The Blitz

by Vince Cross

  I know they’ve decorated the hall so that it looks quite festive, even if it still smells a bit “off’’. We’ll have some singing and dancing, and I think they’ve got a Charlie Chaplin film and some cartoons to keep the kids amused. The Christmas tea might not be all that wonderful, but I think they’ve managed a cake of sorts. When those kids get hold of it, and there are about 40 of them, you can bet it won’t last long! Happy Christmas, Deptford!

  Wednesday, 25th December

  Last night we went to the midnight service at St Matthew’s. As we walked down to the church the air was crisp and cold, and the sky was clear and starry. There was a bomber’s moon, but everything was quiet. Even Germans celebrate Christmas! When the bells rang out, and the vicar was talking about “Peace on earth, goodwill to all men”, it was very odd to think of people in Germany doing exactly the same thing.

  If they say they’re Christians like us, how come they’ve been bombing us to pieces these last few months? I thought of everything we’ve been through, and I said thank you to whoever it is up there that we’re still in number 47, and not homeless like those kids out in Deptford. And I made a big wish that Hitler would get the message and be happy with what he’s got and leave us alone.

  Before we sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, the vicar made a point of saying it was a German tune, and that we had to pray there could be peace with justice soon. As I looked around the church it was obvious not everyone was singing. Mum and I weren’t the only ones with tears in our eyes.

  Monday, 30th December

  Uncle Bob keeps the Lord Wellington pub in Webber Street near London Bridge. He’s Dad’s older brother and we don’t see him very often. He joined the Auxiliary Fire Service early in the war. Dad says Bob saw which way the wind was blowing and thought that if he was called up Auntie Doris would never be able to run the pub on her own. This way Uncle Bob can keep an eye on things. Dad and Bob get on well, but generally there’s a funny relationship between regular firemen and auxiliaries, like the regulars think the auxiliaries aren’t proper somehow.

  Anyway, yesterday Dad piled us on to the bus to spend the day with them. There haven’t been any air raids in a while, and we took our night things and toothbrushes thinking we’d stay over.

  They’re both big, jolly people. Uncle Bob always wears a bow tie, quite often a spotted one, and just to look at her, you’d know Auntie Doris worked behind a bar, all bosom and behind. Uncle Bob is the only person I know who calls my dad “Albert”.

  We’d had a lovely day in their living room, high above the chatter of the bars, talking and playing board games (mostly Tom and me) but then the siren caught us unawares when it went off half an hour or so after blackout. Dad and Bob looked at each other, put down their glasses of Guinness, and resignedly went off to do their duty.

  Bob and Doris have done the cellar up quite nicely, and I shouldn’t think there are many places safer in the whole of London, but we were down there hours and hours and bored silly by the time the all-clear went. We heard, or rather felt, the occasional dull explosion, but nothing to indicate what had really been going on outside. The walls of the Lord Wellington must be very thick.

  When we went upstairs about midnight, Doris went to the window and cried out softly, “Oh my Gawd!”

  From the big picture-windows of their lounge, you can see across the railway and the River Thames to the City of London. St Paul’s sits in the middle, surrounded by all the great buildings belonging to the newspapers and the banks. It’s a wonderful view, so good you feel you should be paying to look at it.

  But now the light thrown back from the fires raging across the beautiful city was as strong as the electric light in Bob and Doris’s lounge could have been. The shells of at least two of Sir Christopher Wren’s churches stood out clearly against the black sky, lit from inside like torches as the flames burnt away 300 years of history. Even at that distance you could see sparks shooting into the air, so powerful was the force of the blaze. The whole panorama was silhouetted in red, like a mad sunset. It made you understand the terror Dad and Bob must face every time they go out to work. The city was being destroyed before our eyes, a second Great Fire of London.

  This afternoon, before we left for home and Bob had dragged himself back to the Lord Wellington (blackened and bruised after a twelve-hour shift), the fires were still burning. And you can be sure the bombers will come back for the kill tonight.

  Thursday, 2nd January 1941

  I don’t know quite know how to write my diary today. I’m so full up I could burst. Words won’t do any more. I thought I could get rid of my fear and unhappiness by putting it on paper. Now I know that, when it comes down to it, there are some things you can never tell.

  Frank’s dead. We had a letter this morning saying so. It must have been the same raids we’d seen from Uncle Bob and Aunt Doris’s flat.

  I suppose the Germans were softening up the RAF stations to keep our fighters out of the air. Then they’d have had a free run at the city. As if it matters. Everyone knows our boys are no good after dark anyway. They just can’t see the bombers well enough, despite the searchlights.

  Anyway, according to Frank’s commanding officer, some German planes got through to Biggin Hill and strafed the runways. Frank and two other men were out there, desperately trying to get some Hurricanes ready to fly. A petrol tank went up. And that was it.

  I thought he’d be safe if he stayed on the ground. I thought death was something that happened to other families. I thought this year would be better than last. God, I don’t believe in you, not if you take away the life of someone like Frank who never did anybody any harm. It’s not fair. It’s so awful, sometimes I catch myself thinking it hasn’t really happened at all. How on earth will we ever recover?

  Saturday, 4th January

  Mum had to go to the undertaker’s this morning to make arrangements for the funeral. I went with her. It was a bitingly cold morning under a steely grey sky, so our bodies were as numb as our minds, despite being wrapped up as much as possible in scarves and gloves.

  It was a fair walk right up towards New Cross, and I don’t know why but on the way home we wandered down through Crofton Park. We were walking along a row of terraces when this woman with her hair in curlers rushes out of her house.

  “You’ve got to help,” she says. “She’s started. What are we going to do? I can’t believe it. How can she have started now? She’s not due for another month.”

  Mum calmed her down, and we went inside. The house was in a right state. I should think it hadn’t been cleaned in a month of Sundays. On the sofa in the front room was a girl who didn’t look much older than me, groaning and screaming by turns – having a baby. I mean, I’ve never seen anyone give birth before, but I didn’t need telling.

  To spare the gory details, it was all over in about half an hour. I didn’t know it could be that quick! By the time the doctor arrived he’d missed the arrival of a beautiful new little baby boy. Well, as ugly as a shrivelled prune actually, but who’s going to tell a new mother and grandmother that?

  And then I made the connection between a birth and a death, and for the first time since we had that letter three days ago I couldn’t help myself and I was in floods and floods of tears that just wouldn’t stop coming. Soon I was shaking and I couldn’t have spoken even if there’d been anything to say.

  Friday, 18th April

  I know I’ve been bad and I haven’t kept this diary going, but in the weeks after Frank’s funeral I just couldn’t find the energy. I couldn’t see the point in much at all to be honest. The people who’d left Lewisham during the back end of last year have begun to drift back, and I’ve started to go to a school that’s running (mornings only) near Lee Green, so I suppose, what with everything else, my time’s been pretty well occupied.

  And (until Wednesday) life had been what passes for normal these days. On the whole it’s been
quiet these last few weeks. The sirens go pretty regularly but compared with before Christmas, there’s not been much damage.

  On Wednesday the warnings went in the mid-evening, about eight o’clock, and we settled down in the Anderson as usual. It’s all right in there now. There’s even electric light, though you have to be careful you don’t trip over the cables.

  You don’t often hear the droning of the planes like we did that day. They seemed unusually low and concentrated. Then suddenly out of the blue, there were two almighty explosions. The Anderson and the earth around us seemed to bend and change shape almost before we felt the hollow whoosh of noise that surrounded us and caught us up. Earth was flying everywhere, the lights went out, and then there was the sound of splintering wood and glass. For one awful moment I thought we were going to be buried alive.

  Mum was in there with us. Dad was on duty. In the ominous quiet that followed the explosions, she asked anxiously, “Everyone all right?” and though we were all shivering we all said we were.

  “What do we do, Mum?” squeaked Tom in panic.

  “Hold still,” she said. “Who knows if Jerry’s finished? Until we know he has, we’re safer here.”

  In fact the all-clear sounded quite soon, but when we crawled out of the shelter and looked back towards the house, number 47 wasn’t there any more, and neither was Bessie Andrews’s house next door. As we stood there we could already hear the fire bells ringing down the road and, by the time we’d picked our dazed way across the rubble to the street, a fire tender (with Dad clinging on to the side) was dodging the bricks towards where the front gate had been. Mum ran to the tender and she and Dad clung to each other, while we kids looked on not knowing what to do.

  In the cold light of day, there wasn’t any good news. Bessie must have been in the house next door when the bomb struck. The only consolation is she wouldn’t have known anything about it. We’d never been able to persuade her to let the council put in a shelter of her own, or to come and share ours.

  When they told us it was safe to go on the site, we wandered about sifting through the remains of our old life. It’s funny the way the bomb has utterly destroyed some things, and left others almost undamaged. Take the kitchen for instance. The furniture in there just seems to have vanished, but I found a cup and a saucer covered in dust but otherwise completely untouched – not a chip, not a scratch.

  And then there was my diary. By the new year it had filled three exercise books, which I’d kept in a square biscuit tin in my room. Now, as I wandered about on the bricks and fallen beams, I almost fell over the tin, dented but in one piece.

  It’s a miracle! I don’t know why but clearly it was meant to survive along with us. So having made this last entry, I’ll keep the diary with me to bring us good luck in whatever comes next. We might need it!

  Postscript

  April 1946

  Five years on, and I’ve been re-reading what I wrote in that terrible autumn and winter, a time that now seems so very far away.

  We didn’t find ourselves living in the Red Cross Centre after the collapse of the house in Summerfield Road, as I remember being afraid we might. We were luckier than most. Dad’s friends at the Fire Station saw us all right, and though we were cramped up together in a poky flat for about a year afterwards, at least we didn’t have to leave Lewisham.

  Shirl moved straight in with Margaret, a friend from Chiesman’s, which was sensible but a bit of a shock for me at the time. As of last October she’s become Mrs Goodfellow, and her husband, Christopher, works for Wray’s in Downham. They manufacture lenses for the cameras that go in reconnaissance aircraft. He’s very clever, and obviously thinks the world of Shirl.

  Maureen’s still in the forces and says she might make a career out of it. We saw less and less of her during the last couple of years of the war, but she seems happy. To be honest, we don’t have much in common.

  Tom’s a nice lad now. He’s taller than me and still growing fast. I don’t know where he gets it from. He’s got himself a first job down the river at Vickers, near Erith. It’s a bit of a bus ride, but I think he thrives on the independence. Somehow I don’t think he’ll be at home for long. Good thing, too: he takes up too much room! When I look at him he sometimes reminds me of Frank.

  Dad didn’t come out of the war well. All the years of inhaling smoke and soot have gone to his chest, and he’s been invalided out of the Fire Service. These days even gardening’s a struggle, which for a man of 51 is ridiculous. For what he did in Birmingham he received a George Medal, a distinction very few firemen in London achieved during the war. To this day he’s never talked about the exact details. So he got to meet the King a second time, and reminded His Majesty that the previous time they’d talked about the weather.

  “Did we?” said the King. “And what was it like that day?”

  My mum goes from strength to strength. Dad says there’s no stopping her. In a funny way the war gave Mum an opportunity she didn’t have before. If there’d been no war, maybe she’d have spent the next ten years being a housewife, looking after us kids, cooking and cleaning. Being an ARP warden gave her a taste of how good she is at organizing people. She works for Lewisham Council now, and she’s on her second new job in a year.

  Chamberlain still lives with us in our new house just off Lee High Road. He suffers badly with his nerves after all the bombing, and I shouldn’t think he’ll ever really be right again. But I’m so glad we didn’t have him put down, even though we’d thought about it long and hard during the Blitz. He’s far too precious.

  Me? I’m a real bookworm these days. I want to go to university to study history, and then maybe politics. This Second World War we’ve lived through has left most of Europe ruined. We’ve got to rebuild it, and make it better than it was before. And somehow we’ve got to ensure there’s never a third war, because now we know that if ever there is, no diary and no person is likely to survive it.

  Historical note

  The First World War (or Great War) ended in 1918. By the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germany was prevented from re-arming, and made to accept responsibility for all the damage caused by the war. Germany’s pride was badly dented, but more than that, the Treaty of Versailles meant a lot of hardship for her people over the next ten years.

  Hitler seemed to be a man who could give Germany back her pride, and as he came to power in the 1930s he promised to make her wealthy again. His National Socialist Party, the Nazis, were concerned to make Germany great. They weren’t too worried about the morality of the means used to achieve this.

  In Britain, the governments of the 1930s watched what was happening in Germany with anxiety. On the whole they thought that a strong Germany would make for a safer Europe. They admired German spirit and technology: they didn’t want to see the violence that Hitler was unleashing. So they stood by while Germany re-armed and created a powerful air force, and then as it swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia. This became known as the policy of “appeasement”.

  Gradually it was realized that even at home Hitler was using extreme force against groups and nationalities he believed were making trouble. Later, Hitler’s bizarre ideas about the superiority of the German people were to lead to the deaths of millions of Jews and others in concentration camps.

  In 1939, the British government, led by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, eventually decided that a line had to be drawn. They told Germany that if Poland were invaded, a state of war would exist between Britain and Germany. On September 1st, German troops entered Poland, and two days later Britain declared war.

  German air tactics were well-known by now. They used dive bombers to terrify ordinary civilian populations, to weaken morale and create panic, making ground operations by their army more effective. So when war was declared, the British people expected German bombers overhead immediately, and indeed on that very first day of the war the air-raid warnings sounded in
London. But no bombers came. Not yet.

  It was also expected that the Germans would use poison gas, so everyone was equipped with a gas mask, even the very youngest children. In the event no poison gas was used anywhere in World War Two.

  Neville Chamberlain was never going to be the strong war leader Britain needed, because he was seen as one of those who had appeased Hitler. Winston Churchill had always opposed concessions to Germany. He wasn’t without his faults because he was hot-blooded and always likely to make errors of judgement, but he was a daring and inspirational leader with great vision and a gift for public speaking. He became Prime Minister in May 1940 at a point when Germany had just overrun Holland and Belgium and was about to defeat France. Now, with the United States shying away from declaring war, Britain stood alone.

  Invasion by Germany seemed inevitable, and in May 1940, with many able-bodied young men “called-up” into the armed forces, the Local Defence Volunteers or “Home Guard” was formed to help defend Britain.

  In July Hitler began to lay his plans. His air force, the Luftwaffe, had always been so successful in the past that most of his military actions on the ground had gone more or less unopposed. He believed the same might be true this time. At first he attacked shipping in the English Channel with great success, halting all convoys through the Straits of Dover. Then, during August, he started to attack the British fighter bases in southern England. The losses of aircraft and men on both sides were great, and if he’d continued with this tactic Hitler might have destroyed British air power completely. But he was distracted into retaliating for the first British night bombing-raids against Germany. He called his planes away from the airfields, and told them to bomb London. He hoped to win complete air superiority, and crush Britain’s morale. In the event he achieved neither objective.