Blitz Kids, page 4
Bath-time also caused some consternation in Reg Baker’s new home as the culture clash continued. When he was told to write home to tell his parents where he was, his adopted family were shocked that the nine year old could not spell his own name. Next, the blacksmith’s wife was shocked when it was his turn to have a bath: as he undressed, and prepared to climb into the old tin bath, she realized he wasn’t wearing any underpants. This was normal for the boy – he had never owned any. The situation was soon rectified.
Whilst the more nervous children, and those who were homesick, sat quietly in their new homes, others explored this unfamiliar habitat. They marvelled at the animals they saw in the fields. They had seen such creatures in picture books or at the cinema, but these were living, breathing creatures that seemed to be everywhere. New arrivals had to learn the way of the countryside, needing to be warned not to chase chickens since it would stop them from laying eggs. Reg Baker loved this new world:
The first three days they just let us roam. We chased the cows, sheep and horses. Then the farmer said, ‘Don’t do that, boys. The cows give us milk, the sheep give us wool and the horses are likely to bloody kick you.’ So we settled down and started helping the farmers.
He started to learn about birds and flowers, and discovered how to grow vegetables. Back home their only garden had been a window box that was unable to support any life. When he first saw a hedgehog he thought it was a hairbrush. He climbed conker trees, ran in the fields, drank from streams and had fights with the local kids. Eventually, as the two sides – townies and yokels – learned to understand each other’s accents, they settled down, played together and became friends. One of Reg Baker’s highlights was being taken out for a drive by a local man who allowed the children to ride around in his car: ‘I’d never been in a car, let alone a sports car!’
With so many children sent from the cities, there was an inevitable conflict between the hosts and the visitors. Bad manners, bad language and bed-wetting were among the many complaints heard by those who monitored the evacuees. Children complained of being mistreated by the children of the house in which they had been placed, whilst foster-parents struggled to cope with the strange habits of the evacuees.
Having helped administer the evacuees at Bedford Town Hall, Jean Redman was asked to continue working for the council. The fifteen year old had intended to go to a teacher training college, but with colleges closing after the outbreak of war, her options were limited. With her own school only giving lessons part-time, due to an evacuated school occupying the classrooms for half the week, she spent the rest of her time in the council offices, helping deal with the welfare of evacuees. She was soon asked to work full-time: ‘The town clerk asked if I could go full-time at the council a few days a week. The Head said as we were only doing half-days schooling we weren’t learning much so I may as well go full-time. So I did.’ At first she assisted the billeting officer, dealing with issues raised by both the evacuees and their foster parents. In reality she spent much of her time acting as a messenger and making tea, hardly using the shorthand and typing skills that had been the reason she was originally selected for the task.
The most interesting part of the job was learning about the behaviour of people with whom she would never have mixed pre-war:
I remember people who were looking after evacuees coming to the office and complaining. I remember one woman came in and she said, ‘And he shit on the window sill!’ I thought what is that? I had never heard of the word before – and I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t dare ask. I knew it was something awful by the way she was going on to the billeting officer – she didn’t want the child any more.
She also dealt with cases where evacuees were moved between families. One example was a local woman who was unable to cope with the family she had been sent and turned them out into the street. The family, a Jewish woman from London and her young children, was left standing in the street until a local woman took pity on them and took them in. Although Ivy Woodard had three children of her own to cope with, she happily made space for the homeless Londoners. This constant mixing of people had a considerable influence on all those who experienced it. Mrs Woodard’s six-year-old daughter Margaret was fascinated by their guests. She watched in awe as they carried out their Friday night preparations for the Sabbath. All crammed into the small front room of a council house, the family lit their candles and said their prayers before retiring. For a child living in a small market town, it was exposure to a world she had no idea had existed.
Some children found themselves in curious situations. One boy was sent from London to the Surrey countryside, where he billeted with a blind man. However, the man decided to move to London and took his evacuee with him. In 1940 the boy found himself, supposedly in a place of safety, actually living in a heavily bombed area of south London.
One of the private evacuees was Terry Charles. Born in June 1927, twelve-year-old Terry was the son of dancers and had spent most of his young life travelling around the UK. Wherever they had worked, he had gone with them, attending some fourteen different schools by the time war broke out. With the coming of war he was taken out of school and ‘evacuated’ to Cornwall. It was a private arrangement made by his mother:
I went to my mother’s old nanny. She had brought up my mother but was retired and living in Cornwall. But I got bored. It was a little village near St Austell. I would cycle to Newquay to go swimming. It was great fun. There was an old ruin of a monastery called Roach Rock nearby. It was marvellous for children.
For others evacuation simply meant their entire family moving from London and continuing their lives from a new base. In many cases, couples moved in with their parents and wherever possible fathers still commuted into cities to work. For the children, it was little different from spending a summer holiday with their grandparents. One of the children in this situation was ten-year-old Colin Ryder Richardson. In the summer of 1939 he was staying with his mother’s parents in Lingfield, Surrey. His parents had kept the children in Surrey as a preliminary precaution as the war clouds gathered. The location was convenient: his barrister father was still able to travel into London for work. On 3 September Colin had been helping his grandfather to dig out an air raid shelter when the sirens sounded: ‘Jesus Christ! Where’s my gas mask?’ were his first thoughts – war really had come swiftly.
The decision was taken that Colin would not return to London or to his school, which was being permanently evacuated. Instead he would stay in Surrey and attend a local school. This worked until he returned to school one day to discover that it too had been evacuated – to Cornwall. The school hadn’t been able to contact his parents and was forced to leave Colin behind. He was unconcerned about the interruption to his education:
Frankly, by 1940 I thought, ‘Why have I got to learn French?’ The Germans had occupied France, the French will have to speak German. I thought ‘Why should I learn any language? I’m going to be shot. At my age, I will end up in the Army, I’ll get a rifle and I’ll be lucky if I survive.’ We just thought about survival, getting extra rations, scrounging food. The whole structure of society was being geared for war.
CHAPTER 3
A Phoney War?
‘War isn’t fun, it’s deadly.’
Len Chester, Royal Marines bugler at age fourteen
The coming of war was not greeted by a wave of overt patriotism and portraits of the King and Queen were conspicuous by their absence. There was little flag-waving jingoism; instead, the people remained calm and, in many ways, stoical about their situation. This muted response was hardly surprising. So many factors influenced the emotions of a country that had endured four years of war, followed by twenty years of political, economic and social turmoil that inspired a wave of pacifism. Yet as one writer noted: ‘the worst mistake of the Axis was to confuse the attitude of the mild, easy-going people of Great Britain with spineless selfishness’.1 In the first month of the war, the British people might not have been fired-up into a patriotic fervour but they were not about to submit to the aggressive intentions of the enemy.
But there was so much more to the story. Maybe it was the sudden change in the street scenes, with vast numbers of children already removed to safety. Maybe it was the horrors of war engrained in the minds of a whole generation of men who had survived the Great War only to see their sons threatened with the same fate. Or maybe it was simply the acceptance of war generated by years of waiting for conflict to come. As one diarist noted of Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia: ‘So now we shall fight for England not, as I used to say, in Czechoslovakia, but in Middlesex.’2
Children, like their parents, threw themselves enthusiastically into the necessary preparations for war. As the entire country became covered in mounds of sandbags, boys eagerly joined their fathers in digging holes to fit air raid shelters and fill sandbags. Helping prepare and fit blackout curtains was a joy to children who wanted to be part of the war effort. When asked to put tape across windows to prevent the glass shattering when bombs fell, some children soon got carried away. They ignored the regular criss-cross network and instead stuck the tape in childish, random patterns that seemed so much more interesting.
It was not just the houses that were transformed. Within days the entire scenery of the country seemed to have changed. Suddenly men – and increasingly women – in uniform seemed to abound. Barrage balloons began to fill the skies. One of the first changes noticed by ten-year-old Colin Ryder Richardson was that female soldiers began inflating barrage balloons opposite his grandparents’ home to protect Lingfield racecourse, where local units of the Territorial Army were being mobilized. For a child, it was a fascinating sight and watching these changes became entertainment for the youngster. He watched as pillboxes were built in the North Downs, ready to hold back an invading army intent on heading north into London. At his greatuncle’s shop in Reigate a machine-gun post was set up on the first floor since it commanded a good field of fire along the High Street. A large triangle of cement was set beneath the window to act as a mount for the weapon. When their work was done, the soldiers thanked the bewildered shopkeeper and told him someone would return if and when the invasion came.
Even when he returned on day trips to London Colin was confronted by the new reality, watching taxis pulling water pumps for use in fire-fighting and seeing museum-piece fire engines out on duty. As he recalled: ‘Already our lives were being totally changed.’ One particular blow was felt by pet lovers: with dogs banned from air raid shelters there was a rush to have animals put down. In the first days of war some 400,000 domestic pets were killed by vets.
It was not just the military situation that changed the face of the country. It was the beginning of what seemed like a vast, if enforced, social experiment. The rattle of pram wheels on the paving stones and tarmac were conspicuous by their absence. Elsewhere, in country towns and villages, former city-dwelling mothers who had been evacuated with their young children tried to coax their prams along the rough roads and grass verges of the new homes. From the mud of the countryside to the steeply cobbled lanes of fishing villages, Britain’s mothers had to learn to adapt.
Mothers brought the ways of the city to the villages. Shocking as it was for their hosts, some of the evacuated women tucked up their children for the night and then made their way to village pubs. Heads turned as the locals were surprised to see women casually ordering drinks just as they had done back home. In one Essex village London mothers changed the look of the whole area as the influx of more than 500 mothers and babies almost doubled the population.
It was not just the evacuees who changed the face of the countryside. In sleepy villages there was a wave of activity as the young women of the ‘Land Army’ arrived to take up the work of men who had gone to war. The arrival of these young women was a breath of fresh air in villages unchanged for so long. Likewise, families began to arrive in the countryside, spending their holidays engaged in agricultural labour. Village children were also drafted into the war effort, with over 30,000 working on farms, earning great praise for previously concerned farmers. Ken Durston – twelve years old at the outbreak of war – recalled the effect on rural Somerset:
Pre-war our village was very quiet – everyone knew everyone else. Suddenly there were WAAFs moved into the balloon sites and you got to know more about the outside world. I’d never known anything before that. We lived in a little cottage with one bedroom for seven of us and I’d never been outside the village up to that point. Most of the girls on the barrage balloons were only eighteen – and they were looking for company. The young lads would creep round there at meal times and get invited in for tea.
But if the arrival of children changed the face of the countryside, then the lack of children changed the cities. Though thousands had defied the order to evacuate, the authorities had made little provision for those left behind. Their schools had closed, their teachers had left for the countryside and their classrooms had been taken over for civil defence purposes. In London alone, two thirds of schools had been converted to civil defence facilities – such as first-aid posts and fire stations – by authorities who believed all school-age children would be successfully evacuated. More than 100,000 teachers had followed the children from the capital. In Croydon, every school in the borough was closed for a full six months from the start of war. Across the country, some one million unevacuated children found themselves with no school to go to. With nowhere to go, in the first weeks of war the children left behind experienced a new freedom – an extended holiday that most relished at the time.
For Alf Morris, what started as a welcome break became a lifetime regret:
I just stopped school. The air raid wardens took over the schools. I used to go to the park, take a few jam sandwiches and a bottle of water. I’d play football or have a game of cricket, and later, as soon as the air raid sirens went, I’d run home and get in the Anderson shelter. It was a strange life. Your whole life was taken up with sitting in an air raid shelter.
Even when the schools reopened, with crowded classrooms catering for an often transient population of children, education was sporadic. Even when schools were open, absenteeism was recorded at rising some 50 per cent on pre-war figures. This rupturing of normality was lost on the children, but was later of significance for boys like Alf Morris: ‘That was the one thing in my life that I regret. Education was hit-and-miss. Sometimes you could go, sometimes they didn’t let you in. I don’t mind admitting it, I was a dunce when I left school at fourteen.’ He was not alone: one pupil reported that every member of her class failed a scholarship exam. In Scotland pupils recalled their teachers assisting them by giving them the answers to exam questions: after all, it was not the children’s fault they had not been in lessons.
Whilst boys like Alf happily played football and hung around in local parks, others were less innocent: in the early part of the war juvenile delinquency rose by 40 per cent. With just fifteen of 900 London County Council schools open in early 1940, there were attempts to bring wayward children under control. Many churches and social groups opened their facilities to local children, offering games and lessons in such curious subjects as Esperanto, in an effort to keep children occupied. Some councils opened dedicated rooms for children within their libraries, where children could listen to the broadcasts but also be encouraged to read the available books.
Yet whilst so many children were slowly attempting to settle into their new surroundings or enjoying their new-found freedoms, others were already embroiled in war. For some youngsters war immediately entered their lives, catapulting them into the front line. While history books reflect the ‘Phoney War’ that supposedly lasted until spring 1940, truth was far different and the cabin boys, galley boys and deck boys of the merchant fleet were suddenly at the forefront of the conflict. The Merchant Navy played a vital role for the UK. The country relied on exports to raise revenue and imports of food to sustain its population. In peace and war, it was the merchant fleet that fulfilled this task. As the Germans knew, if they could prevent the Merchant Navy from carrying out its duties, then Britain would surely fall.
As they began their dangerous mission they were protected by the Royal Navy, the one arm of the British military that could claim to be the equal of any service in the world. Just like the merchant fleet, the Royal Navy was home to numerous boys under the age of eighteen who, despite their youth, were considered old enough to be at the forefront of war. Kenneth Toop, who had joined the Royal Navy in 1938 aged fifteen, explained the most common reason for youngsters joining the Navy:
When I left school, if you were extremely fortunate, you could get an apprenticeship. But you had to have money to pay for it. For a lot of us it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t even take up a scholarship. My mum and dad couldn’t afford a school cap and blazer for me. We were more interested in earning a few shillings as an errand boy.
