All the Time You Can Hear Them, They're Not for You

'This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Gwilym Scourfield of the County Heritage Team on behalf of Vera Arbery and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

All the Time You Can Hear Them, They’re Not For You.-
Surviving the Bombing in Central London

I was nineteen when the war began. I had a job in charge of the tobacco kiosk at the local Royal Arsenal Co-op in the Walworth Road in Southwark. When it all started they told us we could close the shop early; five o’clock instead of seven — or eight on a weekend. It was so that you could get home before the air raid started. My first war experience came after hearing whistles. There hadn’t been a siren, but we knew what the whistles meant: German planes coming! So I looked out of the window, and they were! They were just above us. I slammed the window down and shouted,
“The planes are overhead!” Everyone dived down behind counters. A bomb did come down, but it landed about a hundred yards behind the shop. I never did go to check out exactly where.

I was anxious to make sure mum wasn’t worried and I went home at lunch time to let her know I was all right. The first thing she said was,
“Oh, hello. You come to see our bomb?” They had had one, too. One had been dropped near the council flats in Kennington Road where I lived with my mother (Dad had been gassed in the trenches in WW1 and died in 1935) in a first floor flat in Wedgewood House, a very large block with 198 flats. The bomb had been a direct hit on one of the air raid shelters. Typical of Londoners — there wasn’t a soul in it. Good job, they’d all have been killed if they had. You never went into the shelters during the day, you just stayed up and got on with it. After that no one from our blocks ever went down those shelters any more — we stayed in the flat instead!

Soon after that we went up to Dudley in the Midlands, about ten miles from Birmingham. We only stayed for about six weeks. I walked home from work one night along the Wolverhampton New Road and there was shrapnel dropping all around me; great big bits of metal, all shapes. This was from the attacks on Birmingham. Anyway, I got home all right.

After six weeks we saw the fire on the docks in London at a cinema. My mother said,
“Ooh, dear, look at that! Poor London…Shall we go back?” So, we went back to London. We didn’t like to see London being bombed like that.

We lost the windows one day. We lived in a corner flat on the first floor. There was a window at the side. My mother used to put the electric iron in front of the blackout blind to make sure no light got out. We came back up from the shelter that day to find she couldn’t find her electric iron. It had gone. So had the window! A neighbour underneath us found it in her front room. It had blown out of my mother’s window and in to hers! She was out on her door step shouting,
“Has anyone lost an iron?”
“Yes.”
“What colour was it?” and so on. Mum got it back.

That bomb had fallen on Worcester House which was next door to ours, on the other side of the alleyway through. It just took out the whole of the middle of the building. There was a dairy at the bottom, on the corner. In those days we didn’t have eggs in boxes. They were all piled up in the shop. People took them home in a paper bag. Do you know, there wasn’t even an egg cracked in that shop. The bomb had taken out the whole of the middle of the building, leaving them all intact!

I worked in Thames House, the Ministry of Aircraft Production, in the cafeteria. More than once I walked to work from our flat down Lambeth Road crunching over glass and debris. Several of the bridges were closed. I think that is where London invented the traffic jam — all trying to get over Lambeth Bridge. I had left mum clearing up the house. She had a fireplace with an oven over the top of the fire. When we got back into the flat, the oven door was open with soot all over the place. The piano had spun round towards the middle of the room. I don’t know how she got it back. She was such a small woman. The front window was gone. The frame was twisted through ninety degrees. The curtains were wound all round it. Mum told me she was standing there, unwinding the curtains from this frame and broken glass. Someone went past in the street and called up,
“I see you’ve got your flags out then?” This is how you got through; you had to laugh , or…”

Wedgewood House was built in a great big circle. I used to walk through to China Walk just behind us to go to work to take a short cut. After that night, though, I never took that short cut again. The bomb, sounded like one of those enormous express steam trains pulling into a station. The noise was deafening. It caught the block round the corner from us. It went right down through that. The people in there were still alive, but trapped beneath tons of rubble. The entire block of flats had fallen on top of them. There was no way to get them out in time. By the time they did get through, they had died from escaped gas. It was terrible. I couldn’t get the tragedy out of my mind. What a terrible way to perish — survive a bomb and be buried alive and gassed. I could never walk past the place where it all happened. I used to go all the way round the main road to go to work, rather than walk past their tomb.

I wanted to stay home and help mum, but she said no, I should go and do my job. When I got to work the Thames House cafeteria, the roof had completely gone. The glass was all down on the tables in the restaurant. It was a case of everyone on deck, buckets of water and removing glass and clearing up. I ended up working just as hard there clearing up as I would have done helping my mother!

One of the neighbours looked up at our window frame that had been replaced from the rubble. She said,
“Hey, you’ve got my window frame!”
“How do you know?”
“Well, it’s got my fittings on it for a start!” Mum said,
“Never mind, you’ll get it back tomorrow!”

My brother decided after that that we couldn’t live there. He worked for Tannoy in Norwood. He was only sixteen, but he kept on going into estate agents until he found us a place. Norwood was well outside really. There was hardly anything happening up there. It was all happening in Central London. We were amazed when we got the house — every window had panes of glass in them! Our flats had tarpaulins over the window frames after it became obvious that it wasn’t worth repairing them. We were so thrilled to have panes of glass back! It was lovely up there in Norwood.

I still worked at the cafeteria at Thames House. To get home I walked down to Vauxhall Bridge and got the tram to Norwood. One night, after a long shift — eight till eight-, I switched my torch on when I got outside Thames House, only to discover it was already ‘on’, The batteries were dead flat. It must have been on all day. You couldn’t go and buy a battery, especially at that time of night, they were like gold dust.

When I came out of work a motorist stopped. The man trying to find his way to Brighton. He had a huge car — not a Rolls, but not far short. It was so complex, giving directions out of Central London, that I offered to go with him to Brixton and to get a tram from there. (Now that’s something a girl wouldn’t do today, would they? In those days there was a lot more trust about. There were very few cars on the road then; mostly business people or upper classes. Maybe that’s why we felt less at risk.) Anyway I pointed him towards Croydon and made my way back from Brixton.

When I got out of the bus it was so dark, I was totally helpless without my torch. There was no moon. You couldn’t even see the outline of tops of houses against the sky. It was absolutely pitch black. I saw a torch in front of me and followed the spot of light. I followed it to get to the kerb. The light went out when it reached the kerb. So I stopped. The torch came on again. The owner was waiting for me to catch up!

I told the man my battery had gone and I couldn’t see a thing so he said,
“I am going down Chapel Road.” I was relieved because that was very near where I lived. So he said, “I’m turning this corner.” I said,
“So am I.” We turned two further corners and I said, “Well, this is where I live.” I lived at Number Two. He lived at Number Six! I never ever saw that man in daylight. I never knew him. I’d have passed him in the street! That’s how I got home that night.

You see, you went to work in the morning and you didn’t get home until God knows what time, - you just never knew half your neighbours. My mother got friendly with his mother and I found out who he was. Without that information I would never have found out who he was, but I was glad of his light!

One night mum and I were inside the house in a Morrison shelter. The sirens had all warned of an attack The man a few doors away and his family were in the shelter. Mum and heard this dreadful tremor, crash and thud. No explosion, but it was something very heavy. Next day, when I got home from work, mum told me that an unexploded shell (One of ours, actually!) had crashed through the roof of Number Six! Fortunately it didn’t explode. If it had, you wouldn’t be getting my story. Mind you, I did miscarry. Even with a war on, women don’t recover scar-free from losing a baby.

After one attack, we returned to the flat and the front door was blown open. Part of the metal lock had been blown off and gone straight through my mother’s hat at the other end of the passage. That really tickled mum. She laughed her head off about that.
“Coo, look at what it’s done to my hat!” she said. She was only a little woman, but always ready for a laugh, my mum.

You got so used to it in the end that you took it in your stride. We finished up, my mother and I, pushing the coal right to the very back of the coal cellar, getting a couple of chairs and propping the door open, so it couldn’t close on us. Most of the night raids, that’s where you’d find us. We’d sit there until they stopped. I had a friend on the next floor up. She was so terrified I invited her to share our cellar. She sat on the coal on a blanket. When the raid started she pressed her hands to her ears with her head in my lap. Every time she heard a bomb come down she was literally shaking. I said to her,
“All the time you can hear them, they’re not for you.” They’re not. You got so used to it. If they were whistling they weren’t anywhere near you. If it was yours, you wouldn’t hear it.

There were some comforts, you know. The minister from the old Lambeth Church used to come round every single shelter every night and wish us all well. He had only a tin hat to protect him. Come Harvest Festival he told us we were all invited to his church. There were no windows, so we were asked to bring dusters to mop the seats. That church was packed. Windows or not, those people really found comfort from his faith. There were people there who had never been to church for years.

I left Thames House and went to work in Peckham for the NAAFI making tea and sandwiches for the office staff. One foggy night the bus I was taking home pulled up in Dulwich Village. There was a huge area with four or five roads. There wasn’t a roundabout there in those days. The driver stopped. He said,
“I can’t go any further because it is so foggy I can’t see.” We all had to get out. Walking along together towards Herne Hill was fine. We were all going the same way. We’d all got torches. Frome Herne Hill we were all going in different directions. I finished up going up Norwood Road, all on my own. I did have my torch on, but the fog was so thick, it really didn’t penetrate. I found myself navigating by the walls and the gardens trying to keep to them. All of a sudden I came to a kerb. I thought, ah, this is Rosendale Road. I walked out on this road and found myself on the tram lines. I must have turned round and somehow gone out on the tramlines! Fortunately there were no trams, so I walked along, following the lines and walked right up out of the fog. At the top of the hill it was as clear as a bell when I got up to my mother’s. She said,
“You’re late home.” I said,
“Yeah, I have walked from Dulwich Village.”

We got married in 1941 — September 20th. Bob was in the Kings Royal Rifles at first. Later he transferred to The Royal Artillery. I had known him since he had been in the Boys Brigade in the church. We were sweethearts at fifteen — and we still are! It was well after the worst of the bombing. We were determined that everything should be as near to normal as possible. Someone said to me,
“You can’t have a white wedding, with all this lot going on.”
“Oh yes she can!” my mother declared. Well, the dress was the one my sister had worn, adorned with lace (which wasn’t on the coupons!) and one of my bridesmaids had to bring her own frock! The other dresses my sister made using the coupons given to me by a fellow worker from Thames House. She couldn’t afford a wedding present, but asked if I would I like twenty clothing coupons. Now that really was a wonderful gift! The sirens did sound at the wedding, but we’d got so blasé by then we ignored them. It was a truly splendid affair by 1940 standards. We had three cakes, on three separate trestle tables; one my mother had saved up coupons to make; one bought by a friend — a CHOCOLATE wedding cake; the third was inside a returnable cardboard cover. It looked like a luxury iced cake until you took off its cardboard cover! That had to go back to the shop. It was just a fruit cake underneath. The wedding cars were a big Talbot which someone had decorated with ribbons, driven buy a friend of my brother who I didn’t even know and another smaller Austin owned by one of the family. The height of luxury in those days — TWO wedding cars!

I had my first child, my son, in 1944. My brother ended up in the RAF and Bob got posted. There was just mum and me when the flying bombs started we decided to go up to the Midlands. I said to mum,
”I don’t want to lose another baby.” She agreed and we went up north.

We all survived the war; amazing when you think about it. I still can’t stand thunderstorms though.

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