The Day the War Started

This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by Jenna Benson, for Three Counties Action, on behalf of Ethel Payne, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

When war was declared my dad went down to the bottom of the garden and started digging a trench. The alarm went off and we all went down to the trench — it was only shallow at this stage (later it became a proper Anderson Shelter). It was all very scary. I remember the sirens giving the all clear, then they sounded again, so we had to go back to the trench. I was 14 at the time.

I left school before I was 14. War was declared on 3 September and my birthday was on 22 September. They told me not to go back on 3rd so I left school before I was 14.

There was a very sad story when my cousin, about the same age as I was then, and his family went to an aunt’s shelter at Carpenter Gardens where they had a safer shelter, better than the one at my cousin’s own home. Ironically a flying bomb fell on them all and it was a direct hit, so they were all killed. If he had all stayed at home in Palmer’s Green they would all be alive today. Their name was Pretlove.

When I left school I went to work at Mill’s Equipment on the way to Walthamstow from Barnet. We made clothing and equipment for soldiers. I used to have to hammer the webbing flat ready for the machines to stitch. My fingers were black and blue where the hammer missed the webbing, and I had numerous blood blisters.

My father wouldn’t allow us to be evacuated. “Wherever I am, the children stay”, he used to say. He had been a prisoner of war during World War I. So we were in London for 6 years during the war and bombed every night for several months. We learnt to tell the difference between the German and British planes, also the times of the air raids. They were quite regular. We used to say, “They’re late tonight”, if they came after 6 15 p.m. and didn’t arrive until 7.00 p.m.

Sometimes we would spend all night in the shelter and go straight off to work the next morning. My working day started at 7.30 a.m. and finished at 5.00 p.m. I earned about 4½d an hour and took home on average 30s a week. If it was £2 a week it was a good week.

How I met my husband

My friend was a film buff, and we used to go to Palmer’s Green cinema. She worked there and the staff used to take it in turns to do fire watching. A fourteen-year-old boy was sweet on her, and brought along his friend, Alfred — who later became my husband. To make him prove his love for me I asked Alfred to leap from the balcony of the cinema into the stalls. He did. We were both sixteen. He was called up at sixteen and a half and was on the MTB (a landing craft) in the navy. He couldn’t swim. He started off at Butlins at Skegness. We were married at nineteen in 1945. I borrowed a wedding dress and a relative who had a flower shop made me a lovely bouquet.

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