Childhood Memories of Wartime London

At the beginning of the second world war in September 1939 my father was 29, my mother 27, and I was 3. My brother, Roger, was born soon after the outbreak of the war. We lived in a double-storey semi-detached house in Southgate, a northern suburb of London. I and my brother were born in that house. (It is still there. In Britain, nearly everybody works hard to have a beautiful garden, but I was sorry to see, when I walked past my old home at the beginning of this month, that the front garden was completely abandoned to weeds.)

Gradually I became aware that our country was fighting another country across the sea called Germany. In my childish imagination, Germany was a place of constant darkness, where the sun never shone.

My father was not in the army. Apparently his clerical work with the Great Western Railway was too important. He travelled "up to London" six days a week on the underground railway, popularly known as the "tube". He worked near Paddington station. The journey took about an hour in each direction. My father's elder brother, my Uncle Tom, was a soldier in France. He survived the war but died in his forties of tuberculosis. My father, like all the able-bodied men who were left at home, was an "air raid warden". They took it in turns to patrol the streets at night, ensuring that all the houses were property "blacked out". We had wooden frames with black paper in the middle, which we had to lift into the windows when we switched on the lights, so that not a chink showed. The idea was that this would make it difficult for enemy planes to find their way.

As soon as I turned 5 I started at Osidge Primary School. In the first class we were seated at low square wooden tables, 8 children to a table. I was put next to a girl called Brenda Chappel. We immediately became friends. There was a girl in my class called Shirley Smith. I thought this was a horrible name, and made up my mind never to marry a Smith. (I disliked alliteration in names, and still do.)

Some children were “evacuated” to country areas in order to be safer, away from the bombings which the cities had to endure. I remember that when these children returned home they spoke with regional accents which they had picked up in their temporary homes. We were not evacuated, but one summer my mother and Roger and I spent about 6 weeks on my paternal greatuncle's farm in Lincolnshire. And one summer the three of us managed to go for a short holiday in north Devon. I remember having to stand all the way in the train for several hours. It was crammed full of people including many soldiers.

Thinking about the farm reminds me of the phenomenon of "double summer time". In Britain during the war (I don't remember for how long) in the summer we put the clocks on not just one hour (as now) but two hours, the intention being to save electricity. This meant it was light until about eleven o' clock at night. However my farmer uncle and his neighbours refused to change their clocks, for the sake of their animals, especially the cows, as it upset the milking routine.

At school, each child was given a bottle of milk (one-third of a pint) every day. I didn't enjoy drinking milk, and for a while I used to transfer my milk to another glass bottle (no plastic in those days!) and take it home. One day, as I was walking home, the bottle broke somehow and I had to leave it in the gutter. This happened right opposite the house of Mrs Jolley, a teacher at my school. Her daughter was in my class. For a long time I went in fear that she had seen what happened and would report me for taking milk home! Everyone was issued with gas masks, to wear if we were ever attacked with poison gas (which actually never happened). We had to carry our, masks to school in a case with a strap. My mask was the same as my parents', but Roger had a special one for little children. It had big red rubber "ears" and was known as a Mickey Mouse mask.

We were warned of impending air raids by wailing sirens, which were located at the police stations. What a terrible noise that was! When the danger was past there was another siren with a different sound, called the “all clear”. We were supposed to shelter during the raids. There were underground shelters at school, and we all had to file there. We also had shelters at home, issued to every family by the authorities. The first ones we received were made of corrugated iron and had to be installed
outside, partially underground. We were never able to use ours, as it became flooded. But I remember having to go sometimes in the middle of the night to our neighbours' shelter. Later we got a shelter for indoors, which consisted of a large table with a metal top and metal legs at each corner. Ours was in the diningroom and we used it for eating, but the table had a base underneath on which we put mattresses, and the whole family slept there at night.

For my sixth birthday I was given a tabby kitten. We named him Tootsie. He would sleep inside the table-shelter with us, and the sound of his purring was exactly the same as the noise of an approaching plane, so sometimes we thought a plane was coming even when there had been no air-raid warning!

Some people preferred to shelter from the bombs by sleeping in the cupboard under the stairs. We tried this, but the cupboard was too small for us all. Another thing I remember is bunk beds being placed on the platforms of the tube stations, for people to sleep in at night. On the rare occasions when we were at a tube station in the evening, we saw people already in bed, trying to sleep in that public place.

One of my most vivid memories of the war concerned the "Doodlebugs". These were flying bombs sent from Germany to fall on London. When they reached the limit of their range they stopped flying, and sometimes fell directly downwards and at other times dived sideways to fall elsewhere. During one afternoon air raid, my mother and Roger and I were in our indoor shelter when we heard a Doodlebug approach and stop right over our house. (This was confirmed by a neighbour who was outside watching.) We held our breaths, waiting to see what would happen. At last we heard the bomb dive away. We later heard that it had fallen harmlessly in the Long Meadow, part of nearby Oakhill Park. The crater remained there for years.

Thousands of people were killed by bombs, but I didn't know anyone who died in the bombing. (Nor did I know any child whose father was killed in the fighting.) Four adjacent houses in our street were flattened by a bomb, and I remember walking past that gap in the houses for years afterwards. It was a kind of landmark, in my mind. I don't know if anyone in those houses was killed or injured.

One Saturday afternoon, our whole family went shopping in High Barnet. We had no car (hardly anybody did in those days) and we travelled there by two buses, changing at Whetstone. I suppose the distance must be about 5 miles. While we were window-shopping we suddenly missed Roger, who was about 3 years old. We searched all around but couldn't find him anywhere. Finally we went to the police station to report him missing. While we were there, the air-raid warning sounded. My mother was in a terrible state. We waited there, but Roger could not be found. After the "all clear" went there was nothing to do but go home on the bus. We went straight to tell our next-door neighbours what had happened. To our amazement, there was Roger, eating tea with our neighbours as if nothing were amiss. He had walked home on his own. They hadn't known where he had come from. No-one could believe that such a small child could find his way for such a long distance through the suburban streets.

We were deprived of many items of food during the war, and what we had was all rationed. We could even only buy clothes with "clothing coupons". We had no exotic fruits such as bananas and oranges. I remember that for a long time the ration of sweets was 2 ounces per person per week. Only people who kept chickens had fresh eggs. Our "eggs" consisted of a yellow powder, which could be used in baking or to make scrambled eggs.

One day my grandmother came to visit us with her friend. They brought a small jar containing a pale yellow substance for us to taste. I swallowed a mouthful and recognised the flavour immediately - banana! It turned out that it was really parsnip, cooked and mashed with some banana flavouring, but I had thought it was the real thing.

By September 1944 we knew that the war was ending, but unfortunately it dragged on for several more months. At last it finished on 8th May 1945, known as VE Day (for "Victory in Europe"). I had imagined that when peace was announced, everybody would rush cheering into the streets, but this didn't happen. Most -people hung flags outside their houses, and some districts had tea-parties in the streets. One day my whole family went up to London to see the royal family appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Thousands-upon thousands of people were packed in the Mall opposite the palace. Then one day there were local celebrations in Oakhill Park, culminating in a fireworks display,. But I found the noise of the fireworks frightening, reminiscent of the war noises of shooting and bombing. For this reason I dislike fireworks to this day.

Rationing continued for several years after the war. Gradually, one by one, food items became freely available again. It was a red-letter day for children when sweets came off the ration in the early 1950s. And .I remember queueing up for ages, to buy Lyons vanilla ice-cream cones for 2½d (tuppence ha'penny).

After the war we could go on proper annual holidays again. We went to south Devon, and one day as we were walking along the cliffs we met a German prisoner-of-war strolling on his own. He spoke to us, and I was very surprised at how nice and -polite and friendly he was. On another occasion, in a London park, my mother got talking to an Italian prisoner-of-war. This led to an amusing misunderstanding. The Italian pointed to us children and asked a question. My mother replied “nine” and “six” thinking he had asked how old we' were. Later she realised he had been asking how many girls and how many boys she had!

My last postscript on the war concerns my early days at grammar school, or high school. For our first year there, we all learned French. The next school year (September 1948) the children in my class were given the choice of being taught German or Spanish in addition to French. Our parents were sent a letter setting out the various advantages of the two languages. It mentioned among other things that Spanish was similar to French and easier to learn. However, of the 33 pupils in the class, only 3 chose to learn Spanish. I remember the Spanish teacher, Mr. Fishlock, coming from the next classroom to speak to the German teacher, Mr Salame. (We children pronounced his name "Salami" , even though we didn't know what salami was - at least, I didn't.) I can still see the took of bewilderment on those teachers' faces, that so soon after the war, so many children wanted to learn German. None of us could be persuaded to change. I Like to think it was a sign that reconciliation doesn't take long to begin.

Stella Smith (born Burbidge)

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