Living with the war

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While I was evacuated Eastbourne had been a deserted town with so many families and all the children evacuated. Now the town was coming back to life with the passing of the invasion threat. This did not stop Jerry dropping bombs on us, either by design or by accident. You read a lot about people having Anderson Shelters dug into their back gardens. I think this was mostly in the London area. We were more sophisticated and had a Morrison shelter. This was a steel box with four massive angles at the corners and a top and bottom frame. The top frame provided for steel mesh side panels all round the sides and the top was a steel plate. There was a steel wire frame across the bottom to support a double mattress. It seemed huge but was only about six feet by five feet. It took up a lot of space in the front room and sometimes, like at Christmas, we would move it into the kitchen to be a table for Christmas Day. We got quite good at moving it.

I didn’t mean to tell you about Morrison shelters, it just happened. You see it wasn’t used only when there was an air raid warning. For months on end we boys slept in it every night. Eastbourne had a unique air raid warning system. Not only did we have the air raid siren to say there were German aircraft about, we also had the ‘cuckoo’, because that is what it sounded like, and this was set off when the Observer Corps actually spotted German aeroplanes near us. So when the cuckoo sounded the only place to be was in the Morrison shelter. Of course sometimes the Germans saw us before the Observer Corps saw them and then the rush to the ‘Morrison’ was even more frantic. We used to keep a record of the number of sirens and cuckoos but that got lost. According to ‘Front Line Eastbourne’ we were the most heavily attacked town in the region. There were 98 raids in which 671 high-explosive bombs and 3625 incendiaries were dropped, causing more than 1100 civilian casualties including 174 fatally injured. The siren sounded 1346 times and there were 353 ‘cuckoos’. I didn’t set out to tell you all that, but now you have the background to the second half of my pre-teen years.

Everything was rationed. The ration book allowed us each to have a certain amount of this and that, mostly meat and dairy products. In addition we had ‘points’. These were to buy tinned food. People nowadays make jokes about Spam, but if ever we saw Spam in the grocers shop we would buy it because it was far and away the best tinned luncheon meat. Loyalty is everything and we still keep Spam in our larder, for lunchtime snacks and for Spam omelettes. I could get extra clothing coupons because of my big feet. I always did well in “Aircraft Recognition” competitions, even against older people.

If there was a plane crash we had to see the wreckage. On one occasion a Messerschmidt 109 crash-landed on the Downs. I have borrowed a picture of it from ‘Front Line Eastbourne’. We went to see it and I was allowed to sit in the cockpit. Many years later when we were at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford they were cleaning up a Me 109. The history of that plane was that it had been shot down and had crash-landed near Eastbourne. Being in very good condition it had been sent to Canada and the United States to tour around raising cash to pay for fighter planes. Years later it was brought back to England and to Duxford. One day we went fishing in a little pond. It was only the second time I had ever caught a fish. We heard a plane overhead and then it went quiet. We rushed up the bank and could see a Mustang gliding down. It landed, wheels-up, along the top of a bank of stones at the top of the beach on the Crumbles. We could see the stones flying everywhere and we saw the pilot climb out when the plane stopped. We couldn’t rush to see that one because the Crumbles were mined but someone would have known how to get to the pilot.

Once a month Granny A came to stay for the weekend. On Saturday night she ‘baby-sat’ while Mum went fire-watching with her mate and Dad did his Home Guard duty. Our house was in Rotunda Road, a circle built on a man-made hill on which there had been a Martello Tower, put there as a defence against an expected invasion by Napoleon more than one hundred years before. The Martello Tower was gone but the foundations were still there and a house had been built on top of them. There was a super circular cellar. The house became the headquarters for the Firewatchers and the cellar became an unofficial community centre. In the garden, pointing out to sea, there was an enormous cannon left over from the Napoleonic Wars. All this started out to tell you that we had a fairly prominent building on the top of our hill. We think this must have been the target for a hit and run raider but he missed. The bomb went over the top and through the front bedroom window and out through the back wall of a house in our road. It exploded in the garden. Mum’s mate lived next door and her house was badly damaged too. I took our wheel barrow to help move their things to another house along the road where they lived until the end of the war.

A couple of times while we were at home and Mum was out shopping, bombs fell in town. We set off to find her. On one occasion she had been sheltering in the cold room at Carey’s the butchers. Miss Carey was unusual in two ways. She was a master butcher in her own right, her father having the business before her, and secondly she was the only butcher I ever heard of who made sausages with her own fingers, well two of them anyway, when they got caught in the mincing machine. Although red meat was in short supply we thought this was taking things a bit too far but Miss Carey insisted it was an accident. On the other occasion Mum had been in the basement of a drapers shop downtown when there was a cuckoo and everyone trooped down into the basement. Marks and Spencer, a hundred yards away, was flattened in that raid and there were lots of casualties. One corner of the town was so badly damaged by bombing that the commandos took it over to practice house to house fighting. If we were in town we would always go that way to watch the fun, with dummy bullets and thunderflashes to simulate hand-grenades.

The Firewatchers had to practice putting out incendiary bombs. This meant rushing about with a stirrup pump and a bucket of water or with sandbags to smother them. Once they organised a dress rehearsal. Civil Defence and Home Guard people were lighting the fires all over the place and the Firefighters were finding them and hoping to get to them before they spilled all the water out of their bucket or dropped the sandbags through exhaustion. I was helping my Dad light the fires and once my Mum shouted to me “You can’t go there, it’s an incendiary bomb” I shouted back “I know, I just dropped it” and rushed on my way.

Eastbourne was famous for having all its streets tree-lined. At the western end of the town the trees were mature and the foliage covered the roads. So it was that in the spring of 1944 the roads began to fill up with tanks, armoured cars and self-propelled guns. Once again we were called upon to help the war effort and we were passing up shells into the self-propelled guns parked around us and then we were slapping on thick grease wherever there was somewhere to slap it. It was obvious that these chaps were expecting to have to drive through water somewhere soon. A few days before the end of May the streets emptied again and all was quiet until, on 6 June 1944, we woke early on a beautiful spring morning, clear blue sky, clear that is except for it’s being full of allied aircraft with their black and white stripes under the wings. The noise was deafening. We knew immediately that the invasion had started and this was soon confirmed on the wireless. All those soldiers we had helped to load their self-propelled guns were now on the other side of the channel, going through hell, no doubt.

With D-day behind us we thought our war was over, but one day there came an announcement that a new problem, the flying bomb, the V1, was about to descend on us, literally. It became known as the doodle-bug because of the funny noise made by its jet engine and we were told:
‘when the red light at the rear of the aircraft goes out, take cover. The machine will fall to the ground’

In the paper next day we saw the silhouettes of the doodle bug and it was all quite worrying. We were at the Saffrons that afternoon watching a cricket match when we heard the noise that was to become so familiar. Naturally the cricket stopped to watch this thing go over. The match did not restart until we had seen twelve flying-bombs go across the sky one after the other. They were not high up in the sky but just a few hundred, maybe a thousand feet, above our heads. They tried many things to stop them with anti-aircraft guns and with fighter planes. Only the Meteor jet and the Tempest could fly faster than a doodle-bug. They would come up behind the doodle-bug and tip it onto its side, wingtip to wingtip. The most exciting time was when the fighters were working right over our heads and one evening I was watching a doodle-bug crash about half-a-mile away when I heard another and looked up to see a Tempest tipping one up right above my head. They were finally stopped when their launch sites in France were captured. I did hear one V2 rocket that must have gone off course. It passed over Eastbourne and exploded in the countryside. Once again we had cause for concern because my brother was fruit picking somewhere in the general direction where the rocket had landed. That provided enough excitement for the summer of 1944. Looking back it had been quite an eventful four years.

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