How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (30 page)

Us: Are you going to be a pilot?

Henry: Oh, no.

Us: What then? A navigator?

Henry: Oh, no.

Us: But you will learn to fly?

Henry: Oh, no.

Us: Why ever not?

Henry: I don’t particularly want to.

Us: Then you’ll have to be a gunner or something?

Henry: Oh, no. I’ll be ground staff.

Us: What? A penguin?

Henry: I think that’s what they call them.

Us: But you will serve overseas, and you’ll have to fly to get there.

Henry: Oh, I hope not.

Us: Why? Don’t you want to serve overseas and help in the fight?

Henry: Oh, no. Not in wartime.

Us: Not in wartime? What do you mean?

Henry: Not in wartime. It’s far too dangerous.

There were no more questions. We simply laughed ourselves silly but Henry remained quite serious.

Gwen Harris, Oxted, Surrey

I was a special constable in Scunthorpe during the war. One early morning, during an air raid, a bus drew up alongside me and the driver got out.

‘Where’s the lambing pen, mate?’

I looked at him in surprise since he seemed to have a bus full of passengers rather than a lorryload of sheep.

‘I’ve thirty-six pregnant women here that I want to get rid of!’ I directed him quickly to the nearby maternity home.

G. F. Leawing, Lincoln

On another occasion I was working at a housing estate. There were some forty-six incendiary roof fires during one raid and a housewife told me she’d been unable to stir
her man, a former trawlerman who’d been serving on minesweepers and was enjoying a bit of leave with a drink or two, to join her in the shelter. I was on watch for incendiary targets and I
saw one go right through the roof of her building. I took my stirrup pump and bucket and entered the building and went up to her upstairs flat. I shouted, trying to locate the man, but there was no
reply. When I got upstairs I checked each room, one at a time. Eventually I found both the man snoring away, and the hole in the ceiling of the bedroom. Smoke came from a hole in the bed, between
the chap’s legs. The bed was on fire. He was coughing and snorting, but didn’t wake. I got the stirrup pump and started to put out the fire and he began to stir. When he realized his
situation he leapt from the bed. He pulled the bed over on its side and we saw that the bomb had gone right through a spiral bedspring into the floor, where it had stuck on a joist. With the fire
extinguished he told the chief that he’d been so fast asleep that, if it hadn’t been for me, he would have ‘lost his lot’. I knew he was stinking drunk, but said nothing. I
think it was very easy to get like that for men coming home on leave.

Mrs J. W. Graham, Lanarkshire

It was one of those beautiful evenings that close one of June’s perfect days. We three, loathe to go into the house, sat in the garden talking and remembering other nights
that we’d shared as drivers in the ARP service.

We were becoming enveloped in a long silence of perhaps sombre memories of those far-off times, when I reminded the others that it was twenty-two years ago exactly since Hitler had begun his
doodlebug attacks, sending waves of the first of his secret weapons. They caused such widespread damage that communications were getting very strained, and the ambulance and rescue squads were
getting adept at judging just where the fall would be after the V1 engine cut out. Not waiting for official instructions, most of the personnel would be on incidents – destinations unknown
– leaving the depot bare of manpower.

About 2.30 a.m., a call for the mobile canteen came in. Like so many of the vehicles used by the ARP, it had been converted from an ambulance to its present use. It was pretty ancient, its gear
lever was on the right-hand side and you could see the road through the gears. It had been fitted with a fifty-gallon water tank over the driver’s seat, and if you wanted to turn a corner
without the vehicle toppling over, you always saw to it that the tank was full. One side of the vehicle had been made to open up, forming a canopy over the counter. Someone had always to be inside
to rescue something or other that moved from its moorings.

This night, when the call came, there was only one other person beside the depot chief who could come with me, and that was the cook who had stayed on all night, as she was too frightened to go
home. She wasn’t a particularly bright person, but was willing to go in the back. I asked her to get a crate of milk loaded, only to be told there were only two quart-bottles until the
milkman came. Heavens! Eighteen cups to a pint – that wouldn’t go far.

I told her to keep things like the primus stoves on the floor as much as possible, and that when I banged twice she should start filling some cups before pulling up the flap, and so be ready for
the big rush when it came.

The sky was just beginning to get that pearly look of the dawn, but there was still the throbbing of German bombers and the sound of distant gunfire. It was a terrible business remembering to
use your right hand to change gear, and I always had to look down. So I was unable to stop a friendly warden when he banged twice on the side of the van in greeting.

From the back of the van there was a terrific rending sound and a bang. Stopping, and hopping out round to the back, I saw that, at what the cook thought was my signal, the flap had been opened
and sheared off as I’d passed a lamp post before pulling up. Poor cook was looking a bit white and strained, but I said not to worry and placed the flap against the wall so that we could
collect it on the return journey. She’d placed all the cups and saucers out on the counter too, and they were a bit of a shambles.

A short way down the road, I began to pull into a clear space when, without warning, the road caved in and the front wheels sank down to rest on a pipe of some sort. The noise from the back was
ominous. I had visions of scalding water, the floor awash with tea, and a prostrate cook. I tentatively opened the door and wanted to laugh, and yet could not, at the sight of all that broken
crockery, the urns slowly dribbling out tea into the sink, and the cook, who had come to rest sitting in a bucket, clasping the two quart-bottles of milk. Out of the debris we salvaged a dozen or
so cups, and for anyone very thirsty, a few saucers. It all became a bit hilarious, with hands snatching cups before they’d been rinsed and the queue for saucers, all moaning, while we were
trying to get used to standing at an angle.

On returning to the depot and leaving the canteen to be towed out, we found another job lined up. A young baby, just three days old, had been injured and was in hospital. Its mum was unharmed in
the rest centre, and every three hours we would be collecting her to feed her baby. It was 5 a.m. The milk round had started.

May Simpson, Romford, Essex

Another time, a bomb hit a hose that was being used to fight a fire caused by incendiaries and all the water cascaded all over us. We were wet through – but cheerful.

For two weeks we were evacuated from Woolwich Hospital down to Farnborough. One night there was a noise on the roof and this turned out to be a German airman who had baled out of his bomber. I
don’t suppose he thought that was funny, but we did.

Betty Sheperdson, York

I was a full-time Civil Defence volunteer and my husband, who had an artificial limb and was employed on the Tyne by a well-known shipbuilding and engineering firm, was a
part-time CD volunteer. We were always busy as there were many ‘guest nights’, as we called the air raids, most of which seemed to come on moonlit Friday nights.

During one particularly heavy raid, with ack-ack fire going on and shrapnel crashing down, my husband was manning his post when he heard two seamen coming up the main road, pretty drunk and
singing and staggering about. He yelled: ‘Come on you fellows, take cover,’ and then went back to his post. When I got down there I discovered two very wet chaps. There was a
brick-built public shelter nearby, but in their inebriated state they had mistakenly stumbled into a demonstration Anderson shelter that was awaiting removal. It had filled with water and the pair
were drenched. They spent the rest of the night in the public shelter, soaked to the skin from the waist down, but very sober. My husband made them hot coffee and I took this to them along with a
couple of blankets to warm them up. They were particularly unhappy because, somewhere along the way, they had lost the bottles from which they had been drinking. The following day, when the
Anderson shelter was pumped out, lying in it were two bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale and half a bottle of rum.