Blitz Kids (8 page)

Once the evacuation was complete, Albert and his barge returned to London where the boy was met by his mother, who was furious that he had gone away without telling her. When he had first failed to return from work she had contacted his employers, only to be told he was away on ‘government business'. When she asked where he had been, he replied: ‘I've been in France, Mum.' Shocked, she asked him: ‘You've not been to Dunkirk?' Yes, he told her, ‘that's the place'.
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Though later in the war he saw many other awful things, it was the horrors of Dunkirk – as witnessed through the eyes of an innocent fourteen year old – that had the greatest impact.

Of course, whilst the operation was a resounding success, not all the British soldiers made a successful escape from France. Around 40,000 – one for every seven men who escaped – were captured by the Germans in May and June 1940. Among them was Frank Norman, known to his family as John, who was a sixteen-year-old boy serving in the Royal Corps of Signals. He had joined the Army almost a year earlier, having claimed he was eighteen. His was a typical story: his home life had been hard. He was the youngest of five children and the only boy. As a result, he was blamed for everything that went wrong and received many beatings from his father. His father – a qualified engineer – refused to pay for his son to start an apprenticeship, preferring him to start work and immediately earn wages. After two years of odd jobs, John had had enough and joined the Army just after
his sixteenth birthday. At the first recruiting office he was sent away with the words, ‘Go home and grow up first.' Undeterred, he walked seven miles to another recruiting office and was immediately accepted.

Less than a year after volunteering, he was captured near the town of St Valéry as he and some other soldiers attempted to board a boat waiting offshore. He swam out to the boat, only for it to come under fire from the enemy. With the boat in flames, he was forced to re-enter the water and struggle back through the waves to the beach where German soldiers were waiting.

The prisoners were rounded up and sent on a forced march through northern France, into Belgium and then into the Netherlands, where they were put on barges and sent into Germany. John Norman later described the journey as a nightmare of deprivation and suffering. After days crammed below decks on the barges, he was transferred to a train and crowded into a cattle truck ready for the journey to a prisoner-of-war camp. A few days later, tired, hungry and uncertain for his future, the sixteen year old stepped down from the train and was marched into Stalag 8B, the Silesia camp that was to become his home for the next five years.

The children of southern England, in particular in the ports of Kent, were the first fully to realize the implications of the evacuation of the Army from France. They watched and waved as trainloads of servicemen left the ports and headed off to Army camps to reassemble. The children were shocked to see the state of many of the returning men. They smiled from dirty faces, lined with the exhaustion of war. Some were bandaged, others wrapped in blankets. Plenty were without helmets or caps. Some were armed and in full kit, others were dishevelled, forlorn figures without rifles or equipment. They were unrecognizable from the Army that had departed for France a few months earlier.

Elsewhere in the country, there was an initial period when the evacuation was not public knowledge. At Bedford Town Hall, fifteen-year-old Jean Redman was shocked when she arrived at work one morning:

In Wiltshire, Ena Steves was surprised when her father brought home two soldiers. One was dressed in just ill-fitting boots and trousers, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. One of the men kept repeating the same things over and over again and, even as a child, Ena recognized he was suffering from a mental trauma. When the soldiers had gone on their way, she naively asked her mother why the Army sent old men to fight wars. Her mother's answer was shocking: ‘They are not old men dear, that's what war does to young men.'

With France all but beaten and an invasion of the United Kingdom seeming likely, June 1940 saw a second wave of evacuation. Just as the tattered remnants of the British Expeditionary Force arrived back from Dunkirk, unloading from ships in ports along the south coast of England, the region's schools were also evacuated. With invasion threatened, the children needed to be cleared from the possible landing areas. These two groups, exhausted soldiers and excited – if apprehensive – children, passed through railway stations together, a clear indication of the totality of modern warfare. The children, most of whom were carrying sweets and biscuits given by loving parents, soon passed them over to the soldiers. They threw them across platforms, shoved them eagerly through train windows into the hands of men desperate for some measure of comfort.

This second wave of evacuation was carried out with even greater efficiency than the first. Lessons had been learned and arrangements were put in place to smooth the transition from town to country. Dirty children were first sent to a hostel where they were bathed and reclothed before being placed in foster homes. The problem children, including those who had a bad reputation from the earlier evacuation,
were sent more permanently to hostels where they were cared for by trained social workers. Mothers with young children were also placed in hostels, which gave them a sense of independence and allowed them to feel they were not imposing on their hosts. To ease the evacuees into their new life, nurseries, entertainment centres, laundries and communal feeding centres were made available. Again, not all children joined the evacuation. In Dover, those who remained in the port, despite the dangers from enemy guns firing from across the Channel, were known as the ‘Dead End Kids'. They roamed the streets, playing in ruined buildings, until schools eventually began to reopen.

As the Army returned from France, some soldiers went missing from the trains laid on to take them to Army camps. Instead, they headed home for a brief reunion before returning to war. Children were shocked to see the unfamiliar figure of their father opening the front door. It was a shock – and no small relief – for the man of the house to return so unexpectedly. Such visits were all too brief: there were hugs, kisses and tears of joy, maybe one night back in the marital bed and then the long, dull journey back to camp. In one tragic case, a returning soldier went upstairs with his wife but was soon disturbed by the sound of a shot: their teenage son has accidentally shot and killed himself with the soldier's rifle.

At home and with his schoolmates, ten-year-old Colin Ryder Richardson had followed the course of the German advance. Even as children living the countryside, war still engulfed their lives:

The defeat of the expeditionary forces in Norway and France, and the isolation of the British, led to some youngsters feeling that it was
important that their sense of duty and desire to defeat the evils of Nazism should not be wasted. For fifteen-year-old Peter Richards, this helped him to continue on a political path that had started as a schoolboy at a Communist Party meeting in the wake of the Munich Crisis of 1938. He became more critical of the government and its policies:

Nonetheless, Peter started to attend meetings of the Young Communist League, and to read the
Daily Worker
– until it was banned in January 1941. Eventually, he joined the party. Unlike the common impression of ‘young communists' being dour intellectuals with their heads buried in dreary political tomes, Peter Richards and his comrades enjoyed a normal social life:

When the Luftwaffe finally arrived over Britain, it was not London that acted as their first target. Instead, German bombs fell on ports along the Bristol Channel, while Hull and Wick were subject to the first daylight raids on 1 July 1940. July also saw raids on Swansea and other towns in south Wales. By the time the Battle of Britain commenced on 10 July 1940, 300 civilians were already dead, courtesy of high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe. These
figures, shocking at the time, would soon pale into insignificance as the attacks intensified, bringing the war to almost every town and city in the country.

As the Luftwaffe began its daylight incursions above southern England, children discovered a great new game. Despite being encouraged to take cover, children ran out into the streets to watch the RAF confront the enemy. Often, there was nothing to see except dots in the sky or swirling vapour trails that showed a dogfight was taking place. They pointed to the sky in excitement whenever they saw parachutes descending and argued endlessly over whether planes were ‘ours' or ‘theirs'. As one writer put it: ‘Who could sit in a shelter in the daytime when there was so much to look at in the sky?'
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In Roy Bartlett's school there was a sense of additional excitement since they received advance warning of enemy raids. As soon as RAF fighters were scrambled from the nearby Northolt base, they roared over Ealing, to the cheers of the local children: ‘It was wildly exciting. We could see the trails in the sky. Then the sirens would go. We were soon spending nearly all the time in the air raid shelters.' Although wanting to watch the action in the skies above, the children were rushed down the thirteen steps to the shelters that had been dug in the school playground. Earth had been piled over the trench to make a roof, where the school caretaker grew marrows. At first the children sat on the underground benches, stamping their feet on the duckboards, chatting, singing and messing about: ‘Then some silly teacher had the bright idea that we ought to learn something.' In the weeks that followed the teachers tried to continue lessons underground, but failed to hold the children's attention. Instead, they introduced educational quizzes and games that they hoped might just teach the children something.

One of those who watched the activity in the skies was Terry Charles who had returned from Cornwall after getting bored of living in the countryside with a nanny. He figured that was no life for a thirteen-year-old boy:

One teenage girl living in Kent recalled her parents shouting to her to join them in their underground shelter. Instead, she stood outdoors with other similarly enthusiastic children and cheered the British fighters as they struck back at the Germans.

At Lingfield, ten-year-old Colin Ryder Richardson became fascinated by the aerial activity:

In Kent, children who were working in the hop fields stopped work to watch the dogfights above them. When planes were shot down they raced through the fields to find the wreckage, often searching for souvenirs. Often it was race between local policemen or Home Guard units and local children to see who could reach the wreckage first. Sometimes the children enthusiastically guided policemen to where they might find downed pilots and then watched as the unfortunate Germans were rounded up. For children, who had heard so much about the enemy, there was a genuine desire to see a living, breathing German close up. Were they the race of supermen that Hitler seemed to claim? Were they the vicious brutes claimed by propaganda? In truth, most of the children were surprised to see the enemy were simply very young, very ordinary and genuinely frightened.