WW2 AS A CHILD IN ST.PANCRAS.LONDON

My earliest memory of WW2 is of the unusual events in our house at 11.am on Sunday, 3rd September 1939. I was 5 years old and my mother was washing me in the tin bath in the kitchen. (A family living on each floor of a house, tin baths in the kitchen and shared outside lavatories were the norm for our part of London in those days) The radio was on and suddenly my mother and father rushed out of the house to go 3 houses down to my Grandparents house, leaving me in the bath! A little while later they returned, just as a loud noise started wailing. An air raid siren. War with Germany had just been declared and that was the first of many scary days and loud noises that were to come.
My father had decided that I wasn’t to be evacuated, so, just a few days before war was declared, Mum had taken me to school to wave goodbye to the children being put on buses to go to the railways stations and then on to the country. All the children had luggage labels pinned on their lapels, with their names and address on, boxes with gas masks inside, and carried bags or little suitcases. I felt so sad to see them go, and thought I was missing out on a great holiday! Then when the bombing started every child seemed to disappear and I was left with no friends to play with and no school.
Our street was situated between 3 railway stations, Kings Cross, St. Pancras and Euston, with marshalling yards around each of them. These were areas of railway sidings where all goods, coming in trains from all over Britain and abroad, were stored. The “goods” covered everything - foodstuff, hospital equipment, ammunitions, coal, anything and everything. In wartime this is not the best place to live, believe me, as these are prime sites for German bombers to attack!
Mum and I used to go downstairs to the basement when the air raids first started but later in the war, when the bombing began to get too bad my father, who was a Fire Guard at night, decided it was time for us to go to the local air raid shelter every night while he spent a few hours each night patrolling his “patch”. The shelter was a couple of streets away and became my second home for the rest of the war. The Air Raid siren would go and sometimes we had hardly got out of the front door before the guns started blasting away. I used to pick up bits of hot shrapnel on the way to save for collection to recycle, but one day a large piece fell too near for comfort and I wasn’t allowed to linger after that.
I think there were bunks for about 100 people in the shelter. We all took pillows, sheets and blankets, cups and plates, tin of cocoa, bottle of Camp coffee, sugar and milk powder, biscuits. These were all left, wrapped up in a sheet, on our bunks everyday and very rarely did anything get stolen. One man used to boil up water on primus stoves and come round at 9pm filling our cups with hot water to which we would add our cocoa or coffee. We would drink this and then start getting ready for bed, which mostly meant queuing up for one of the few toilets. These had no door, just a sacking curtain and were very noisy and smelly as the actual toilet was a metal container with lots of disinfectant in it and it had to be emptied daily or they would be full up. Curfew was about 10pm, and then most people would climb into their bunks and try to sleep. Difficult, and very scary, on the bad nights with the guns firing and bombs exploding,
So daily life went on, Dad would go off to work at 7.30am (The factory where he worked made parts for the big guns on battleships), and I would go shopping with my mother to Somers Town market to see what we could get for a meal. This became almost a full time job once rationing got under way. Hours were spent queuing on the off chance of getting an orange, or a couple of onions, etc. I don’t know how women managed as at one time the ration per person for the week was: meat 1/9d (9p today), 2 ounces of butter, 2 ounces cheese, 1egg when you could get it, and whatever British seasonable fruit and vegetables were available. I didn’t know what bananas or pineapples were when they got into the shops long after the war was over. I think it was just 2 ounces of sweets a week too. It was most unusual to see an overweight person in those days, unlike today.
One night in 1942 my father, who had been on duty, came to the air raid shelter to tell us that a landmine had come down and flattened the block of flats and its shelter in the street next to ours and the backs of our houses had come down too, so we were bombed out. That landmine killed nearly 100 people, including my godmother and many friends of my parents. At daybreak we left the shelter and had to walk past all the horror of this attack in order to get to the Rest Centre. (Not a pretty sight as bodies get rather “bitty” when hit by bombs) The Centre was in a school and was run by the WVS. People who had lost their homes and clothes were given a hot cup of tea, soup and a sandwich. After this they gave out bits and pieces of clothing so that you could at least have one change of clothes. As I had lost all my toys I was given a beautiful long-legged, blonde hair doll, dressed in a little red and white gingham dress and a red cardigan. She was the best doll I ever owned! Mum and I were shown to a room with armchairs where we could sit and wait for my dad to return. He had gone back to our street to find out what had happened to my grandmother and uncle (his mum and brother). Gran had been sent to another Rest Centre and Uncle was in hospital having his ear stitched and other cuts sorted out. He, unfortunately, had left the basement to go upstairs to the toilet and was sitting on the loo when the mine went off and took the whole back of the house off, leaving him still sitting there, waiting for the Fire brigade to get a ladder up to rescue him. The problem with these landmines was that they came down quietly by parachute, so you had no way of knowing that one was coming your way. The high explosive bombs did as much damage but at least you heard the whistle of the string of bombs coming down, so no way would you leave the basement for the toilet until the wave of bombers passed over and there was a break in the bombing, even if you had to hang on for hours!
We then had 6 weeks of sleeping at night in our bunks in the shelter and then, at 6am every morning, walking over 2 miles to my other grandmother’s house where Mum and I stayed all day while Dad went off to work. After this we got the ground floor of a house to live in, with my grandmother and uncle in the rooms on the first floor. This house was right opposite the shelter where we slept at nights, how lucky was that?
The Luftwaffe gave us a short rest after that and I actually got to go to primary school after 2 years without schooling. As some of the children had drifted back to London since the bombing had stopped, the authorities had to open up some of the schools again. After a few weeks the bombing started again, the children disappeared and school closed again. This pattern was to continue throughout the war. The school had no books, paper or pens, desks or chairs. I suppose that had all been evacuated with the children. We were sorted into groups, put in classrooms with bricked up windows, and spent the school hours standing round the classroom doing spelling bees and mental arithmetic, moving up to the front if you got it right, to the back if you got it wrong. Sometimes teachers would bring in one of their own books and read to us, which was good as we got to sit down for a change, even if it was only on the floor. One teacher, from Scotland, decided to teach us all the songs of the American Civil War. So we learnt to sing these American songs with a Scottish accent. I was very lucky that I had learnt to read by the time I was 5 years old, and could do simple arithmetic, which I suppose was all taught to me by my mother. As I rarely had children to play with then I spent most free time reading books from the local library, which I still do today. I think from September 1939 to June 1945 I had about 1 year at school, so I was very lucky that when I had to take a test at school in April/May 1945 I must have got the right answers as I got a place at a Grammar School. The test had been my 11 plus exam but nobody told me or my parents that I had sat it until a month later when my parents were asked to put in order the 3 schools they would prefer me to get interviews for.
Though there was not much schooling there were still things to do. Every Sunday morning I would go with my dad selling National Savings Stamps at houses in our local streets. This was a good way for people to save a bit of money for after the war and help put money into the Government coffers at the same time. Dad had to send off weekly records of everyone’s savings in case they got killed, then next of kin could claim the money.
Then there was a scheme thought up for children to collect reading books for the Armed Services. I would take my dolls pram and go knocking on doors all around our area, collecting any books that people no longer wanted. If you collected, say, 25 books you got a badge to pin on saying that you were a “Private” in the book army, get another 50 and you became a “Lance Corporal” and so on. I can’t remember the correct figures, but anyway I ended up a “General”, being one of the highest collectors of books and went, with a few other children, to tea with the Mayor at St. Pancras (now Camden) Town Hall. The local people must have been really sick of me always knocking asking if they had anymore books yet and the Forces must have felt the same about some of the awful books they were sent.
Mum used to get wool, from the WVS I think, and knitted jumpers, socks, and scarves for the Royal Navy. As she had taught me to knit I was allowed to help with the scarves. We often had a laugh thinking about the knitting instructions for the huge navy blue jumpers and gigantic white oiled-wool long socks she had to knit, wondering who had made up the patterns and just what size giants did they think were in the Navy.
Along the way “war” things happened like the unexploded bomb that fell right next to the shelter, and as our house was opposite it, we were sent to the Rest Centre for the day whilst they de-fused it.
We had quite a lot of bombs dropped round about us and our windows were always being smashed by the blast, and bits of ceiling plaster coming down. One night we went back to the house after the All Clear had sounded to find our kitchen extension had been hit by incendiary bombs and mum’s line of washing, hanging up across the length of the room, was all alight. Unfortunately my cat had been badly injured by a piece of roofing slate, but like us he survived the War.
Then there were the V1 flying bombs called “doodlebugs”. These were a bit worrying because you could hear them flying over, but as long as you could hear their engines going you were ok, but as soon as they stopped you just prayed that you wouldn’t be under it when it crashed down.
After that came the V2 rockets. These were the worse ones as you never saw them or knew they were coming, you just heard the explosion.
Sometime during the war there was a bus blown right up against the first floor of a house a few streets away from us. The photo of it was in all the national newspapers at the time and I saw it again recently, on TV, in a programme about the civilian’s war. It brought back many memories of that time and made me decide to write this saga.
Early on in the war I remember asking my mum why this man called Hitler, whom I had never met or done any thing to upset, kept trying to kill us and she told me she was as puzzled as me as she had never met him either!!
Now when I go back to the streets where we lived then, and see the high-rise flats built where all the bombsites were, I am amazed that I’m around to tell the tale when so many other people died.

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