the grounds: ‘It’s coming back!’ Somehow the V1 had turned and was heading back towards them. They watched as it again passed over their heads, then the engine spluttered, cut out, and it plunged to the earth just hundreds of yards away. As he watched the smoke rising, Roy saw a man jump up and start running, screaming about his wife being at home. He had seen where the bomb had landed and knew his own home had been beneath it.
One of those wounded by flying bombs that summer was Betty Baker, the promiscuous Welsh teenager who had run away from approved school, married at sixteen, then separated from her husband
and moved to London. Arriving in January 1943, still aged sixteen and buoyed by a weekly allotment of money courtesy of her estranged husband, she had initially found employment in Paul’s Café,
Hammersmith
, West London. In the summer of 1944, as she approached her eighteenth birthday, Baker was living in lodgings in Edith Road in Hammersmith. When a V1 flying bomb landed nearby, the house was rendered uninhabitable, forcing her to seek alternative
accommodation
. Having abandoned her old name, by early 1943 she had taken her husband’s name, changed her middle name from Maud and was calling herself Elizabeth Marina Jones. Five-foot-five tall, good looking and appearing far older than her years, the newly christened Elizabeth Jones had also taken to speaking with a North American accent, utilizing the memory of her early years in Canada. The accent gave her an air of glamour that belied her background in the juvenile courts.
For a teenager in search of male attention and glamour, a Hammersmith cafe was far from an ideal workplace and she swiftly moved on, working as a barmaid, chambermaid, cinema usherette and cashier. Then, craving attention and the show-business lifestyle, Betty set out to become a dancer. Once again, she acquired a new name to go with her new position, calling herself Georgina Grayston. She soon found employment as a dancer at the Cabaret Club in Beak Street. However, the now seventeen year old’s promiscuous lifestyle soon caught up with her. The club’s costume mistress discovered stains on one of her stage costumes, leading to concern that she had contracted a venereal disease. As a result, the club’s owner sent her for medical examination by a Harley Street doctor who confirmed the diagnosis. The club’s owner also discovered that ‘Georgina’ was frequenting the Strand Corner House, a location he had designated ‘out of bounds’ to the club’s employees. As a result, her employment was terminated.
Her next job in the entertainment industry was as a striptease dancer at the Panama Club in Knightsbridge and the Blue Lagoon Club in Carnaby Street. These jobs were the potential source of wages of £14 a week. However, Harry Adams, the clubs’ owner, considered her stage act to be unsatisfactory and in February 1944 the employment was terminated. Through the rest of 1944 ‘Georgina’ lived on the thirty-five shilling allowance from her estranged husband and what she could earn from ‘encounters’ with servicemen she met in the pubs and
clubs of London. This behaviour contrasted with her claims that she was training to be a dancer. On the positive side, ‘Georgina’ was well dressed, young, pretty, relatively tall and slim, with a glamorous foreign accent – even if it wasn’t her own. However, the other side of her life was that she had a criminal record, had failed as a dancer, was falling into prostitution and had contracted both a venereal disease and scabies. On top of that, in the summer of 1944, she faced the same dangers as every Londoner and was forced from her lodgings when the building was damaged by a flying bomb.