How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On

by Anton Rippon

  Ivy Moulton, Clacton

  We lived in Ilford at the start of the war. Our neighbours had been offered an Anderson shelter in 1938, but had refused. By September 1940, the London Blitz had begun and they changed their minds. By this time, however, the demand for shelters was high and they had to wait. In the meantime, they dug the hole, ready for the delivery of the shelter and we took some palings out of our fence to enable them to use our shelter. One night there was a particularly heavy raid. We were already in the shelter when Mrs McC came down in her nightdress with a thick eiderdown wrapped around her. When I tell you that Mrs McC was around fourteen stone, you’ll know that we weren’t surprised when she got wedged in the shelter entrance. Her husband, Jack, began to push her from the rear, as we were pulling her from inside. Suddenly she fell in head first, leaving the eiderdown wedged in the entrance. Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt and we all had a good laugh.

  After a while, Mrs McC asked where the gas masks were. Jack said he hadn’t got them and that they must still be on the kitchen table. Jack was a silly old fool, said Mrs McC, and he’d better fetch them ‘before we were all gassed to death’. So Jack went inside to fetch the masks.

  After a while we heard a terrific crash, followed by a few muffled choice words, then another crash, followed by Jack falling head first down into the shelter. He’d put on his gas mask in the house and, of course, couldn’t see where he was going. He fell down the hole he’d dug for his own shelter, hit his head on the crossbeam of the fence and knocked the snout of the gas mask upwards and sideways so that it finished somewhere above the region of his left ear. He never heard the end of that.

  We left Ilford soon afterwards and came to Derby. Some years after the war we went back to Ilford for a visit and happened to be walking past the McCs’ old house, just as some workmen were removing an Anderson shelter from their garden.

  Eileen Godfrey, Derby

  I have poor hearing, which is why I wasn’t in the army. One afternoon, I was reading my newspaper as I travelled home on the tram when, all of a sudden, I realized that the tram had been stopped for quite a while. I looked up to find no one in sight. No driver, no passengers, no conductor. Then there was a terrific explosion. A V1 had dropped about one hundred yards away. Eventually, out came the driver, the passengers, and the conductor. They’d all been hiding under the seats, having heard it approaching. They thought I was a cool customer, still sitting there reading.

  Stanley Norman, Brighton

  My friend’s husband had extremely bad eyesight and had taken off his spectacles before getting into bed. He placed them on his bedside table along with a jam tart that he’d taken up with him in case he got peckish in the night. He was fast asleep when the sirens sounded. As a fire warden he had to be on duty, but preferred to ignore the summons. His wife nudged him with some urgency to ‘go and do your job’. The room was in total darkness and after scrambling out of bed, he groped for his specs, floundered around the room in the dark and eventually ended up in the wardrobe. When the light went on he was wearing his wife’s sunglasses and clutching a sticky jam tart.

  The same couple were again woken up by the sirens. Firebombs were falling all over place and, again, the wife urged her husband to do his duty. This time he went to the window, saw the mountain of blazing fires and asked: ‘Which one would you like me to tackle first?’

  When I was directed to go on fire duty for the first time I would also have preferred to ignore the summons, but my mother reminded me: ‘You’ve got to go out and help the girl next door. You’re both on duty.’

  Sticking my helmet on my head I went outside, assuming that the other girl, who knew the ropes better than I, would guide me along. She wasn’t there. In fact, there was no sign of life in the whole street. There was I, facing pockets of fire and puzzling as to what I could do alone. Suddenly, as I stood there pondering on this problem, a piece of shrapnel hit my helmet with an ominous ping. That was enough. Crouching under the porch I rang the bell of our flat and my mother came hurrying downstairs. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been hit,’ I told her. ‘And I’m not going out there again. That girl hasn’t shown up and I’m not fighting the war alone.’

  My mum wasn’t at all impressed and it wasn’t until next morning that I could find the piece of shrapnel as evidence of my ‘injury’.

  ‘That?’ said my mother sarcastically, ‘That’s nothing . . .’

  Peggy Saunders, Richmond

  It seems that our next-door neighbour was a bit of a coward. Every time the sirens sounded, he used to panic and run like mad to the air-raid shelter. We lived at Hucknall, only a few minutes from the Rolls-Royce Works aerodrome, so the sirens went fairly frequently. One day it seemed worse than ever. First the warning sirens, then the all-clear sounded, one after the other all day long. Each time our neighbour did his ‘minute-mile’.

  In the evening my mother was on her own with her four children because Dad was on the evening shift at Rolls-Royce. By a quarter to midnight, she was fed-up of going back and forth to the shelter. She was in bed, just going off to sleep, when the siren went off again. Through the wall she heard a mad scramble going off in the bedroom of next door, and our neighbour running downstairs, taking them about four at a time. She heard him shouting in the back garden to his wife to hurry up. When his wife joined him, my mother heard him ask where we were. His wife replied that we were still in bed. At this point he began shouting up to my mother’s window urging her to get up and get to safety. My mother opened the window and peered out. She told him she was staying where it was warm and dry and comfortable and, if she was going to die, that was where she was going to do it. Our neighbour wasn’t impressed. He called her ‘mad’ and went off on his ‘minute-mile’ once more. My mother laughed as he nearly tripped himself up trying to put on his trousers and getting two feet into the same leg hole.

  Once, while I was playing for a sergeants’ mess dance at a POW camp near Rochdale, there was a breakout of prisoners. The first we knew was much later when a sergeant said to me: ‘It was all your fault! You shouldn’t have played “The Prisoner’s Song” followed by “If I Had the Wings of a Swallow”.’

  Hannah Wheatley, Belper, Derbyshire

  One late spring night in 1940, the first air-raid warning sounded in Smethwick. At the time I was newly married. My husband was in the armed forces and I was living in rooms with a very old and very deaf lady. I was in bed and, since it was a very warm night, I was wearing no nightdress. However, at the sound of the siren, I jumped out of bed and ran to the old lady’s bedroom shouting: ‘Mrs B, the air raids have started! The sirens are going!’

  She, poor soul, being very deaf, said, ‘What?’

  I said, ‘The bulls are blowing!’ The ‘bulls’ were the pre-war factory sirens telling everyone it was time to go to work.

  With that, panic-stricken and, I am afraid, cowardly, I ran downstairs, grabbed a coat and a pair of sandals and raced to the nearest shelter, which was down a steep hill in the local park. On my flight I tripped and cut my knee. Reaching the shelter, which was dark and empty, I stood there trembling for what seemed like hours but could have been no more than five minutes, when a man and two small children entered. I spoke. He nearly jumped out of his skin; he thought I was a ghost. I told him that I’d fallen, and with the aid of a match – in the circumstances I was glad he’d no torch – he bound my knee with a clean handkerchief. A few minutes later, more terrified people came in and my ‘Sir Galahad’ said he would take me to the first-aid post when the all-clear sounded. There the first-aid officer dressed my knee and I managed to hold my coat together this time.

  When he took me home, we found that poor Mrs B had barricaded herself in her room. When she peeked out of the window and caught sight of the first-aider still wearing his helmet, she panicked. ‘The Germans have got her! Please don’t have me, I’m only an old woman!’

  The first-aider was an old neighbour and knew Mrs B well, and realized there was no point
in him trying to calm her, so ran down the street to fetch her son. After some difficulty, Mrs B’s son managed to get to his mother, who clearly still thought she was in the hands of the Germans, and was yelling and crying. Only when she saw her daughter-in-law did she calm down. I didn’t stay much longer with Mrs B, but I reckon I was the first air-raid casualty in Smethwick.

  Mrs E. R. Smith, West Bromwich

  We were in London during the Blitz, and we had an Irish lodger living as one of the family. Her name was Sheila McSweeney and she was about twenty-six. She never worried about bombs dropping.

  All she ever did was read a book and smoke a fag, and nothing took her away from these. Well, one night in 1941 we were getting a terrific bombing. All the docks were ablaze and our street was hit very badly. In the space of one night, a high explosive and an oil bomb were dropped on the street. Then another bomb fell but remained unexploded, and then a Molotov Breadbasket [a bomb that combined a high-explosive charge with a cluster of incendiary bombs that were released as it fell] and several incendiaries were dropped. My parents and sisters were all in the shelter in the garden, while Sheila stayed in the kitchen with her book and her fag, never bothering about the carnage in the street. My brother and I were racing in and out of the house, fighting the fires as they broke out, but every time we came indoors, she was still sitting and reading. We kept asking her to come and give us a hand, but never once did she look up or answer us. We were absolutely beat at the finish, so for the last time of asking we begged her to help. Well, she put down the book, took the cigarette out of her mouth and retorted: ‘This is not my war, it’s your war. So you can get on with it!’ With that she put the cigarette back in her mouth and carried on reading, leaving my brother and I not knowing whether to laugh or cry. What an answer. As if the Germans would know there was an Irish neutral in the house and not attack it. Anyway, a short time later she was in the thick of it, and if anyone deserved the George Medal that night, it was Sheila McSweeney.

  Eric Cutmore, Bourn, Cambridgeshire

  During the war I had three apple trees in my garden, which I painted with whitewash to keep insects away. One moonlit night, when we expected an air raid, my next-door neighbour looked out of her bedroom window at the back of the house, saw my trees and panicked. She ran down the stairs to her family shouting: ‘My God! German paratroops, dressed in white, have landed in Mr Barnett’s garden!’

  A. A. BARNETT, COLINDALE, LONDON

  Between 1940 and 1943, I was employed as a senior nursery attendant in Oxford, with a group of forty children aged between three and five. The nursery had originally been a large home but Lord Nuffield had taken over the building as part of his factory. The nursery unit was housed in an old youth hostel with a beautiful garden.

  We had several air-raid alerts, thankfully all false, but the children found a wonderful game imitating the siren, after which an older child would take a smaller one, usually carrying it to a large oak tree.

  One day we were visited by an air-raid warden because the children’s imitation of the siren was so good, it had been fooling the neighbours!

  Josie Nicholson, Ivybridge, Devon

  During the summer of 1940, my husband had gone down to the local pub for an evening drink. Around 9.30 p.m. and alone at home, I decided to step outside for some fresh air. Our cottage stood on a bank and from the garden I saw what I thought were German paratroopers dropping from the sky. Quickly, I ran the 300 yards towards the pub to start the alarm. Everyone, including the landlord, put down their pints and rushed outside, climbing up the steep hill to our cottage. The first man up there, however, seemed less alarmed.

  ‘You fool! They’re barrage balloons!’

  Mrs A. Taylor, Shifnal, Shropshire

  In June 1944, I was travelling to my job as an invoice typist with the LNER at King’s Cross Goods Way in London. It was a beautiful day and I was wearing a white dress and shoes and carrying a white bag. My train was sitting in Vauxhall station and the carriages were packed when suddenly one man shouted at me: ‘Get down, missus!’ A flying bomb’s engine had cut out over the station. Everyone else threw themselves to the floor, but I took one look and saw it was filthy. There was no way I was going to lie down there. So I just huddled up and prayed.

  Gladys Lutterloch, Yeovil

  During the war one of my friends, Dorothy Griffiths, decided to have a party and, as she lived in a flat, her aunt and uncle gave permission for her to hold the party at their Salford home, a small terraced house with no bathroom and an outside lavatory. As the party drew to a close, a few of the boys were too late to get back to their various camps and lodgings in Eccles and so were invited to stay overnight. All was quiet until the return of the aunt and uncle. The uncle had a sudden thought about what might happen if any of the lads had to answer a call of nature during the night. So he grabbed a spare chamber pot, went upstairs, knocked on the bedroom door and shouted: ‘Jerry’s here!’

  There was utter chaos as the men scrambled down the stairs, pushing the uncle to one side. They thought there was an air raid and were heading straight for camp!

  Mrs Frances Sheridan, Bolton

  One of the Group 2 staff, London Civil Defence, was a very tidy secretary known as Rosie. We were on night duty, but resting as we did when no alert was on. Then the air-raid siren sounded and we rushed down to the basement room to man our posts. Poor Rosie was quite unaware at having run down there dressed only in blouse and petticoat!

  Leila Mackinlay, London

  The scene is my grandmother’s air-raid shelter. It must be about 2 a.m. The shelter is full of people, maybe about a dozen or so. It is easy to hear people in adjacent shelters in gardens on either side. Laughter, singing and so on. Suddenly everything goes quiet. A pair of very booted heavy feet begin to walk down the long path towards the shelter. Thud, thud, thud. Is it an enemy parachutist who has landed nearby? Everyone is holding their breath. Left, right, left, right, clump, clump, clump. And then, in a very loud voice: ‘Achtung!’ Utter terror on everyone’s faces. Until they realize it was my uncle playing a trick. I don’t think they knew whether to kick him or kiss him.

  Brenda Shaw, Kingston upon Hull

  Aunt Maggie had been evacuated to the country. When Uncle John came home on leave, she moaned and moaned about having to live in a converted stable.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Uncle John, ‘our Lord was born in a stable.’

  ‘Aye,’ replied Aunt Maggie, ‘but he wisnae paying seven shillings and four pence a week.’

  Sheila McGerhan, Glasgow

  The nearest air-raid shelter was a communal one at the end of the road. One night we were all running madly down the street while the guns boomed overhead and flares dropped around us. Halfway down the road, one of us noticed that Nanny was missing. She was standing in the street, gazing admiringly at the flares and wanting to know who had put them there.

  Mrs B. M. Hipperson

  One morning, in the early hours, just Mother and me at home. It’s a warm summer’s night and the windows are open. There’s suddenly the sound of heavy breathing in the bedroom. My mother gets out of bed, warily, to search for our ‘intruder’. After creeping into the other rooms and finding no such man, yet the heavy breathing getting louder and louder, we discover it is the noise of the breeze whipping through the ropes attached to the barrage balloon in the neighbouring playing field.

  Brenda Shaw, Kingston upon Hull

  There were some strange sights after the air raids on Hull. There was a house where the front wall had been blown off but you could see almost every piece of furniture still in its place, like a doll’s house with the front just taken off. After one raid, a complete fish-fryer from a fish and chip shop that had been hit was sitting on the roof of a house on the other side of the street. But people just got on with it, and it was the little things that bothered them. One old lady who lived opposite my friend was being lifted out of the rubble of her house and she kept asking for her false teeth. Apparently, they�
�d been in a glass of water beside her bed. The Civil Defence men told her not to worry about her dentures, they could be replaced. But she said that she wasn’t leaving without them: ‘I’m not letting people see me without my teeth.’

  Phyllis Rippon, Derby

  Flat 66 in Newport Buildings, Covent Garden, wasn’t a luxury apartment. But in May 1941 it was a comfortable enough home for seventy-two-year-old Rose Heffer – even after the Luftwaffe had dropped a bomb nearby and caused sufficient damage for the building to be declared unsafe. So Mrs Heffer ignored cracked walls, loose brickwork and the absence of doors and windows, and continued to live there.

  She ignored, too, the notice pinned to an outside wall, declaring the building unsafe and forbidding anyone to enter it. When a night-patrol policeman heard someone moving around, he investigated and found Mrs Heffer alone, sitting by a roaring coal fire. Yes, she’d read the notice but she didn’t have anywhere else to go, so she was stopping where she was.

  The policeman couldn’t agree and instead took her to the police station. One week later, she appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court accused of failing to obey a police order not to enter a building.

  She told the court: ‘I wasn’t in there long. I went in to wash after I’d buried my poor son who was killed in that terrible raid. Anyway, the flat isn’t in such a bad state. I wish you could see it. They’re going to repair it this week.’

  Hearing that she was now sleeping down the Tube and spending the days wherever she could, the magistrate, Mr Fry, told her: ‘Well, I hope that someone takes care of you.’ Then he dismissed the case, leaving Mrs Heffer to keep calm and carry on, just like she was trying to do.