EAST ACTON: ARP AND EVACUATION 1939

ARP Air Raid Precautions - these were people who would look after us if there was a war. Our local Air Raid Siren was put on a very tall post beside the railway bridge at the Wormwood Scrubs end of Old Oak Common Lane. A policeman operated this.

When it was tested it produced a loud blood-curdling sound that couldn’t be ignored. Starting as a low moan it rose to a high screaming wail, then dropped down to a moan, then back up to a wail, doing this several times before finally fading away leaving a loud silence. It was quickly named: “Moaning Minnie”. All the grown-ups told us that if we ever heard that sound we must run home as fast as we could. Lucky I got those new plimsolls for my fourth birthday!

Sunday morning, 3rd September, my sister Beryl (9) and I were visiting Gran and Grandpa (Ames) at Taylors Green (5 minutes walk away). I think Mum’s sisters, Aunties Glad and Audrey, were at our house, (18 The Green) listening to the wireless (as the radio was then called). We were playing in the garden with their cat when Gran suddenly called out to Beryl that we had better go straight home.

Halfway down Long Drive the siren suddenly started wailing, which frightened the birds, started all the dogs barking and stopped us dead in our tracks. Then Beryl grabbed my hand and hurtled home dragging me behind, stumbling and tripping, trying to keep up. The grown-ups were worried, looking for us and also up at the sky. We were bundled out to the shelter clutching cushions. There was water in the shelter, Beryl didn’t want to climb down in and spoil her Sunday best clothes - we were pushed inside and told to stay there.

War had been declared, followed in minutes by the siren. It was a mistake, soon ended by the “All Clear’ signal - the siren just sounding a steady high note. The grown-ups laughed with relief and joked about it, but they were very shaken, people really did think that hundreds of German bombers could suddenly appear overhead.

BLACK OUT
No light must be shown at night. The gas street lamps round The Green were turned off. Mum had to buy blackout material to hang over the windows as the ordinary curtains still let some light through. Large pieces were hung over the doors as well. The hall light had to be switched off before opening the front door to visitors.

We now had an Air Raid Warden, Mr. Cuddiford from number 15, to look after us and enforce the blackout rules. He was short and portly and wore a dark blue ‘boiler suit’ (now called ‘overalls’) plus a ‘tin hat’ (helmet) with a big letter ‘W’ for Warden on it. During the period later known as ‘The Phoney War’ (when nothing war-like seemed to be happening here) people found all the new ARP regulations very irritating. Wardens, with their officious manner, and always quoting ‘regulations’, were soon regarded as “just little Hitlers”. That attitude would change later.

People were being killed in the blackout with no street lighting and buses and cars with caps over their headlights to reduce the light shown. Aunty Glad said it was very hard finding your way in the dark. All the trees on Old Oak Common Lane had white bands painted round them, as did telegraph poles, lampposts, and any obstruction on the pavement. Street corners and crossing places had broad white stripes painted on the curbs. The long steps in front of the East Acton shops on the high side, opposite Woolworths store, were marked as well. Cars and Lorries had white mudguards, so did buses plus a big white spot on the back. People were told to ‘wear something white at night’.

EVACUATION
Beryl was taken to John Perryn School with her name on a luggage label tied to her coat and a parcel of clothes and sandwiches. She was being evacuated with the school. Mum cried, but I was quite pleased to be rid of her, she was always pulling faces at me! I think Beryl was excited at going off on an adventure, too. Evacuation was the moving of mothers and children away from the danger of being bombed in London. Mum and me went on a short holiday to Torquay, in Devon. Dad, on a leave pass from the Army, visited us there, and we had our picture taken in a studio.

Back home we had to wait to be evacuated properly until Aunty Glad’s baby, Adrienne, was born in October. Although I didn’t know at the time, my Mum was also expecting a baby. I was expecting a Rupert Bear Annual for Christmas — if you still had Christmas when there was a war on.

For evacuation we all went on a long stop-start-stop-start train journey from, I think, Acton Central Station, to Poole in Dorset. It took ages and it was nearly dark when we arrived. We were put into disused holiday chalets. They were piled up with deckchairs and camp beds and everything was very dusty and stale smelling. “Gas lighting and chemical toilets!” My Mum and Aunty Glad were really disgusted, having spent all day travelling and having left modern electric light homes for this. And all because of that man Hitler.

It was cold, wet, and miserable. I couldn’t be carried by Mum and had to hold on to baby Adrienne’s pram, getting soaked by all the wet bushes along the paths around the chalets. But the Jerries didn’t show up and bomb everything in London. Mum and Aunty Glad talked about it, and then said: “We are going home!” In a short time we were all safely back home in East Acton.

We must have seemed very ungrateful to the people in Poole, but there really is no place like home, and your very own air raid shelter.

Revised extracts from ‘A Sheltered Childhood ~ Wartime Family Memories of an East Acton Child’

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