Blitz Boy

by Alf Townsend

  The full story of the lack of action by the Allies against the many Nazi death camps may never be known. But the latest evidence about the Second World War seems to indicate that the death camps were situated deep in Poland and originally out of range of Allied bombers. Even after the Allies invaded Normandy and were sweeping across Europe, the decision was taken not to bomb in case they killed all the inmates! In my mind a sad mistake and one the Jews, quite rightly, are still angry about to this day!

  JERRY’S COMING

  The faint sound of rumbling in the distance – almost like thunder – was enough to wake me from my childish reverie. I tried in vain to snuggle down under the rough blanket and shut out the sound, but the rumbling got louder and louder and quickly became a mighty roar. I sat up in a blind panic not knowing where I was or what was happening, my heart pounding and my eyes full of tears. Then whoosh! – a blast of warm air hit my cold face and the long, red monster, with the one shiny eye, went hurtling past the platform like an absolute nightmare. Then there was total silence – broken only by my loud snivelling!

  This was London during the early days of the Blitz. The ‘Phoney War’ was over and now the Luftwaffe was pounding London every night. I was one of many thousands of kids and adults trying to sleep in the comparative safety on the platforms of the underground stations. But, as an impressionable five-year-old, the early morning, non-stop train that rushed through the Caledonian Road station used to frighten the living daylights out of me. This fear has never left me and gave me terrible nightmares right through to the early years of my marriage. Even now, when boarding an aircraft, the latent fear expresses itself with clammy hands and feet as the jet engines roar into life and we bump down the runway.

  I remember Mum used to say to us kids after school: ‘We’re all sleeping down the Tube tonight, we’ve been told that Jerry’s coming.’ I didn’t have a clue who the hell Jerry was. Maybe he was like the insurance man or the ‘tally’ man who came a-knocking on our door every so often for his money. But, we didn’t have to sleep down the Tube when he came round. Mum just used to tell us kids to be very quiet until he got fed up and went away! Then Mum would proceed to busy herself by loading up an old pram with sheets and blankets and all the paraphernalia required to keep four kids happy for the night. Off we’d go from Offord Road, turning right into Roman Way and walking past the dreaded Pentonville prison. I well remember one teatime when we were walking past the ‘’Ville’ – that’s what the locals called it – and a stray German bomb had breached the main wall the previous night. Our Dad informed us in his local cockney jargon that ‘Sixteen cons had had it away on their toes through the hole.’ What the hell are ‘cons’? I thought. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about!

  Then as soon as we arrived at the Cally Tube, we’d pile into the big, smelly lift, our eyes all big and shiny with excitement as we waited for the whirring sound. Then there were loud screams from all the kids as the lift started descending and we got that funny sinking feeling in our tummies. Then we’d run out when it stopped and dash onto the platform like madmen. It’s very difficult to try to describe the scene that greeted my young eyes. In fact, the kids of today just wouldn’t believe it – sometimes I don’t believe it myself! There were literally hundreds of people on the platform and lots of rickety old double-bunks leaning against the walls. Air-raid wardens in their white tin helmets were shouting out instructions. There were a couple of coppers chatting to people and all the parents were yelling at their kids and telling them to stop making a noise. Some of the older people, like the old boys with their flat caps and wrinkled faces, were just sitting quietly reading their papers and having a puff on their fags.

  As the evening wore on, after most of the kids had settled down for the night, the men arrived back from a drinking session in the local pubs. The atmosphere livened up for a while with everyone joining in the singing of all the old cockney pub songs and music hall numbers. What fascinated me was the fact that most everyone knew ALL the words of ALL the songs! Fair enough, even I knew some of the words of ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’. But everybody knew the words of such weird songs as ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’ and ‘When Father Painted the Parlour You Couldn’t See Him for Dust’. The final song was always a rousing rendition of the classic ‘I’m ’Ennery the Eighth I Am’. The words are still implanted in my subconscious.

  I’m ’Ennery the Eighth I am, ’Ennery the Eighth I am, I am

  I got married to the widow next door, she’s been married seven times before

  And every one was a ’ennery, not a ’arry, or a Willy, or a Sam

  I’m her eighth ol’ man called ’ennery, ’ennery the Eighth I am

  But, when the eerie wail of the sirens started, sounding for all the world like a demented soul in torment, it all went deathly quiet – even the boozy mob suddenly sobered up. Then came the deep drone of the aircraft, the sound of the ack-ack guns and the thud of bombs hitting the ground. Thinking back to those harrowing times, I often shudder to think what would have happened if the station had suffered a direct hit, as did the unfortunate Balham station in South London. Nobody really knows how many perished simply because nobody knew how many people were down there at the time. The story was the same at other terrible tragedies of the Blitz, like the school in Agate Street in the East End. Originally more than 600 people had been shipped there by coaches, supposedly taking them away to safety after their homes had been flattened by the hordes of German bombers. For sure, the school had a concrete roof but it was still far too close to the docks. Thankfully, after the first night, half of them had been shipped elsewhere. Sadly, the following night the school received a direct hit, the bomb literally cutting the school in half on impact, exploding inside and killing many innocent souls. One half of the building then slid into the crater before the rescue teams arrived. They started digging and putting body parts into rubble baskets, then loaded their gory cargo into ambulances along with intact bodies. The local swimming baths had been drained of water and used as a temporary mortuary and the gory cargo was unloaded and hosed down. The mortuary attendants were left trying desperately to match the body parts in a nightmare jigsaw puzzle. Horribly, there were all kinds of bits and pieces left over. The official death toll was recorded as just seventy and they were buried in a mass grave before the scene was concreted over. Nobody knew how many had died because, again, nobody really knew how many people were in the school on that terrible night. Locals believe more than 200 perished with generations of the same families being completely wiped out.

  It was the same horrific story in Bermondsey close to the wharves in Tooley Street. One of the railway arches in Druid Street had been sandbagged on both sides and converted into a shelter. Someone had got a piano inside and everyone was having a jolly-up on a Friday night, 25 October 1940 – the shelter was packed out. Suddenly, a large bomb went straight through the railway line and penetrated the shelter from above before exploding inside it. Again, nobody really knew how many poor souls were inside in the first place because many had simply just walked in off the street. Even so, the official death toll was listed at only seventy-seven. Rumours swept around London during the Blitz that the various council depots were stacked high with many thousands of coffins. These rumours were in fact correct. In 1937, the Air Ministry had estimated that the probable terrible outcome of some 600 tonnes of bombs falling on the city would result in 20,000 casualties.

  Thankfully, what the authorities hadn’t predicted was the large numbers of displaced people who had been made homeless by the savage bombing. So, the 600 tonnes of bombs dropped on 7 September 1940 only caused about one-tenth of the estimated 20,000 or so casualties. As for us, we were only half a mile up the road from the prime German targets of Euston, Kings Cross and St Pancras stations and the giant gasometers. The Luftwaffe pilots were quite happy to shed their bomb loads if they couldn’t quite reach their targets. So, our area of London took a right pasting nearly
every night and for many nights until the end of the Blitz.

  Early the next morning, it was pack up all your things and walk the return journey back home. I well remember the smell of London after an air raid. It smelt like when Dad made a big fire in the garden to burn all the old wood. And there was this strange glow in the early morning sky, a bit like the sun, but not. During the daylight hours, us local kids used to scour the streets for shrapnel, especially after we saw the dogfights in the sky between the British and German planes. The most prized possessions to swap were any pieces with German writing on them – most prized of all and worth child-like fortunes were those pieces that had part of the black German cross or the swastika! With a piece like that, you were the local king! Other less fortunate kids were often maimed and even killed by picking up unexploded bombs and grenades.

  After countless nights of sleeping down the Cally Tube, things started to change. One day a gang of men arrived at our house with big curved sheets of corrugated iron. Then they started to dig a large, deep oblong hole in our garden. With all the kids watching in fascination, the workmen proceeded to place the sheets of corrugated iron over the big hole, just like putting on a roof. Finally, they shovelled the earth from the hole back over the corrugated iron. I remember hearing one of the old girls say, knowingly, but still chillingly, in between puffing her fag: ‘Oh yus, these ’ere Anderson shelters are blast-proof and you’ll only cop it with a direct hit from Jerry’. But sleeping in the Anderson shelter was much more fun and not half as scary as sleeping down the Tube. And we only had to walk down to the bottom of our garden when the siren started. My two sisters shared one of the rickety double bunks and me and my Mum, holding our baby brother, shared the other. I believe later in the Blitz, some bright spark designed another sort of shelter and called it the Morrison shelter. It consisted of a collapsible steel frame that fitted over the kitchen table. This, I am told, was the theory: when the sirens sounded, all the family had to get under the kitchen table, which protected them from the blast. I don’t think anyone had bothered to work out what would happen to the people under the kitchen table if they suffered a direct hit and the house collapsed. Or, what about those poor souls on the top floors of council flats? But the Anderson shelters were very basic and always very damp, with water falling down the side walls and lots of creepy-crawlies all over the floor. It was the dank, earthy smell that used to upset me, a bit like lying alive in a coffin, I suppose. That smell has never left me to this very day. Sleeping in an Anderson shelter most nights was probably extremely unhealthy for both young, under-nourished kids with breathing problems and grown-ups alike. But, it helped our family to survive. Many’s the time we came out of the shelter in the early morning after a very heavy air raid, blinking from the sun’s rays and seeing scenes of utter devastation, with whole streets razed to the ground. I recall once when one of our neighbours copped a direct hit and the house looked just like a flattened pile of rubble. I overheard our Mum say to a friend, knowingly pointing at the rubble. ‘She ain’t bleedin’ taking the mickey out of our Anderson shelter now, is she?’

  Alfie’s Dad, who served between the wars. (Author’s collection)

  But the air raids got progressively worse and more prolonged, as more and more German bombers battered London every night. It seemed we spent nearly every night down in our shelter. Our Mum was adamant, she used to say: ‘Your Dad and his boozy mates are big enough and ugly enough to make up their own minds where they want to sleep. But my kids go down the shelter.’ Suddenly, the German bombers became so confident that they started coming in the daytime. London’s air defences and its ack-ack batteries were being overwhelmed and the sky seemed to be always full of wave after wave of German planes from dawn until dusk. Records from the war show that London was bombed continuously for fifty-seven consecutive nights, with 42,000 civilians killed and some 45,000 injured. Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Goering, had managed to convince the Führer that he could destroy both London and the RAF to clear the way for a German invasion of England. But as history tells us, he got it wrong. The Luftwaffe failed to break the civilian morale with their terror-bombing and, more crucially, because of the RAF’s early-warning radar system, they failed to destroy our air force. Hitler had duly made the worst military decision of what, until then, had been a string of brilliant successes. He decided instead on Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the USSR.

  Something drastic had to happen to me or I probably wouldn’t be here telling my story today. Evacuation to the country for all the city kids was the number one priority for the government. Sadly, many of these kids – mostly from London – were unknowingly sent out of the frying pan into the fire. When the Luftwaffe suddenly switched their targets the following year, places like Coventry, the Midlands and Plymouth, which were originally designated as ‘safe areas’, took a terrible hammering with great loss of life. How ironic to be uprooted from your home and family, dragged to another part of the country, then meet an untimely death in a strange city! As for me, like any other young boy, I was in a world of my own. For sure, I used to get scared, but I was too young to really understand the seriousness of our situation. It was all a bit of a lark to me, sleeping down the Tube and in the Anderson shelter and collecting bits of German aeroplanes. I can recall looking intently into the faces of some of the grown-ups and recognising the fear they were trying to control. But, my young mind couldn’t relate to the dangers and really comprehend what they were frightened about!

  Through no choice of my own, my great country adventure that was to last nearly five years, was beginning to unfold.

  Alfie’s sisters, Joan and Irene. (Joan Westmore’s collection)

  TWO

  MUM SAYS IT’S A TRIP

  TO THE SEASIDE

  My two sisters and myself – my little brother was too young – were told by our Mum, as Dad was away working, that we were all going on a train down to the seaside for a lovely little holiday. I can always remember our Mum cuddling me and tearfully telling us: ‘Bleedin’ Jerry won’t be able to get you down there, will ’e?’ By now, I knew that Jerry were the people responsible for dropping bombs on us every night. But where on earth ‘down there’ was, I hadn’t the faintest idea!

  Crossing Holloway Road on the way to the country. (Author’s collection)

  Evacuees on their way. (London Metropolitan Archives)

  Our battered old suitcases were packed and, if I had been older and wiser, I would have realised immediately that nobody ever took ALL their worldly possessions for a ‘lovely little holiday’! We carefully carried our Mickey Mouse gasmasks and had huge brown labels pinned to our coats with our names and address printed on them. We took the same walk down Roman Way, past the prison to the Cally Tube. Down in the big lift and out on to the same scary platform where we used to sleep – still in a mess with the old double bunks lying around. Now the platform was completely empty, but I only had to shut my eyes to get a clear vision of all those hundreds of petrified people with utter fear on their faces, all staring upwards and listening to the bombs exploding. I started to twitch in blind panic as I felt the blast of hot air in my face and the train seemed to burst into the station. Even today, I still twitch nervously when the ‘big red monster’ with the ‘one staring eye’ comes rushing scarily into the station and I swear I sometimes can still visualise those old double bunks and those frightened faces many years later!

  We finally arrived at a very crowded Paddington station and, from my low vantage point halfway down to the floor, the whole place was an absolute madhouse. Hundreds of people were milling around, all dressed in uniforms and all carrying kitbags. There were soldiers, sailors and the blue of the RAF. Some even had black faces with big, bushy beards and they wore funny turbans on their heads. All the pushing and all the shoving and all the noise suddenly became too much for me and I started to cry. Suddenly, a big warm hand was placed on my head and I heard a deep voice saying: ‘What’s the matter with you, little fella?’ I looke
d up through my tears and saw this huge man dressed in an RAF uniform and sporting the biggest moustache I’d ever seen. I snivelled in reply, cuffing my nose with my sleeve in the process: ‘I don’t like all this noise mister and I wanna go home.’ He squatted on his knees in front of me and holding my hands very gently, he said: ‘We all want to go home little fella, but we’ve all got a job to do, even you.’ With that, he reached into his pockets and pulled out a coin. ‘See this little fella?’ he smiled, waving this silver coin in front of my face. ‘Everybody who volunteers to fight for King and Country gets the King’s shilling’, he said, pressing the coin into my wet, sticky hand. ‘So here’s the King’s shilling for you little fella, you are now one of the soldiers of the King. So be brave and keep your chin up.’ Then he was gone, even before my Mum had a chance to see him disappearing into the heaving horde. Consequently, she never did believe my story of how I managed to obtain a silver shilling and always called me a ‘fibber’ for years. Moments of kindness like that live long in your memory. I had no idea what on earth he was talking about but, as a scared kid, I knew this total stranger was going out of his way to show his empathy. I often wonder if he made it through the war and went home to his family again. He was such a lovely man and he deserved to survive.

  Evacuees at their country school. (London Metropolitan Archives)

  Evacuees all packed up and ready to go. (London Metropolitan Archives)