Memories of the War as a Young Boy

I was only 2 when the war started but I remember quite a bit about the end of it. I lived in a little village near Epping in Essex. We weren’t bombed very much but sometimes when the German bombers came over and they couldn’t find London or they got shot at and they were getting a bit worried they would dump bombs and go back to Germany, and we would catch a lot of bombs like that because they’d just let them go. Usually, they’d drop near us in open fields and didn’t do any real damage but occasionally, just by bad luck, they’d drop on a house.

I wasn't evacuated because I lived outside of London but people were evacuated to us, and my mother used to look after children for a short while until they were properly put somewhere else. Also, we used to have people come and stay with us that had been bombed out, they'd got nowhere to go because their house had collapsed. They used to stay with us for a little while and then someone would find them somewhere better because obviously when they were with us they were crowded.

People would come on the train and you’d see lots of little children with grown-ups, and they’d be marched along and usually taken to what they used to call a British restaurant, which was a place where you could get food if you didn’t have any ration books or anything like that. They’d go there and get sorted out because there were certain people there who could tell them where there were spaces for children. Then the children would come to the same school as us and their mothers and fathers could occasionally come down. Because we were on the railway line their parents sometimes could visit them but of course some children went right down to Wales or as far away as that and their parents perhaps would only see them once a year. As far as I know, no children were evacuated with their mums but I suppose some people were. When they were bombed out they would come with their mum and their children then. Usually there wasn’t any dad because he’d normally be in the army; half the men were in the army, that’s just what happened.

We had quite good food; it was rationed. You couldn’t get any fruit and you had a very small amount of sweets you could get but there were some sweets that were off the ration because probably they were supposed to be medicine. You could get cough sweets so we used to go buy cough sweets even though we hadn’t got a cough, because at least it was something sweet. You couldn’t get oranges or anything like that at all, and I remember I didn’t know what a banana looked like and I’d see pictures in books of a banana and it was yellow. And the first time I saw a banana, one of the boy’s dads sent him a banana in the post from wherever they’re grown and, of course, it was black by the time it got to us, and he said “this is a banana”. I said it can’t be a banana because bananas are yellow. That was the first one I’d seen and I was about 8!

We didn’t wear our gas mask very often but we had to carry it all the time and we had to take it into the shelter with us and when the air-raid siren went, the teachers would take us quickly into the air-raid shelter and shut the doors, and then we were in there with our gas mask but we didn’t have to put them on unless someone told us to. I remember it as being a bit dark in the air-raid shelter and I don’t think there were any lights in there at all but the door was shut. I think most of the teachers had torches and we didn’t have any lessons in there. It was just a matter of sitting in there and singing, or whatever you wanted to do to pass the time until the air-raid siren sounded again for the all clear, and then we’d go back into the classroom. We wouldn’t stay in there long, usually we wouldn’t be in there more than an hour, and then we could go back to class. There were 2 in the school, they were brick built, about 4 metres by 3, and you’d just sit round on wooden benches. There was a door to go in, which if a bomb dropped the blast couldn’t come straight in the door, and there was also a little tiny door at the back that you had to crawl out of, like a little tunnel, so that if a bomb dropped and the door collapsed you could still get out by crawling out through the back of the air-raid shelter.

There were lots of soldiers about all the time. We had a village green and it had tanks and jeeps and stuff all over it, because being in our end of the country, when they were going to go and fight in France and were all waiting to go, there were soldiers everywhere on British greens, everywhere there was a bit of room. They had tanks and armoured cars, lorries parked up ready to go.

You had a ration book and a child’s ration book was a different colour to an adult’s, and only children got fruit if there was ever any oranges, or anything like that came into the country only children could have them because, obviously, children needed them because they were growing up and they needed the vitamins so no-one else got them. We got apples and stuff like that, that could be grown in this country but oranges we didn’t get. Sometimes we got orange juice because it was easier to send orange juice because it took up less room on the ships, so you got a very strong, concentrated orange juice to give you vitamin C.

My dad was called up as a soldier so he had to go and he was away for all the war and he didn’t come home until 1946. Most people’s dads did tend to go; when I was at school, most of the kids only had their mums. There were a few chaps who still had to work: the lorry drivers and people who had jobs that still had to be done, like making things for the war, so they didn’t get called up. They had what, I think, they called a ‘reserved occupation’ which meant you could stay at home then but it was still quite hard because there was no lights at night. There was a blackout so that they couldn’t find you and the bombs. So if you tried to move about at night it was with a torch. And if there was an air-raid you were made to put the torch out so it was a bit awkward moving about.

On Victory Day we had a big party in the road and sweets, and things would come out that we hadn’t had for ages! And they managed to rake up a toy of some sort for everybody. We dressed up or if we didn’t have something to dress up as, you had a red, white and blue cap, jacket and trousers made out of just cotton, like old sheet or something. We had tables down the centre of the road and everybody was out! Still no dads but it was good...

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.