Blitz Kids (60 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
In the post-war years, Ted Roberts was lucky never to be plagued with nightmares. He often dreamed about being in the Army, but never about the fighting. Despite not suffering trauma he remains able to recall almost every moment of those six weeks in the front line. Looking back, he has no bitterness towards the enemy and certainly not to the man who shot him: ‘If I had been in the position of the German who shot me, I would have done the same thing. If I could meet him now, I’d buy him a drink. He did me a favour – the wound saved my life.’ He was right: the long months in hospital meant he never returned to the front line.
For some of the boys who had seen service in wartime, there was an unexpected surprise awaiting them: the prospect of having to do National Service now they had reached eighteen. Leaving the Merchant Navy after four years at sea, Alfred Leonard was told that he still faced conscription, despite having served on a merchant vessel as a sixteen year old. To prevent being called up he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, ensuring if he were conscripted he would at least return to the sea. He couldn’t understand why he should face such a situation. After all, he had been awarded campaign medals for his Merchant Navy service: surely he had already done ‘his bit’?
In later years, such matters were of less concern. What mattered was that he was proud of his service:
Without a doubt, I really started to grow up when I went to sea. My mother and father said, ‘You went away a boy and came back a man.’ You really had to toughen up at sea. I’m a World War II veteran but I am as young as you get. When I joined the veteran’s club they told me I didn’t look old enough. I was only sixteen in Normandy and seventeen at the end of the war.
For John Chinnery, who finished six years at sea in wartime at just eighteen years of age, the post-war years did not see his memory wiped clean of all the bad events he witnessed while in the Merchant Navy. In the immediate aftermath of war he was asked to represent the Merchant Navy in the victory parade through the streets of London but refused. He also knew that he had to remain at sea since, as an eighteen year old, he faced being conscripted for National Service despite his wartime service at sea. Not only that, but he realized he had grown up quickly whilst at sea and had outgrown his contemporaries who were only just starting out on an independent life.
Despite growing up quickly and developing a precocious
confidence
, John also carried the emotional scars of all he had experienced. In later life he admitted to his wife Daphne that chatting to her over the morning cup of tea had become a form of therapy. He said that as a child between twelve and eighteen years of age, he had been unable to take in all that he had experienced. Somehow, his youth and the circumstances of life at sea in wartime had cushioned him. He admitted
to her that he carried the emotional burden of memories that he didn’t want to recall to anyone and was frank in realizing that, if he had admitted this to himself in wartime, it would have proved too much. He believed he would have killed himself or died of shock at the horrors he had witnessed.
John Hipkin, who was a prisoner of war from the age of fourteen to eighteen, did not return to the sea. Instead, he returned to education and trained as a schoolteacher. Looking back on his four years as a teenage prisoner of war he remained remarkably upbeat: ‘It sounds silly, but we had a great time. We were boys but we were treated like men. But I had missed a lot. When I got home at the age of nineteen I had a lot of time to make up.’ Despite his light-hearted outlook on the seemingly wasted teenage years, there was a darker side to his homecoming:
We were never getting enough of the right food. You put adolescent boys in a prison camp and make them work, well by the time we were liberated we were as skinny as can be. The doctors checked me and said I had been malnourished. I still get a war pension as a result of the lack of food I suffered. The grown men had an easier time of it.
After retiring, he became interested in another group of servicemen: the underage volunteers of the Great War who were executed for cowardice and desertion. As he told a local newspaper: ‘I’m fighting for the boys.’
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He established the ‘Shot at Dawn’ campaign, fighting for a pardon for British and Commonwealth soldiers executed between 1914 and 1918. In 2006 the campaign reached its climax when the UK government granted pardons to the executed men.
Like so many, Geoff Pulzer kept his wartime experiences hidden for many years. He had witnessed the Blitz on the City of London, joined the Home Guard as a sixteen year old, then served with a tank regiment from D-Day to VE Day. Yet he felt this did not compare to the horrific experiences of his wife. When Geoff Pulzer had entered the Belgian city of Antwerp with one of the liberating units, he had no idea that his future wife was just a few streets away as they engaged the remaining German defenders. Fourteen-year-old Julienne
Vanhandenhoeve
, whose war had started when her ship had been sunk as she attempted to return to England, was similarly unsuspecting.
As Geoff recalled:
I didn’t know it at the time but I had virtually liberated her. Funnily enough, in Antwerp there was one little battle I was involved in. We were ferreting some Germans out of their positions on a bombed area on a hill. They were dug in and we were firing on them with our
machine-guns
– until they came out holding white flags. We took them prisoner. I later found out it was only a hundred yards away from where Julienne had been living.
The two finally met some years after the war when they were both working in London. As he recalled: ‘Word got round among the boys that there was a pretty Belgian girl joining the department. So I went and told her I had liberated her!’
Julienne’s sister Yvonne also returned to England. The experience of growing up in German-occupied Belgium had made a profound impression upon her:
My husband used to say he could never get a true answer out of me. I had it engrained in me that you should not say anything out loud, because you didn’t know if your friends were collaborators with the Germans. So all my statements would be very guarded and I didn’t give a straight answer. He found it very frustrating.
She was also affected by both the sinking of the ship and the later bombing of Antwerp: ‘I have never talked to my children about my experiences in Antwerp. It left me very worried about loud noises. I couldn’t stand thunder and lightning. I’ve got a bit more used to it now. I still won’t watch films with guns firing – I switch them off. I don’t like violence.’
For Bill Edwardes, who served as a stretcher-bearer in an infantry regiment from June 1944 to May 1945, war was the making of him. Just sixteen when he volunteered, seventeen when he was sent to France and eighteen when war ended, he was forced to grow up:
Was I daft? Yes and no. Consider this, I was something of an urchin. I wasn’t very well educated. I joined the Army. I did my primary training
and within three months I’d learned to ride a motorbike, drive a Bren carrier, to shoot, to fire all sorts of weapons – I was as happy as Larry – I was having a whale of a time. When I joined I was slim, but I ate well and put on weight. It did me good. It was just the fighting bit that came later that didn’t do me good.
Yet Bill can never escape the memories of Normandy. Something in the back of his mind takes him back to the sights and sounds of the battlefield: ‘One abiding memory is the smell, the stench of dead cattle, cordite and rotting bodies. It was an awful, and constant, mixture – I can still smell it now. There was no getting away from it. There is nothing else like it.’ Even in his mid-eighties, the memories return: ‘I sometimes do battlefield tours – for the Territorial Army, the regular Army, or trainee officers – then I come home and for a few days I have nightmares. My wife wakes me up and tells me I have been shouting and raving.’ The one memory that returns is the battle at Vernon:
It spooks me. The sight of the Tiger tank coming towards us, just yards away, sweeping the road with its machine-guns. The sound of the tank rumbling and its tracks clattering on the road. The whole area was dark and eerie. I can still see it all in my mind. It was horrifying.
It is not just the bad memories of war that remain. The experience changed him and gave him skills that stayed with him throughout his working life:
I was very much calmer in difficult situations. In my career there were situations when someone needed to take a grip, take charge, and I could do it automatically. I saw the need and just did it. I was at one factory and just stopped the production line down because things were getting out of hand and nobody wanted to take charge. I put that down to having to react quickly when dealing with casualties. It was like triage. I was self-reliant. I am still not frightened to help people who are hurt or taken ill. It doesn’t worry me. When I went into the Army it was a huge benefit to me as a person. It turned the boy into a man. I was given jobs that as a boy I would never have had a chance to do. I learned all sorts of new skills.
He carries the feeling that the whole experience was worthwhile, that his youth was not wasted:
I was twelve when war broke out and I was eighteen when it finished – people say to me, ‘that was all your youth gone’. It didn’t go, it was just spent in a different way. I don’t regret it one bit. It was an experience that saw me through the rest of my life. The only time I regretted it was when I was actually in battle, thinking I could have been back in the factory, doing that boring job. But I was doing something positive, I was saving people’s lives.
For all the horrors he experienced, Bill Edwardes was of a generation old enough to make the choice to go to war. Naive, maybe, but they had sought out war, not waited for it to come to them. For the younger children who were sucked into conflict and saw it at its most violent, there was no escape into celebration of their service. All they had were memories of the darkness that had engulfed their childhood. Like Alf Morris, who ‘bottled up’ the memory of his experiences at Bethnal Green, keeping them to himself until he finally felt he had to tell the world about the horrors.
For more than fifty years he didn’t talk about his experiences at Bethnal Green tube station. However, being pulled alive from a pile of 173 bodies – including those of many people he knew – deeply affected him. Yet even his family were not aware of how close he had been to death. Even Alf’s wife Vera, who had been living in the same street as him in 1943, knew nothing about his experiences. Yet the memories are always with him:
It was a small incident in a big, worldwide event – it stays in your mind forever. I can’t get rid of the memory of the sound of people dying around me. People who haven’t been through it can’t understand. I just bottled it up. I never told anyone. I never told my wife. But I thought about it all the time. When I was eventually asked about it, I said I was there, and Vera said, ‘What?’ She didn’t know. My kids never knew about it. But I had dreams about it. I’d wake up and be unable to get back to sleep. Sometimes I’d shut myself in the toilet and have a little cry about it. Just to let it out.
Eventually Alf Morris decided that a memorial should be erected in memory of the dead and a charity, the Stairway to Heaven Memorial Trust, was started to raise funds for one. ‘I feel I owe it to the dead to have a permanent memorial to them. I won’t be happy until I see the memorial erected. These people have got to be remembered.’
In later life, Alf’s experiences gave him sympathy for the suffering of others around the world. However, the depth of his experience – having been ‘bombed out’ from four homes and narrowly escaping death in Bethnal Green tube station – meant he remains convinced it was correct for the Allied air forces to have inflicted huge devastation on Germany in revenge:
We didn’t want to go to war. I was only a kid, but I can remember it all. It was forced on us. At first, we took a hammering. Then, when we got going we did what we had to do. They showed us what they could do, and we gave it back, but better. But when it was payback time people don’t like it. It wasn’t nice – they started it, but we finished it properly.
For one underage volunteer, who preferred to remain anonymous, the post-war years were marked by a struggle to settle down in civilian life. As he admitted in the final years of his life, he had grown used to killing and had eventually grown to enjoy it. After service in the
Mediterranean
and north-west Europe – first seeing action as a seventeen year old – killing became a routine part of his everyday existence. At times the violence had been intensely personal, having killed Germans with a knife whilst engulfed in fury at the news of his brother’s death.
Aged just nineteen at war’s end, he returned home to marry ‘the girl next door’, only to crave a return to the excitement he had known whilst overseas. He soon escaped the boredom of post-war Britain and returned to Germany to find employment with the British element of the Allied Control Commission.
This was followed by an itinerant existence, at some times hitching lifts around Europe, even illegally entering the Soviet Bloc and making his way to Russia. He later found work as a taxi driver, taking American war-widows to the site of their husband’s deaths. For a while he also drove a water-taxi in Venice, before finally returning home almost twenty years after the end of the war. Only after those itinerant
years did he finally find stability, settling down with a new wife and family. Even in the final years of his life he refused to divulge the details of the worst of his war experiences to his family, and the extent to which growing to enjoy killing had influenced his life.
He was not alone in being turned from a boy into someone who found killing easy. For Fred Rowe, just seven years old when the Blitz hit London, the horrors shaped his entire life. It seemed that every day for the next thirty years was influenced by the experiences he had in the Blitz and his childhood looting expeditions. In 1944 he passed the ‘Eleven Plus’ exam and started at the local grammar school. Yet his time there was uncomfortable. The self-confessed street-urchin didn’t fit in with many of the other boys and was soon expelled for fighting.