A Night Visitor with a Difference

From the end of what was known as the “phoney war”, spring 1940, and until the mid 1950s, our family lived in the suburban developments of North London of which Stanmore, Edgware, and Harrow describe a triangle. Amazingly, we were very little affected by what is historically recorded as “The Blitz”, except for a direct hit on the Kodak factory near Harrow which turned the night sky into an inferno of luminescent red and orange for so many miles around that one might have seen all the sunsets and sunrises of one’s life together.

Throughout this period, when the City of London and its residential environs were so devastated, we experienced little bombardment except for the tension of the long-drawn-out periods we remained crammed into the cupboard under the stairs, recommended as the safest place in any house, and our fears of having to put the current baby into one of those horrific-looking baby gas masks which have since been on view only in war museums, or relegated to the prop and costume rooms of the “Dr. Who” story creators.

Personally, I feel that historians have been slow to explain to us why the expected gas air-raids failed to take place, or maybe I have just failed to inform myself. For two years, we all went everywhere with those ungainly cardboard boxes bouncing off our hips and backsides, and were convinced that if we had to use the said baby ‘tent’ gasmask, we would be the cause of the poor infant’s death rather than the enemy.

During this period, many of our neighbours dug out part of their back gardens for an “Anderson” shelter to be installed, but our father, not wishing to give up his vegetable patch, procrastinated on the project, and gave us beetroots instead. In the event, he was proved to have made a wise decision, even if it were really indecision, as by the time of our real air raids, and the introduction of the “Morrison” shelter, most people had abandoned the “Anderson”, as a harbourer of vermin and foul-smelling water amongst other horrors.

The “Morrison” shelter was a steel table about four feet by six in area, standing on four cast-steel legs of a strength which was expected to support the weight of an average two-storey house after a direct hit. We never discovered how many of theses tables were put to that extreme of testing, but ours was well-used for a variety of activities including playing table-tennis, and providing the stage for our very own theatre of amateur dramatics. Even I, as “The Scarlet Pimpernel” trod a noisy sheet-steel “boards” in someone-else’s blue silk pyjamas and Mother’s high heels!

Apart from these distinguished services, and all our Sunday dinners, the “Morrison”, shelter really came into its own during the V-1 and V-2 bombardments from 1943 until the liberating armies captured the launching sites early in 1945. As the raids became more frequent and less predictable: there was no warning system for the V-2, our parents tried to have us all sleeping under the table shelter, but went ‘up to bed’ themselves. We were a large family; large in numbers that is, and even packing us in like sardines, using the length of the table as the width, meant placing ourselves really like sardines, with heads and feet alternately. Bearing with smell of a younger brother’s (obviously unwashed) feet in one’s face, or a curled-up toddler in a damp nappy pressing into the small of one’s back, drove me and my sister, Anne to creep upstairs by midnight, declaring that we would “rather be bombed in peace in our beds” than put up with the discomfort downstairs. The resignation of our ‘elder sister’ duties in this way was to rob us of the limelight and excitement which our younger siblings were to relish, find fame in, and crow over in the years to come.

Early in the new year of 1945, when the permanent GMT+1 timing made the mornings very dark, and the effort to get everyone up and dressing a real chore of unpopularity for the ‘elders’, Anne and I came downstairs one morning, still locked in our own need of sleep, to find the younger children all up and running around in a state of heightened activity, none of which bore any relation to the business of dressing, breakfast, nor the need to be ready for school in time.

To our utter astonishment, Clare and Lelia, (aged eleven and seven respectively), with assorted help from the infants old enough to take part, were being interviewed by the police! Apparently they had heard noises in the kitchen, next to the dining-room in the early hours, but how early they did not know, and had been too frightened to venture out to see what might have caused the noises and woken the younger children from their sleep. They were equally too frightened to send anyone upstairs to rouse our parents or Anne and me, who should have been with them in the first place, of course! Who actually called the police, never became clear, but someone must have had more presence of mind than we might have given credit for.

What was clear, was that the burglar had taken fright when he heard children crying in the adjoining room, and had beaten a hasty retreat, signalled by the abandoning of a pair of thick grey woollen socks, left out in the cold on the back doorstep. They were the kind of socks which might have belonged to an airman or even a sailor, and it was absolutely certain, without any further investigation, that the intruder had been a prisoner-of-war on the run from the transit camp which lay on the corner of Honeypot Lane and Whitchurch Lane, but a few hundred yards across the common at the bottom of our back garden, and easily accessible from our house by an simple vault across the ditch which was our boundary. Many years of children climbing the tree which overhung the ditch, had eliminated any fence that might ever have been there.

Discovering that the poor fellow had ‘thieved’ no more than a pint of milk and a heel of cheese, drove any ideas of detection or retribution from all our minds, and even the younger children, felt more compassion for him than fear of him. As I recall it, Anne and I were up for the disciplinary reaction of our parents, and had to carry the can of having failed in our duty of care. For all that, we could bear the poor POW no ill feelings, hoping only that he found safety (and was spared punishment) at last!!

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