by Jeff Smith
Later in the war we were evacuated to Six Mile Bottom, about halfway between Cambridge and Newmarket. Our Jane was out there with the Land Army and she fixed it all up for me. We stayed with ‘Aunty Blinco’ in one of six terraced farm cottages, which stood alone at the end of a long tree-lined drive coming up from the main road. It was in the middle of nowhere. It was just like the romantic idea of a cottage, with two rooms downstairs and two up. The floors were made of brick, but until very recently they had still been dirt. The ceilings were low, you stooped to go through a door, and the staircase was almost a ladder in the corner of the front room. Water came from a pump outside and the garden looked like a ‘cottage garden’ illustration on the box of a jigsaw puzzle.
Aunty had her own story to tell. She had married young and soon had a small family. Disaster struck when her husband died, leaving her to be the youngest widow anybody in the area could ever remember. She had no means of support apart from a tiny plot of land but she was a worker and set-to, just so that she and the kids could survive. She used the plot of land to grow onions and sold them locally. She got just about enough money each year to scrape through to the next. Eventually she remarried, and after that life was much easier. ‘Uncle’ was much younger than her, but they were a devoted couple and lived out a long life together. He was a farm worker on the estate, which was how they came to be living in one of the estate cottages. He worked long hours on the estate and when he got home from there he would work more hours in the garden growing their vegetables. He used to go out once a week, regular as clockwork, every Saturday night down to the pub with his mates.
One Saturday, as he was going out, he mentioned that he might bring back some greengages – his friend, ‘A’, had said he would let him have a basketful. Aunty hit the roof!
‘There is absolutely no way I am going to have his greengages in the house!’
‘But they are free and will bottle well – make jam!’
‘That doesn’t matter, there are none of his greengages coming into this house!’
‘Well it seems silly to waste them, and they are good ones…’
‘That’s even worse, if they come back I will leave home…’
They carried on to and fro like this for at least a quarter of an hour until Uncle gave in and left for the pub. I was terribly embarrassed, because I had never seen Uncle and Aunty argue like that and I didn’t know what to say. So I just kept my mouth shut and tried to avoid the subject, but in the end, Aunty told me anyway. Apparently ‘A’ and his wife lived in one of the cottages over at somewhere or other. His wife was always pregnant and must have had a baby every year, but never did they have a child. Of course, out in those remote areas you never got a midwife and I don’t suppose they could have afforded one anyway. Come to that, they couldn’t have afforded any extra mouths to feed either. Whether those two facts were related or just coincidence I don’t know, but every year another baby went under that greengage tree – and there was no way on God’s earth that Aunty was going to eat the fruit that came off it! It was just another sign of how rough life could be out in the remote country areas in the first half of the century.
It was amazing to hear what went on. I remember once talking to an older lady who was dreadfully sad about how she had no family. She was ever so vague though, and I couldn’t really make sense of the bits of stories and hints she was giving me. So I just agreed with her and sympathised. When I got back to the cottage I asked Aunty about her. It took Aunty a little while to work out who I was talking about, but then she told me the story. Her husband used to be head gardener up at the big house and they had quite a good little family. But then one winter one of the children caught diphtheria and in no time all the kids had caught it. Eventually they had to call the doctor in and his only advice was that the children had to be kept warm and cosy. That was much easier said than done, especially living in a small, unheated estate cottage and eventually, in desperation, the father made up beds for the children in one of the heated greenhouses and nursed them there. It is amazing to think that they could heat greenhouses but not homes for sick children, and nobody thought that it was at all unreasonable! Anyway, it was all to no avail and one-by-one the children died. Of course, you couldn’t keep that sort of thing quiet and slowly the story came out. When the master heard about it he was livid – children dying is one thing but up at the house they ate food that had been grown in those greenhouses. He promptly had the greenhouses burnt down and sacked the father. Of course, that was a real disaster in those days and though he did his best to make a living he soon gave up the struggle and died young. His wife never really recovered her wits and was always a bit touched, unsurprisingly. The master and his wife went down on the Titanic, but I don’t think anybody was too upset.
21
Doodlebugs and Rockets
(1944–5)
After the Blitz things went a bit quiet until near the end of the war, when we got the doodlebugs and rockets. We were living in Keogh Road and I already had a great big lump, expecting my second boy. By then doodlebugs were getting a bit routine so we always used to sleep in the Morrison shelter, with a piano between us and the window for extra protection. I made a small bag out of a bit of spare cloth and every night I packed this with a towel, some water, a baby’s bottle and a sandwich, and I used to put this in the shelter ‘just in case’ of emergencies. Well, this night the warning went and so I hurriedly packed the bag and put it, and the baby (well, he was more of a toddler by then), in the shelter. Fred, of course, was already down at the warden post. He used to work all day, be at the post all night, then just come in for breakfast before going to work again. God knows how he kept it up.
My brother George had been visiting us that night but had left to go home and I had done various odd jobs before getting ready for bed. Nearly an hour later there was a knock on the door and there stood George. Now George suffered from night blindness, in fact he couldn’t see a thing in the dark. He hadn’t been gone long when the warning went and, of course, they turned off all the lights. There wasn’t much light to find your way around at the best of times, but in a raid there was none and poor old George was totally blind. It seems that he had wandered round in circles for ages, trying to recognise something or somewhere by feel. Some fellow had asked him where Keogh Road was, but George couldn’t help because he didn’t know where he was! At least, though, he now had a companion in his search. Anyway, they then found somebody else who gave them directions and so the second fellow was able to bring George back to our house. I was dumbstruck to see him on the doorstep, but then the warden from somewhere shouted about closing down the light from the door and so I pulled him inside.
It was obvious that he wasn’t going home that night so he stayed with me. I suppose he could have come into the shelter but it didn’t seem quite right to me so he went upstairs to the spare bed. It was late summer and ever so warm, besides which he didn’t have any pyjamas with him anyway, so he slept in the nude. The next morning I was sort of woken up by Fred’s voice, far away, shouting to ‘stay in the shelter!’ I didn’t quite take it in, and promptly climbed out of the shelter. Suddenly WHUMMMPHT – the world started shaking, bits of the house fell in, there were clouds of plaster everywhere and I didn’t know whether I was on my head or my feet. At which moment George appeared, stark naked.
One of Fred’s (many) ARP training certificates.
A letter of commendation for Fred’s handling of the Keogh Road incident.
I got Fred’s side of the story later. Having spent the night at the post he was on his way home for breakfast when the warning went again. This time it was a doodlebug coming our way and that was when he had to run the last few yards home, screaming to me to stay put and waking me up in the process. It had just passed over when the engine cut out, but for some reason it didn’t carry straight on but turned and came back again diving straight towards him. Looking back it was just plain stupid, but at the time Fred could think of nothing better to
do than lift his arms up to catch the thing and stop it hitting the ground! He said he felt that he could almost touch it and always remembered its great shadow passing over him. It landed just a few houses away, but somehow we were sheltered from the very worst of the blast. Needless to say it killed the couple in the house where it landed. We had always thought that they were brother and sister but it emerged from all the fuss that they were an unmarried couple living together; quite a scandal then but nobody had suspected anything.
Of course, Fred was the senior person on site and as soon as he saw that I was alright he went back to the post and immediately took control. He set up his control post and in no time at all was busy organising rescues here, cars there, checking for people trapped in ruins, clearing the street and all the rest. Truth be told, he was in his element organising things, but he did do a marvellous job. In fact, he later got an official Letter of Commendation from the Borough ARP Controller for the exemplary work he had done in the situation, despite his own home being among those wrecked in the incident.
Anyway, back home, George was standing there stark naked in the rubble of our front room. He too had heard Fred shouting and was rushing downstairs to tell me to stay put when the bomb went off. I found an old sheet and tore it in half so he could wrap it around himself and then he gingerly cleared a way up what remained of the staircase – and it wasn’t very much – to the ruin of the bedroom. He managed to find his clothes and got dressed, though he looked a bit of a shambles. I then got Robert out of the shelter and we went out in the street and sat on a low wall. I could see Fred up the road surrounded by loads of people and doing his organising. I was happy to leave him to it, when along came a nurse.
Polly’s casualty card.
‘You’re injured,’ she said.
‘No I’m not,’ I replied.
‘Yes you are,’ she said.
And, sure enough, I had some sort of cut at the top of my nose and the blood was trickling down my face. I couldn’t feel anything, I think because apart from the shock I was absolutely covered in plaster-dust and it was just soaking up the blood as it went. So she wrote a label, pinned it on me, and said I had to go to hospital. Then we had another performance because I said that I couldn’t leave the baby, and it was quite clear that Fred couldn’t look after him. Luckily Mrs Jones from a couple of doors along came up at that point and she took Robert.
Then I had to go and see Fred who, as controller, whistled up a car from nowhere and off I went to Forest Lane Hospital. This was a maternity hospital really, but in those days anybody would deal with anything. I suppose they had to. They cleaned up the wound very quickly and it turned out to be pretty trivial, but the doctor patted me on the tummy and asked when it was due. When I told him he decided that I would have to stay in for observation, so we had another performance while I told him about the other baby. Eventually he said I would have to take some pill or other, and then he would let me out if I promised to take it easy.
While I was waiting I got talking to this old lady who was waiting for transport. She had been injured but was a bit unhinged too, and truth be told had no idea what was going on. They had found somewhere for her to go and now she had to wait. Eventually my pill turned up, and I swear it was the size of a tennis ball. I have never been good at taking pills and goodness knows how many attempts it took before I finally got this one down. No sooner had I done so when a taxi arrived. I decided to be helpful, so I went and found the old lady and packed her into the taxi, then set out to walk back home. After about a hundred yards I heard all this shouting, and looked round to see the doctor and a couple of nurses running down the road after me. The taxi was for me, not the old lady.
When I got back there wasn’t much to be done. The house was ruined and so dangerous that it would have to be pulled down as soon as possible. Fred was still organising the recovery crews who were, by now, salvaging whatever furniture could be saved and arranging for it to go into store. I was given a ticket for Salway School where there was an emergency shelter and arrangements for feeding those who had been bombed out. As I was leaving this soldier came running out of the ruins of the house and held out his hand.
Mrs Kelly’s purse and contents.
‘Is this yours, missus?’ he asked.
He was holding the purse that Mrs Kelly had given us as a wedding present. It contained our 10s. 10s was a lot of money when Mrs Kelly had given it to us and we had decided to keep it for emergencies. In a real emergency it would have bought us a week’s food, or paid the rent, or just tided us over. We got very close to using it once or twice in the early days, but never quite needed it. Whenever the design of notes was changed we substituted one of the new ones, but otherwise we hung onto it – and I have still got it complete with the little gift card from Mrs Kelly. It was still a lot of money even then and I have always remembered the honesty of that soldier – he could easily have kept that money and nobody would have ever been any the wiser. I suppose war brings out the best in some people, just like it brings out the worst in others.
Anyway, I arranged to go and stay with my sister in Buckhurst Hill and Fred arranged a car to take us there. My sister Jane was in the Land Army near Newmarket, and she found me a billet in a little hamlet nearby. That was how we’d met Aunty Blinco.
While we were away Fred found us half a requisitioned house in Earlham Grove, just round the corner from Keogh Road. We might have been safe in the country, but I didn’t want to risk having my second baby with the primitive hospital system there, so when it was due I wanted to return to London. Fred wasn’t happy with the idea and tried to talk me out of it – he even sent me a letter listing all the incidents during a 3-day period but I still thought that London-with-bombs was safer than the Newmarket local hospitals (see chapter 18). By then the doodlebugs had finished, but we were getting rockets instead. They were worse because you got no warning and there was nothing you could do. One day I was walking down Earlham Grove with Robert in the pushchair and little Keith Lee walking beside me. He was a friend of Robert’s and I had taken the pair of them shopping. As we crossed Sprowston Road we were suddenly lifted about 2ft off the ground – all three of us – and then put down again. Almost immediately there was an almighty explosion at the other end of Earlham Grove where the rocket fell. I have never heard anybody else talk about it, but I am sure there must have been some sort of air-wave or something as the rocket went past.
A mother and her child were killed in that incident. This woman and her husband were a bit strange, in fact I think that they were rather simple. Their son was an absolute horror and everybody used to avoid him and keep their kids away from him, but his parents loved him and they were such a happy little family. For some reason, though, the son and Robert really hit it off and they used to play together ever such a lot. An hour or so after the rocket landed I was standing at the door and saw the father walking down the road. He had been called at work and told of the deaths. As he walked down the road the tears were just rolling down his face – I can still see him and it still chokes me up to think about it.
At the very end of the war I was just coming out of Woolworths with Robert (and the baby in the pram) as a man was coming in. He looked at us and fainted! He was a manager in the sugar-boiling department at Clarnico when I used to work there and he lived nearby when we were in Keogh Road. Robert used to hang on the gate watching the world go by, so this man first used to say hello, then he talked to Robert, then used to give him a sweet, and eventually Robert asked if he could have a sweet for his Mum too, so he used to get two sweets. This man had thought that it was me and Robert who had been killed by the rocket – no wonder he fainted.
The other near-miss was the rocket that landed in the middle of Earlham Grove. We were away at the time and it only did minor damage to the house, including shaking most of the plaster off the living room wall. When Jane got married just after the war we covered the gap with a huge Union Jack. That rocket provided the site for Earlham Grove Sc
hool.
22
Early Post-War
(1945–50)
It’s funny to look back to just after the war and remember how rough it was, though at the time we thought that it was fine – I suppose because it was so different from the war. Really, anything was bound to be good when you weren’t being bombed and didn’t have to worry about who was going to get killed next. The council gave us half a requisitioned house in Earlham Grove. Goodness knows who had owned it before or how it came to be requisitioned but at the time you just didn’t think about that sort of thing. It was one of those big Edwardian houses with big rooms and tall ceilings, and was built for an altogether more gracious age. It even had a coach house. Well, we called it the garage but it was meant for a horse and carriage. It was built onto the side of the house and had huge double doors to allow the carriage to go in and out but, of course, we only ever used the little wicket gate let into one corner of one of the big doors. It even had a hayloft, to keep food for the horse I suppose, but we never went up there. The house must have been built early in the century when that area of Forest Gate was the choice of wealthy Jews from the East End rag trade who moved out to be away from the squalor but in easy reach of their factories. There were still a lot of Jews living along there and next door the Bs still even had a maid. She was a leftover from the 1920s when the middle classes all had a live-in maid, but Annie (that was her name) had never moved on and became pretty well one of the family. Goodness knows how old she was, but by then I think she needed more help from the family than she could ever give them.