The war years

I was six years old  in 1939. Much has been said of that last summer of 1939. The quiet before the storm; the disbelief of those hazy September days that anything evil could cast its dark cloud over that idyllic Autumn.

   My brother and I sailed our boats on Blackheath pond on a beautiful September Sunday. They reached the middle and crossed and we crouched one on each side of the pond waiting to send them off again, their sails filling with the gentle breeze the water rippling in their wake when suddenly the world changed for ever. A warden, astride his cycle, tin helmet balanced precariously on his head, whistle blowing furiously shot into view and we all obediently ran for cover, a barrage balloon like a sad elephant lurching into the sky. A passing doctor in his car took us all to his house nearby. Later we discovered that our boats, lovingly created by my father, had been spirited away by some unknown being as indeed peacetime similarly was at that moment except in that case we knew the culprit - Adolph Hitler.

I remember quite vividly the Saturday in 1940 when the ‘Battle of Britain reached its climax, a brilliant blue sky, the sun reflecting off the silver fighters, little dots in the sky, the huge red fires over Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs as the day drew on into night; the the loose barrage balloons lurching out of the smoke and flames.

  The war for my brother and I was in many ways exciting; collecting twisted lumps of shrapnel off the green outside our house in Charlton Road. At nights we  slept in the large communal shelter deep under the little park emerging sleepy eyed in the morning to the smell of smoke and an altered landscape of rubble and broken windows. My father, a crane driver in Millwall Docks and a veteran of the First World War, was chosen to train troops for the D. Day landings so that they might take over the french docks. He was transferred to Bristol and then to Plymouth and we dutifully followed in his wake as a family experiencing the very worst of the bombing. I have a memory of my mother holding me up above the water in a flooded shelter in Bristol, the candle guttering, shadows playing on the ribbed curved walls dripping with condensation. 

   Our house in Blackheath was never hit but towards the end of the war we nearly received a direct hit from a rocket in a house we were renting in New Eltham. I was sitting on the living room floor doing a crossword, my mother knitting, my elder brother upstairs in his bedroom practising the violin. Suddenly the door without any warning came silently towards me and windows shattered in this strange unearthly silence; then the huge explosion. We struggled outside to see our chickens scattered and the wall of our house pulled out in a huge bulge. My father sister and brother were returning from the pictures in Eltham walking up by the horse through  in Green Lane and must have thought we were all killed. Later fireman appeared every now and then with our chickens under their arms, chickens that my father had  fed with grain gathered in his trouser turn ups from the Millwall granary where sometimes he was obliged to crawl across the stored grain to close ventilators. an experience he said was unnerving to the extreme, the fear of sinking below the surface uppermost in his mind. 

   In New Eltham we lived on one side of a three cornered field with a huge oak tree in the middle one of the last surviving from the old Eltham Palace forest. This tree was the centre of all our adventures for us children. Older children had built a camp high up in it’s branches a thick rope the only means of reaching the lower branches. I never had the courage to climb and stood below watching with envy their antics high above my head. This beautiful tree was reduced  to a  short stump and with it a whole row of houses flattened to the ground , several people  killed including some of our best friends; the tree protected us from the full blast. On VE Day we built a bonfire around the blackened stump and later planted a sapling nearby.

   The war for me was a series of fragmented memories; trailing down to the school shelter halfway through my eleven plus; my father digging a hole in the back garden so that when on ‘patrol ‘he might throw himself in - a lesson taken from the Great War and infinitely preferable to diving into the overcrowded Anderson shelter where we played ‘guess the tune’ tapping on empty biscuit tins, rarely sleeping. 

‘There’s something different tonight’ he said one night poking his head through the sacking clad doorway. There was! The first of the doodlebugs. On a tram in broad daylight near Woolwich barracks we all sat with bated breath as one followed us unerringly only in the end to our relief, to drop harmlessly on the huge playing fields that surrounded the barracks. Another low over the roof of our house was tipped wing to wing by a spitfire to eventually land harmlessly on Avery Hill Sports Ground. At least we knew they were coming. Rockets were another matter. One never knew when they would strike. Strangely I still think that first false air raid is the most vivid memory I have of the war perhaps because it was one of personal loss however insignificant.