How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (34 page)

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

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