Authors: Sean Longden
However, after less than a month John was thrown into a difficult situation. In August 1940, a lone German bomber dropped its bombs on the factory in Wimbledon where Gina’s father worked. He was among the seven casualties:
That hit me hard. I had only known her a fortnight and there was no other male around to accompany her and her mother as they went to try and find out what had happened. So I took it upon myself to take them to his workmate’s house to find out which hospital he had been taken to. That’s where we found out he had been killed and taken to the mortuary.
Taking on the role of the only male, John acted as their escort, taking responsibility for the two women as they tried to cope with their grief. Although just a boy himself, since he had told Gina he was eighteen he could hardly avoid the role of their protector.
In the months that followed, the couple grew closer but, with nightly air raids, their social life was limited:
We did our courting in her air raid shelter. There’d be her gran and her mother, and the two of us sitting there holding hands – all the time checking how high the water was rising from the floor of the Anderson shelter, then bailing it out with a saucepan. We used to hold hands, maybe have a little kiss in the dark. And there was a terrible smell of a paraffin lamp. How romantic it was!
Since it would not have been seemly to stay the night, John waited as long as possible and then walked back through the air raids to his parents’ house – all the time listening to the ‘Ping! Ping!’ noise as shrapnel hit landed around him.
At Christmas 1940, just before his sixteenth birthday, John Osborne went to Godalming, where Gina was staying with relatives. On 29 December, the night of his birthday, the couple went out for a walk. In the distance, to the east, they could see a yellowy-orange haze in the sky and wondered what it was. It soon became clear: London was being bombed. ‘The next morning I had to go to work. By this time I was working for the Electric Light Company in the City of London, reading electricity meters. I caught a train to Waterloo then walked to Aldersgate Street.’ What he witnessed as he walked to work was an unforgettable sight. It seemed the whole city had been razed to the ground. Whole swathes of the streets that he knew were now smouldering ruins. Some buildings were still burning. There were bemused office workers wandering the streets, weaving in and out of
the rubble and the mazes of hoses, avoiding the burst water mains and flaming gas pipes. Familiar landmarks had gone: only St Paul’s stood unmarked: ‘There was this terrible stench, there were hoses all over the road. The area I knew, around the Guildhall, where I did my meter reading, was in absolute ruins.’ As he made his way through the ruins just one thought occupied his mind: ‘What will I find when I get there?’
He was lucky: his workplace still stood and the staff were ready to start work. He was immediately shifted to a new position:
That was when they switched me from meter reading to being an electrician’s mate. I was palled up with an older man and we went round the bombed buildings taking away the electricity meters and cutting off the mains supply. We went on to do this all over the City and in Southwark. We had to make sure there was no live current in bombed buildings.
One of their jobs was to cut off the power in a soap factory that had been bombed. John and his colleagues had to step carefully across the sticky, soap-smothered floors, where the factory’s product had melted and then mixed with the water from fire brigade hoses. Elsewhere, they struggled to identify buildings in streets they knew well:
We had written instructions to go to addresses to turn off the electricity so we’d try to work out which building we were supposed to go to. Sometimes we’d have to guess – you couldn’t work out which number the building was. So we’d go in and do the job and just hope it’s the right building. And hope it didn’t collapse on us.
John Osborne later noted that his role was insignificant: ‘I was called an electrician’s mate, but all I did was carry the toolkit and hold the torch. My cleverest thing was fitting a battery into a torch.’ Though he downplayed his role, John was fulfilling a vital task: the mains had to be isolated to prevent accidents and further fires. Their role was not without dangers. They had to negotiate rickety, charred stairways and search through wrecked buildings to find fuse boxes.
Unlike many other workers in the City, the sixteen year old was unsentimental about what he had witnessed:
I felt a certain pride in the City of London, and it was shocking to see the City like that. I was old enough to understand the destruction. But it needed doing: the City was an old place full of narrow lanes and courtyards. Some of the buildings were horrible – it was a dirty old place. I was happy to see the old buildings got rid of, then replaced with something new.
Whilst boys like John Osborne were tasked with making safe the bombsites of the City of London, there were others whose intentions were less honourable. One fifteen year old was convicted of stealing coins from the gas meter of a house whose occupants were seeking safety in a public shelter. The boy’s crime – though minor – was symptomatic of a growing number of children who used the chaos to their own advantage.
Though housebreaking increased as a result of the long hours of night that people spent in shelters, the one crime to make the most impact was looting. In September 1940, magistrate Sir Robert Dummett queried why looters were being brought before him charged with theft. Since looting could be punished with death or penal servitude for life, it was hardly a deterrent to charge looters with a lesser crime, one for which they faced a maximum sentence of three months. Of course, the reality was that many looters took little of any value; they simply picked up small items that they found in the streets. One man was charged with the theft of a few bars of soap from a bombed factory, others for taking enough coal to light their fires or taking a tin of sweets from a shop.
Among the opportunist looters were some who made the crime a habit. The professional criminals were joined by a number of children, who copied their antics. In the East End of London a group of children were caught stealing toys from a bombed warehouse; elsewhere youths disguised themselves as ARP wardens to commit their crimes. Though, for many, this was no more than childish high spirits and a desire to relieve the drab monotony of rationing and wartime shortages, for some it was the beginning of a career in crime.
The opportunities thrown up by the Blitz tempted even the youngest children. One who was unable to resist was seven-year-old Fred Rowe. With his father away from home serving in the Army, his mother
struggled to make ends meet. Whenever the family was short of money she simply defaulted on the rent, loaded a cart with their possessions and did a ‘moonlight flit’. Having moved from Pimlico to Battersea, she had taken the family into an area of heavy bombing. The devastation may not have matched the levels seen in the East End, but the violence marked a turning point in young Fred’s life: ‘It was months of destruction and death. It used to do my head in. I thought I can’t deal with this!’ Amidst the violence of the aerial assault on London, he soon found a way to occupy himself.
Leaving a public air shelter in the aftermath of an air raid, he noticed the results of local shops having been blasted:
I got the idea that there were all these shops with their windows blown out. We were skint. You’d see all this food everywhere, all over the pavement. There wasn’t much, but it was grub. And it was more than we had. So I thought, if I can get out of the shelter a bit quicker, I can get a bit of the grub for Mum.
A thought that was conceived to get a bit of extra food on the table had a profound effect on his life.
Having made his plan, Fred made sure he carried a bag with him ready for the next air raid:
The air raid warning went so I ran away and I hid somewhere. So I could be the first one out. These bombs fell quite near. They suck the air out of you! I was running down the street because I could hear these planes coming. And the blast knocked the legs from under me and pushed me against a wall. It seemed like ages before I could catch my breath. I was gasping. My ears were fuckin’ ringing for days afterwards.
Despite having been blown off his feet, the seven year old soon got to work:
There was a butcher’s and a grocer’s shop that had been hit. So I filled my bag up with food and ran home to Mum. She asked where I’d been. I told her I’d got her some food. She said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that, they shoot looters!’ I said, ‘They won’t shoot a little boy!’ She told me they would, because it was wartime. But she still took the bag of food.
This set the pattern for the weeks and months ahead: his mother told him not to steal food; he stole food and justified it by saying the food would otherwise go to waste; she took the food, cooked it and warded off their hunger.
Fred had to take risks by hiding outside during the bombing and there was one factor that he had not expected when he decided to be the first person out in the streets: ‘The air raid wardens were great: when the “all clear” went, they were straight out there clearing away all the bodies. They knew it would upset people. But because I was never in the shelter – I was hiding outside – I saw it all.’
The things he encountered on the streets of his home area shocked him, revolted him and stuck with him forever:
It was terrible. There were fuckin’ body parts everywhere. The first thing I saw was a shoulder and an arm on the street. People had been blown up into trees. There was legs and heads around. I saw a torso in a tree with all the blood dripping down. The worst thing – the one that really got me – was seeing dead babies. I saw babies in the street that had been blown out of windows. They were horrible. I saw women ripped apart, with half the head blown off. The dress was the only way you’d recognize it was a woman. It was the people that wouldn’t leave their houses to go to the shelter. The blast would blow them out of the houses.
On one occasion, as he ran from the shelter, he was followed by his elder sister. As soon as she saw the bodies she screamed and ran back. Yet Fred continued his work. As he later admitted: ‘I was too young to understand what I was going through.’
He took incredible risks to search the streets for food, running through the streets whilst bombs were still falling, taking shelter when he thought it was too dangerous, then scampering out to bombed shops as soon as there was a lull. He began to realize that one of the greatest dangers he faced was blast: ‘When you were in the shelter it would rock, and the ground would rumble, but when you’re out there, standing by a tree or something – the blast throws you. One time it threw me six feet.’ Recognizing the dangers, but unable to resist the lure of free food, he continued looting. One time he ran across a road to grab food he had spotted. He was later confronted by a local ARP
warden, who shouted: ‘You’re fucking mad, Freddy. I saw you out there running across the road to get that bit of meat! You’re a nutter! I was sheltering behind the wall and you’re out there collecting meat! I wouldn’t go anywhere near that.’ For all the horror and the dangers both from bombs and of being caught, Fred was excited by it. The sense of excitement he felt from putting himself in danger would later influence his entire life.
Despite the looting, Fred was also conscious of the need to help people who had been wounded. As soon as he had run home and stored his loot, he returned to the scene of the bombing and offered what help he could. As the emergency services patched up the survivors, Fred asked what he could do to help:
They’d ask us to go to the local hospital, fetch a box of dressings and run them back to them. I did it. But I also nicked sheets from the hospital. There were sheets, blankets and pillows on the beds they had for people who’d been bombed out – I nicked them. Mum didn’t say it was right to do it, but she didn’t refuse them – our sheets were worn out. This was my life. I was just a fuckin’ little street urchin. I didn’t know any better.
When Fred Rowe met a friend who admitted he was always hungry, he offered to take him with him after the next air raid. They hid, then ran out into the streets and collected food from the street, filling their bags with tinned corned beef, tins of beans, biscuits and bread. It was the only night Fred met any opposition: ‘One ARP bloke stopped us. He asked what was in the bags. We said, “It’s food. We’re starving.” He said, “Get on your way. I’ll say I ain’t seen you.” So we ran home.’ It was a close escape, but it did not deter him from further expeditions. Instead, the next day his mate said, ‘My mum thinks you’re a hero, Freddy.’ Further encouraged, Fred decided to continue to risk being caught. Although he never stole from houses, he soon graduated to taking more than just food. One night he spotted a wrecked car standing in the street. Inside was the driver who had been decapitated and had one arm blown off. Unaffected by the sight, Fred approached the car: ‘I nicked his watch.’
Even a child like Fred Rowe, a determined and expert looter, had shown that he was prepared to help out in the aftermath of air raids.
Like so many others, he had played a role in helping out when the emergency services were hard pressed to cope with the effects of the bombing. However, he was too young to play any real role in the fight back against the enemy. Others were not. There was a whole generation of boys who went from acting as first-aiders, messengers and fire-watchers in blitzed towns to being active participants in the conflict.
Like so many British teenagers, fifteen-year-old John Longfield was determined to do his bit for the war effort. Intelligent and
self-confident,
but too young to be called up for military service, there were plenty of other things he could do and so he volunteered for the National Fire Service. Working as a messenger, the youngster soon found his spare time was fully occupied.
On top of regular evening and weekend duties, at least once a week John did an all-night shift at the fire station. Even when he was off-duty, as soon as the air raid siren sounded, he jumped on his bicycle and pedalled furiously to the station to see if he was needed. Whilst there were plenty of false alarms, sometimes he found himself far from home dealing with the aftermath of German bombing raids. Though fewer and far less destructive than the raids of 1940 and 1941, each night of bombing reminded him of the importance of his duties.