When Will the War End Mummy?

I was born in August 1939, just one month before World War 2 was declared. My father joined the Royal Army Service Corps soon after these equally momentous occasions and was sent out into what was called the “Middle Eastern Theatre”, Egypt, India and thereabouts. Mother and I were left almost alone in the two year old three bed semi which hard saving had won them soon after their marriage. I say we were almost alone because our solitude was shared with two of my mother’s lively “Geordie” sisters who frequently stayed with us, when, indeed, I found myself with three mothers! The sisters were both in the local ARP (Air Raid Precautions) team and wore huge steel helmets when they went on duty to prove it. Of these more anon.

I have no recollection of my first experience of the war, it is a story which became part of family legend. I believe it happened during 1940/1 when the “Blitz” bombing raids were at their heaviest. Our home was in Potters Bar some 15 miles north of London but the bombers came out over Hertfordshire most nights. I would think that after dropping their deadly loads on the capital their attempts to turn from home, accompanied by our harrying Spitfires and Hurricanes, forced them out over the suburbs. However on that eventful night it seems that mother, sisters and their visiting mother were huddled with me in the dug-out shelter in the back garden when it was noticed that I was not doing so well, in fact looking rather peaky, yellow even; in retrospect it was probably caused by the feeble torchlight which provided illumination in the blacked-out shelter.

“Get that bairn into the house and some medicine into him”, said grandmother. And bombers or no, grandmother was obeyed. The “medicine” turned out to be a teaspoonful of whisky; what wonderful remedies they had for baby ailments in those days! I was duly settled into the cot, the bombers went home and the ladies prepared their own potent cure-all, “a nice coopa tea”. However their post air-raid peace was soon shattered by a strange and uncouth wailing from upstairs. They rushed in convoy up to the front room where my cot stood next to my mother’s bed, and in the cot a strange sight; a twelve month old boy standing, clutching the cot rail with one hand, swinging his baby bonnet in circles by a string in the other, bouncing up and down in great glee and “singing” at the top of his voice, his baby face engulfed in a huge smile. The medicine certainly brought me round and even today I cannot recommend it highly enough, only in larger doses.

I thus grew to consciousness in a world dominated by indulgent women and the early knowledge that there was “a war” on. What the actual meaning of that short word implied I doubt I understood, nor whether “a war” constituted a permanent condition of life, although my first memories remaining now are all of war events. They flash out of the overall surrounding darkness like brilliantly lit photo-slides from a projector and demonstrate the importance which I must have attached to this “war” in that they are my first abiding memories.

Similarly, whether I understood what “bombing” actually was I know not. I suppose it was the reactions of mother, aunts and grandparents which communicated a fear of this “war” and its possibility of “bombing”, which was somehow associated with the hair-raising call of the warning siren which ululated through most nights in an alternating, slowly ascending, descending wail to say that the bombers were on their way, then the menacing roar of the bombers themselves.

Sometimes the memories are not without humour, especially those of the two aunts dressed in black and wearing their great helmets to go on their air raid precaution duties which consisted of patrolling the local streets in search of house lights shining through incorrectly closed blackout curtains. At sight of their domed steel heads I would run shrieking to mother to their great amusement and to my mother’s annoyance. I sometimes think that they were more effective in this than in their patrols. Indeed I remember them returning at times convulsed with laughter over some occurrence out on the “blackout” patrol. It wasn’t all doom and gloom in the ”blackout”, not out in the suburbs anyway.

The shelter in the garden soon proved to be below the local water table and not long after my first drunken experience it became so waterlogged that it could no longer be used. No bombs had fallen on Potters Bar, anyway, although we shall see that some did, and when the siren commenced its banshee wail my mother put out as many lights as possible, double-checked the blackout curtains, and moved about the house more silently than usual, putting me to bed but constantly coming up to see me, especially when her sisters were out on what was their really most dangerous mission.

One particular evening when the siren had sounded, I stood, a growing going-on-three year old now, stark naked in the living room before the brightly burning coal fire, glass of diluted war-concentrate orange juice in one hand, biscuit in the other, when the sound of a fast approaching aero engine rushed towards the house. The two aunts converged upon me from opposite sides of the room and bore me between them under the living-room table where they lay together soaked in orange juice, in the kind of helpless laughter which I think was so essential to people then in order to get through what were really grim times, while I extricated myself, similarly dripping orange-juice, biscuit in crummy destruction, and enquired indignantly, “What did you do that for?”.

Another, similar, but more frightening incident occurred one night well after bedtime. I was awoken by the sound of airplanes over the house and I can still hear the alternating roar of the engines as they fought it out overhead, for another clear memory is the staccato rattle of aircraft cannon — there was a classic “dogfight” taking place directly over our house. My mother was wide awake next to me and although she said nothing I could sense her anxiety. Suddenly the roaring was drowned by a higher, ear-piercing whine which seemed to fall towards us, gaining in nerve-racking volume as it came. Mother scooped me close to her in a crushing so-tight embrace as the ‘planes, surely one pursued and one pursuing, throttles pushed wide, skimmed the roof-top then climbed away into the night sky. She spoke then, great shuddering words of thanks to the god who had, it seemed, sanctioned these frightening events.

And it was surely about this time that an enemy aircraft, perhaps heading for home still loaded, perhaps uncertain of his whereabouts, or perhaps even spotting an unguarded chink of light from a carelessly drawn blackout curtain, dropped a stick of incendiary bombs which burned down several houses just minutes away from us. The aunts were on ARP duty that night. They were not laughing when they came home.

A more regular war sound came from the 10 mile distant anti-aircraft battery stationed on Hatfield aerodrome, then belonging to the De Havilland Aircraft Company and making “Mosquito” fighter-bombers, latterly part of British Aerospace, now built upon. Their guns rumbled and muttered in the north most nights when a raid was on. I remember one night in particular as I lay in the “big bed” listening to the distant muffled detonations, mother came up to ascertain that all was well and I said drowsily,

“When will the war end, Mummy?”

“Soon, we all hope, soon,” was the whispered reply.

Well that “soon”, hoped for in 1941 or 2, was to last for another four years and in 1944 the first move towards today’s unmanned missile warfare was actively made with the German V1 and V2 rockets.

The first of these was in conventional aircraft shape with a short tubby fuselage, stubby wings and a rocket motor, although they were quite slow. The fuselage was packed with high explosives and the motor made a low rumbling noise reminiscent of the lowest register of a water filled trombone. This motor was designed to cut out at target distance when the devilish machine fell and exploded on whatever it fell upon. And it was this menacing gurgling rumble which now became the nightly horror. Indeed we were told that if we could hear them we were safe, for when the motor cut the things then glided obliquely downwards for some distance, before coming devastatingly to ground; if one hit you, you never heard it coming! Nevertheless the knowledge of the death and destruction attached to that fearful rumble made us huddle together in breathless dread until it had passed on. By then I was old enough to begin to appreciate what was going on and what the “doodlebugs”, as they were cheerfully called, did when they hit.

The V2 was the first true missile I suppose. Wingless and really rocket shaped they were fired high into the stratosphere at tremendous velocity and you really didn’t hear them at all until they arrived. They had no nick-names, they were “V2’s”. Germany sent them over at all times of day and night; you never knew when — and one fell in Potters Bar one afternoon; smack on our old wooden Catholic church in Southgate Road across the High Street, the then Great North Road, the old part of Potters Bar — and my father’s parents lived in Southgate Road.

That afternoon, down in “new” Potters Bar, my mother and I were just setting out for the ten minute walk to the local shops. I remember clearly pausing with her at the front gate as a huge column of smoke shot high into the air in the High Street direction. The terrific detonation followed several totally silent seconds later. Mother knew straight away what had happened. We stood irresolute at the garden gate as she explained and worried. What to do? There were few telephones at that time and the High Street was ten minutes’ bus ride away; ten minutes suddenly became a long, long time for my poor mother.

Truth to tell I am unsure what happened then, apart from the fact that our walk to the “top shops” was not continued. I believe mother used a call box to call the police for information. In any event she discovered that the church had received a direct hit and that Southgate Road was sealed off. We had no news of nanna and grandad until late that night when information gradually filtered through that apart from not having one whole window pane left in their house, or any other in their terrace come to that, they were alright but for minor cuts and bruises. Mother gave thanks again!

The church grounds mercifully shielded the houses in Southgate Road although I think some on the terrace end were damaged. Father Grande who had christened me some five years earlier had left the church just minutes before the V2’s arrival and was safe in the church house which was some distance away and somehow untouched. People walking past in Southgate Road, however, were not so lucky as they were wide open to the blast in that direction. A friend of my mother and her little daughter who was about my age and who I knew well, were included in these casualties. Both were killed. Mother did not give thanks!

Soon after this, bombers, dog-fights, V1’s and V2’s all became things of the past as the allied forces, advancing through France during the summer of 1944, entered Germany in early 1945 where the last German forces surrendered on 7th April.

My last memory of World War II happened later in 1945. How much I understood by then the meaning of this word “war”, how much I realised that this “war” which had been part of my short life since the very dawn of conscious awareness and had become one with all the other everyday events of living, even though, mercifully, it only passed over us in the skies, only occasionally actually touching our lives at home, how much I realised that this “war” had now ended, as my mother and aunts and grandparents said it would one day, I do not know. But they had also said that a man called “Daddy” who really belonged in our house and who I knew only through letters and comical drawings sent to me from lands, so I was told, far away, would come home when the war finished. Which during my sixth year it had. And early in my seventh year he did.

One night, I know not how late, I was woken by the click of the garden gate. Mother appeared to be awake and waiting, left her bed very quickly, throwing on her dressing gown and I wondered, as there were now no more bombers or rockets, and anyway the siren hadn’t sounded, why she was in such a rush. However, she dashed downstairs and I heard voices, the front door closed and the voices continued — and the other voice was a man’s!

“Mummy, who’s that man you’re getting into bed with?” I enquired, puzzled, a little later.

“It’s Daddy!” was the choked reply — and a whole new life began.

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