by Anton Rippon
Margaret Pack, Maidstone
I always think I was lucky because during the war we lived in Kent, right under the Battle of Britain. That might sound strange if it came from an adult, but we were just kids. I suppose we spent more time searching around bomb sites, and places where aircraft had crashed, than anywhere else. In the long summer holidays it was great fun. We used to collect shrapnel and anything else we could find and swap it for other things like sweets – which were obviously in short supply – or perhaps even a football, if you had enough ‘currency’. Because that is what all these spoils of war were – currency. Sometimes, you’d just swap what you had for a ‘better’ bit of shrapnel to build up your collection.
Anyway, one day my brother was setting off for work and I was still in bed, and he called up to me that a German plane had been damaged that night and that part of its engine was lying in our front garden. I’d never moved so fast. I got dressed as quickly as I could and raced downstairs. There was no sign of anything in our garden. He was pulling my leg. That was the thing, though – we lived right in the thick of it and we just made a joke of it all. It was just part of our lives.
Len Johnson, London
We were sitting in the air-raid shelter one night. The sirens had sounded but there was no sign of the bombers yet. My parents were discussing the chap down the road who had a bit of a reputation with the ladies. I was only about nine years old and wasn’t involved in the conversation but children pick up on these things. Anyway, they were pulling him to pieces when my elder brother – he’d be about fifteen at the time – piped up and said: ‘I know why he only goes out with blondes.’
Both my parents stopped talking and just stared at him. Then he said: ‘It’s because he’s afraid of the blackout.’ My parents didn’t know whether to laugh or tell him off. He told me later that he’d heard the comedian Max Miller crack the joke on the wireless.
Norman Taylor, Lambeth
When I was fourteen, I was evacuated to Hayward’s Heath in Sussex. There was a woman and her two-year-old baby living in the same house. Every night she told the little one: ‘If you go to sleep, then I’ll bring you a nice air raid.’ It was the other way round. As soon as the sirens sounded, the baby always dropped off sound asleep.
Eventually I went to work in a factory where they had gas-mask drill. Over the loudspeaker came the order: ‘Gas masks on!’ and then we had to carry on working until the order came to remove them. Imagine the discomfort. But we just had to carry on.
June Buckle, London
I used to live in a small village where very little ever happened, apart from a few stray bombs that had been targeted at nearby Bomber Command. My father was the local chief air-raid warden and, when the sirens sounded, the wardens gathered at our house.
When my cousin and I were about thirteen, a mock ‘invasion’ was planned and local people were asked to play the parts of casualties. We were very excited to be able to take part. My cousin had a card pinned to her that read ‘Broken leg’, while mine read ‘Bleeding badly’. We were told to sit under the hedge until the Red Cross found us as we were playing the part of badly injured casualties. We waited and waited and sat and sat. At first we could hear quite a lot of activity, but eventually, as dusk arrived and it fell quiet, we limped out from our hedge to take a look around. There wasn’t a soul in sight! We went to the Red Cross hut but it was locked. The exercise had finished, everyone had gone home and we had been forgotten! Desperately disappointed, we went back home to make the cocoa for the boys in the AFS hut. They laughed and laughed.
Mrs M. J. Robertson, High Wycombe
After one heavy raid a block of flats was damaged and sticking out of the rubble was the remains of a grand piano. No wood – just the insides. One of the local kids asked the demolition men: ‘If you don’t want that old harp, can we have it?’
After another raid, there was this old lady wandering around the street, shouting: ‘Sugar! Sugar!’ Mum thought she had lost her sugar ration so she sent me out with two spoonfuls. Then she discovered that the old lady was looking for her dog.
June Buckle, London
Boys will be boys – especially in wartime. At the height of the invasion scare in September 1940, Home Guards reporting for duty in Stockport found that their headquarters had been broken into and seventy-seven rounds of ammunition, some money and a bayonet had been stolen; they assumed it was the work of fifth columnists. But the offenders were much closer to home. Three boys, aged twelve, eleven and nine, appeared before Stockport Juvenile Court, charged with the offence. Two of the boys were sent to a remand home, the third was discharged. And the Home Guard took extra care when securing their HQ for the night.
JOHN ELLIS, MANCHESTER
There was this story that snoek was actually whale meat, although we found out that it was just another sort of fish that came from foreign waters. Anyway, me and my pal, who was a couple of years older than me, were sent to the fishmonger to get some snoek, and my pal asked the fishmonger if it was true – that it really was a whale. And when the fishmonger said that, yes, it was, my mate said: ‘Well, in that case, my mum says can you leave the head on for our cat?’ The whole shop erupted in laughter.
Derek Taylor, Birmingham
Anyway, we moved to the outskirts of Maidstone but that didn’t stop us being bombed. One afternoon the siren went and my mother collected my brother and we crawled under the bed and lay there listening to bombs being dropped on the town about two miles away. Suddenly there was silence. You could have heard a pin drop. Our front door had been left open – it was supposed that a bomb blast would merely rush through the house and out of the back door – and we heard heavy footsteps approaching. ‘My God,’ whispered my mother, clutching us to her, ‘it might be a German!’
We clung to each other as the footsteps came into the hallway and hesitated at the door of the bedroom. ‘Anyone about?’ said a gruff voice. We breathed a sigh of relief. It was the road sweeper, a man too old to be called up. He stood looking at us as we peered out from the side of the bed and then, without a word, he crawled under my single bed. We all lay there in a long row, saying nothing until the all-clear sounded, whereupon he wriggled out, nodded to my mother and returned to his work.
Margaret Pack, Maidstone
On the way home from school we used to go down Gas Works Lane and watch the gunner over the rail line have a go at any enemy aircraft attacking the trains.
One afternoon it was really going on, guns firing, German aircraft swooping past. Suddenly a huge bang! A bomb had landed, but it bounced up across town and went off in a sports field on the other side. There were tracer bullets everywhere. That was a great afternoon.
One of the neighbours told my mum that she had seen us boys cheering and shouting down by the railway, so she gave me a clip round the ear for not getting home while a raid was going on. Worth it, though.
Ron Finch, Ashford
My father had a big shed in the garden and it was converted into an air-raid shelter. But after the first nights of the Blitz, my mother decided that she would rather die in a warm bed than a cold shed, so she never used it again and, after a while, we all abandoned it in favour of our beds. But it was put to very good use as a ‘den’ when my two brothers and me, and some of the neighbourhood kids, played together.
To a load of boys with vivid imaginations it was everything – the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber, a submarine under the Atlantic, you name it. We still had to take our gas masks with us, though, and one evening my older brother discovered that if you put your mask on and blew hard enough, then it made a very rude noise. That kept us entertained until bedtime.
Derek Smith, London
I can remember the last day of peace. It was a Saturday and my father took me to see Arsenal play Sunderland. The kick-off was delayed for about two hours because so many children were being evacuated from London that there was traffic congestion everywhere. Arsenal won 5-2 and Ted Drake scored four of them, but everyone
was really quiet on the bus going home. I suppose the adults knew that there was going to be a war and that the result of a football match wasn’t all that important, considering.
Then one chap said, almost thinking aloud: ‘I reckon the Government will declare war on Hitler tomorrow.’
And, quick as a flash, a chap sitting behind him said: ‘They can do what they like as long as they don’t drag the rest of us in.’
Everyone laughed and it lightened the mood. I was still annoyed, though, when they abandoned the football season and Arsenal’s win never counted.
Harry Patrick, London