by Jeff Smith
Looking back, most of my friends and relatives who were in the forces seemed to end up in the desert and then Italy. Eddy, my friend’s husband, was captured in the desert and spent the rest of the war as a PoW. On his first day home after the war he sat at the kitchen table, looked at the wall opposite, and said that if there was another war he would go again, he would fight if he had to, but he would never be taken prisoner again. He never said another word about his experiences. My brother-in-law Bert never said anything either, not until almost his last words that is. In the late 1980s he spent his last days in a local hospice and by the end wasn’t really conscious. As far as we could tell, he didn’t know what was going on around him and barely spoke. However, one day a priest went in to see him. Bert didn’t look at him or even open his eyes, but must have sensed the priest and was quite rude.
‘You can go away,’ he said, ‘I’ll never get to heaven. I killed a man in the war and I never even knew his name.’ He had never said anything about any such incident, and we have no idea what happened, but it must have been preying on his mind all those years. He had never got over it.
My brother Bob went all through the desert and then on into Italy. In fact, every year at Christmas I still have to weep when the news on TV reports that the Pope has given his blessing to the ‘City and the World’ – and especially when television shows the picture of the crowds in St Peter’s Square. You see, I listened to the live radio broadcast from Rome on Christmas Day 1944. I cannot remember who the reporter was or anything like that, but he was talking about the vast crowd of mainly servicemen crowding the square with their eyes glued to the balcony of the Vatican (or wherever it was that the Pope appears). Then he turned his attention to ‘a lone RASC driver, sitting on the running board of his lorry parked just beyond the edge of the crowd and enjoying a cigarette.’ After the war Bob told us how on Christmas Day there really wasn’t very much to do so he volunteered to drive the Catholics from his unit into Rome to see the Pope, and how he watched it all sitting on the running board of his lorry. So that must have been him. It sent a shiver up my spine then, and it still does every year.
I said that I remembered the day the war broke out. I also remember the day the war ended, or at least, the day it ended in Europe – VE Day. We had, by then, been bombed out of Keogh Road and they moved us into a half-house about half a mile away in Earlham Grove. We had the ground floor and another family lived upstairs. Anyway, on VE Day I was at home on my own, apart from the kids that is. Somehow you felt that you had to do something, but there was nothing to do. I couldn’t think of anything better than to stand at the front gate and find somebody to talk to. Even then, the street was pretty well empty. It was very long and right up at the far end I could see a young woman coming along. I stood there and watched her, thinking of all the wonderful things I could say and how happy we would be. Eventually she got within speaking range.
‘It’s over at last then,’ said I, all bright and breezy.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I can’t celebrate. My brother is a prisoner of war with the Japs. I can’t celebrate.’
And she went on her way. She had such hatred in her eyes and voice, I really couldn’t credit it. It knocked me back on my heels and knocked me down for the rest of the day. I never saw her again and I’ve got no idea what happened to her brother, even whether he ever came back. The way the Japs treated prisoners was unbelievable and nothing is enough to pay them back for their behaviour. I have often felt I would like to meet the man who dropped the atom bomb on them and shake him by the hand. That must have been the best thing that was done in the whole war. Even that was a better death than they gave to PoWs.
16
The Blitz
(1940–4)
I get really sick of all the rubbish about the Blitz and the cheerful East Enders who refused to be downhearted. It wasn’t like that at all. It was bloody awful and the authorities were just not prepared. As always, it was the ordinary people who just had to put up with the suffering and grief caused by the mistakes and stupidity of those who claimed to know best. Poor bloody devils.
I remember the first day of the Blitz. We were living in Keogh Road then, and I was expecting the first boy so I was a great lump. Fred was at work. You worked every hour God sent then; you just went into work and stayed; you didn’t have any option. My friend Chrissie came round to see me and said that if we went up the Point [Editor’s note: Maryland Point] to the wool shop she would buy some silk and crochet a dress for the baby. It sounded a good idea so I started to get ready.
Just then, Fred walked in. He looked awful. He told us that he had just had enough – I cannot remember how long he had been at work by then – and he couldn’t carry on any longer, so he had come home. I got in a bit of a flap because I hadn’t got any dinner ready, in fact I hadn’t even thought about it yet and was only just getting ready to go shopping. What could I do for him? What did he want? and all that. But he didn’t care, he couldn’t care less, he just wanted to rest and told me not to bother but go shopping. He went into the front room (we were ever so posh because we had a front room with some decent furniture) sat in an armchair and almost instantly went to sleep. I finished getting ready and, with Chrissie, went up the shops. When we got back Fred was still in the chair asleep. I don’t think he had moved a muscle while we were out. He must have been absolutely knackered.
I was about to start preparing some food when the warning went. Chrissie flew into a panic about getting down the shelter. We didn’t have our own shelter but Aunty next door had an Anderson shelter and we shared that. We had even knocked down a section of the wall between the gardens so that we could go in and out easily. It had been quite useful really because Uncle had been having some medical trouble and I had been able to nip in and help when he had one of his ‘attacks’. I had even been up to the hospital with him a couple of times. Anyway, Chrissie was flapping up and down about the warning and the shelter, but of course she worked out of London all week and only came back at weekends so she didn’t understand how we had got used to it during the Battle of Britain. The warning was always going but nothing ever happened because the Germans were attacking the airfields, not London. After a while we had stopped taking notice of them and got on with our lives as if nothing had happened, just like I wanted to start getting the dinner ready. But she went on and on, so in the end I said that I would go down the shelter. First, though, I had to wake Fred, which wasn’t very easy. When I eventually managed and told him what was going on he started on me too – I should have gone straight to the shelter, it didn’t matter about the false alarms, there was no time to hang about, and all the rest. Anybody would have thought that the warning was all my fault!
So nursing my lump I picked my way over the rubble of the wall. Chrissie was already down in the shelter, she had shot out there as soon as I had said the word, and Fred was behind me fussing. I got to the door and was just about to take the first step down when there was an almighty thump and I found myself laying flat on the lump in the middle of the floor. A bomb had landed about 50 yards away! Luckily it hadn’t exploded, but just the force of hitting the ground had made the thump and there was a crater in the road. Boy did we jump into that shelter. There was only a dirt floor and nothing to sit on. I mean, up until then we had not taken it very seriously so there were no preparations or efforts to make it comfortable.
We weren’t there long, because once they realised about the unexploded bomb we all had to move out. They tried to move us down to the local school which had been opened to provide emergency accommodation, but I did not fancy that. Instead Fred took me down to my mum’s which was on the other side of Stratford.
We hadn’t been there long either when my brother came in from work. He worked in the same place as Fred, down in the docks area, but because of the bombing they had been sent home. He was an amazing sight, ever so scruffy and untidy, but BLACK! Because of the bombing there were no buses so he had to walk home. But that meant walk
ing all the way through the docks which had been the main target. Wherever he went there were fires and wreckage, and many of the roads had been closed but the firemen let him through because he was trying to get home. By the time he had walked in, through and past all these fires, he was totally black.
He was going out with a girl in Canning Town at the time, and of course that had got more of a pasting than us even. As soon as he got cleaned up he wanted to go out again to see if she was alright. Mum started kicking up a fuss about the danger and how he should stay at home. In the end Fred came up with the solution – he put a saucepan lid inside my brother’s cap to protect him! It did not fit in very easily and goodness knows how he kept it on his head. I do not think I had laughed so much for years but it made Mum happier so he left.
Then the warning went again. We did not mess about this time but headed straight for the shelter. To be honest, Mum’s shelter wasn’t worth the bother. It was only set a few inches into the soil and there was barely any soil on top of it, just about enough to grow some lettuces later in the war if I remember rightly. Still, we got into it, or would have done if it had been big enough. Just like Aunty’s back in Keogh Road it had no furniture or other comforts, though they would have made it more cramped. Fred stood just outside and whenever he heard a bomb coming close he would squeeze inside the door.
We spent the night like that. It was the most terrible night. Next morning we went back home but they still wouldn’t let us in because the bomb hadn’t been dealt with. I cannot remember what we did but we must have got back sometime that day. That was the first day of the Blitz.
It was all a pretty terrifying experience and I must admit that after a little while I thought that we had really had enough. I just couldn’t see how we could possibly carry on having hell knocked out of us every night and I was all in favour of Mr Churchill asking for peace on whatever terms were available. I even said as much to Fred, but he didn’t reply. Then one day I went up to London with him. The Swimming Club had all sorts of silver cups and trophies and it had been decided that these should be put into safe custody in some big bank up in the City. There had been a raid the night before and as we travelled I remember looking at some of the grand buildings all battered and smashed, and suddenly I got angry. In that moment my mood turned round completely, and I still remember thinking that we weren’t going to let that ‘bloody barbarian’ destroy everything. We would stop him and punish him, whatever it took.
My sister-in-law Doll was in her shelter on the night when the sewer-bank [Editor’s note: the Northern Outfall Sewer which runs through an artificial embankment to the Beckton Sewage Works] was hit. All the lights went out as well, which added to the confusion. Suddenly water started flowing into the shelter and it quickly reached a few feet deep. It was time to get out and Dolly started to feel her way to the door. Her hand came against something floating so she carefully picked it up and held it until she got outside. Then, in the better light she looked down and saw she was carrying a turd. She rushed indoors to wash her hands but found the lower floor also flooded. The water drained away fairly quickly but, when she opened the knife drawer in her kitchen cabinet, she found another turd nestled nicely among the cutlery.
In the end she was bombed out of the East End but managed to get half a house in Roding Valley, away from the real bombing. Doll was really pleased to find somewhere that was so much safer than London and always wanted me to stay with her or at the very least, whenever I visited, to delay my return from there until the last possible moment. I used to visit her at least once a week. It was quite a performance, especially with the baby. I used to have to walk through to the Point and get a bus up to Leytonstone High Road. There I would get the train out to Buckhurst Hill and walk from there to Doll’s. The return journey was simply the reverse.
One day there were all sorts of hold-ups along the Leytonstone Road, hangovers from the bombing I suppose, and when I reached the station the train was already in. I could see it at the other side of the platform, but from the bus stop I had to walk all round the outside of the station to come in from the other side. I shot off as fast as I could and halfway round met a railwayman. I was pretty desperate so I asked him if there was any way he could hold up the train while I got round the outside.
‘Don’t bother,’ he said, ‘follow me,’ and he led me through a little tunnel straight up onto the platform. It struck me right away what a useful short cut it was, and how it was a pretty good shelter in an emergency. Anyway, I caught the train.
As the afternoon wore on I decided to leave early. Doll was ever so upset and wanted me to stay longer. Fred always encouraged me to stay as well, he always thought it was too dangerous for me to go back into town. But, somehow, I felt I had to get Robert into bed early and I was determined to get him to bed. So I left a bit earlier than usual, getting home earlier, and putting him to bed earlier.
The next week I set off as usual to visit Doll. Having found the short cut there seemed no reason to go the long way round the station. Only, when I got there, the entrance passageway to the tunnel was blocked by a barrier. So, once again I walked around the outside. Still, I had plenty of time, and when I eventually reached the platform I asked the porter why the tunnel was closed.
‘Bad business’ he said. Apparently the week before the warning had gone just as my ‘later’ train reached the platform. For protection, all the passengers had been ushered down into the tunnel. That is where they were when it received a direct hit and everybody was killed. Of course, it was wartime, and we had heard nothing about it in the news or local papers. It was just coincidence that I met somebody able to tell me the story.
After the Blitz it all went rather quiet, the raids more or less stopped and life sort of got back to normal. That was, until the doodlebugs towards the end of the war. I can remember the first couple ever so clearly. The first was completely unexpected – the warning went but it had been ages since there was any sort of raid and nothing seemed to be going on in the sky so we didn’t take it seriously. Suddenly there was a loud bang, obviously a long way away, but obviously very big. That one fell on Upton Park, but of course no official explanation was given. The next day there was another warning. Fred was around for some reason and doing his air raid warden routine. He kept saying it was alright, this was an exercise because ‘they’ were worried that air raid drill was getting slack. It was only an exercise so it was important for everybody to go through the routine for practise. The more he said it was an exercise and very important the less interested everybody else got. Then somebody called us out into the street. We ran out and looked up, and there was a small aeroplane flying over ‘on fire’! We watched horrified as it went out of sight and a few seconds later came that same bang we had heard the day before. That was the first doodlebug we saw. It fell on Bow and killed a woman and her five children.
After that we started following air-raid drills again.
17
The Dirtiest Woman in the World
(1940–50)
For most of the war we lived in Keogh Road and there was a young woman who lived next door. Her husband was away in the army so we had never seen him from the time we moved in. She had three children, twin girls and a boy. The two girls were real beauties, long blonde hair, clear blue eyes, smooth unblemished skin, and always smiling, always pleasant. But she was ugly, she was unbelievably ugly, the sort of face that made you instinctively either stare in grim fascination or look away in embarrassment and disgust. Then at last her husband got some leave and was coming home for a week. I couldn’t wait to see who would or could have married such an impossibly ugly woman. When he finally arrived I got the shock of my life – he truly was one of the most handsome men I have ever seen. Goodness knows how they got together or what he saw in her, but they made the most unlikely couple you could imagine.
Still, no one can help being ugly. But much worse, to my mind, was that she was dirty. Her hands and face were dirty, her hair hung down matte
d into lank, greasy, cord-like strands, her clothes were dirty, her children were dirty and her house was dirty. The girls were evacuated away from London for a long time but wanted to get back to their mum and were eventually reunited. They turned up clean, beautiful and cared for, with long, flowing blonde hair. Within a couple of days their heads were covered with the same straggling mess of greasy rats’ tails as their mother. When her husband came home on that leave they went to bed and in the middle of the night he woke up to find himself covered with fleas. She was literally flea-infested. So he got her up in the middle of his first night of leave and washed her hair in paraffin. Some romantic homecoming. The truth was, she just had absolutely no idea how to look after herself – I suppose that for some reason nobody had ever taught her how. I never knew anything about her childhood or why she should have missed out on such basic upbringing.