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In 1939, two days before my eighth birthday, war
was declared. I remember it well because I cried as I thought Adolf
Hitler had done it on purpose to spoil my birthday party. When the
announcement was made on the radio my mother and father rushed out into
the back garden to talk to the next door neighbours over the back
fence. I can remember my mother being very agitated. Of course my
party wasn’t cancelled but there was an air of gloom surrounding
everyone.
Within
a few days everything seemed to be happening in my small world – air
raid sirens were being tested and we had to go and be fitted with gas
masks. The latter being one of the worst experiences of my childhood and
I can still smell the rubber smell that came from these awful
things. I created such a fuss when the gas mask was being
fitted that the people concerned could not get me to keep still long
enough to fit one, so for a good part of the war I carried a gas mask
that really didn’t fit properly!
One of the exciting things at the beginning of the
war was playing victims of the bombing. Volunteers were recruited for
casualties in a pretend raid and all the children in the street would
come forward to have their arms, heads, legs and other parts of their
body bandaged and to be carried off on a stretcher. Shelters had to be
built in the school grounds. Whilst this was under way at my school –
Roe Green Junior Mixed School in Kingsbury – we had to have lessons at
a school about 2 miles away, which meant children walking there and back
on their own as fathers were at war and mothers directed to war work.
These lessons were only on a few days a week – not every day – and
lasted only a few hours.
 Once
our own shelters were built we had practice of going down into them
class by class. I believe there were three or four shelters in all. They
were quite large and seemed such a long way done to an eight-year old.
When the siren sounded we would file down (clutching our gas masks,
which went everywhere with us) and sit waiting for the "all
clear" to sound. When the school shelters were completed shelters
were erected in the streets. These were brick buildings and didn’t
appear very safe – in fact, in our street the shelters were mainly
used by the children for play areas. They weren’t used very much in
air raids as most people in the street used the school shelters at
night, stayed in their own beds or took cover under the stairs. A lot of
people had Anderson Shelters in their
gardens (which more often than not were very damp) or like us had a Morrison
shelter in their homes. These were like big iron tables with a cage
underneath. We used these during the day if there was a raid and they
were used more when the worst of the blitz was over.
 When
the blitz started in l940, my family used the school shelters every
evening. Directly after we had had our tea it was "action
stations" and we hurried across the road arms full of blankets,
pillows, hurricane lamps and whatever else we needed. My father would
see us settled in and then, as he was an A.R.P. warden (Air Raid
Precautions) he would be off helping with various aspects of the
bombing. Sometimes he would be out all night, come back for a couple of
hours sleep, and then up for work the next day. He would often bring
home some lonely figure who had been bombed out and have no where to go
and my mother would give them a bed for a couple of nights – in fact
more often than not they would come down the shelter with us.
One night I remember the lady who lived
next-door-but one to us went into labour. It was a particularly heavy
raid and we had to wait in the house because it was too dangerous to
move to the shelter – bombs were dropping everywhere and a lot of the
houses in the street were ablaze, the sky was unforgettable with fires
burning all around. This poor lady was in the house all alone – her
husband was absolutely terrified of the raids and when things got bad he
just left her and ran. My mother stayed with her whilst my
father got the midwife, all this time I was with a neighbour, trying to
get across to the shelters.
 We
emerged from the shelter the next morning – it had been a terrible
night. We had all sat huddled together and the grown ups were
endeavouring to get sing-songs going to take the children’s mind off
things – it was horrendous. In the school playing field there was a
bomb crater which you could have got a double-decker bus in and all
around were houses bombed. There were houses devastated further up the
road to the right and left of us and in front and behind us and yet our
house barely had a pane of glass broken!
My junior school was so very much a large part of
my life at the beginning of the war as my mother was directed to factory
work and therefore had to leave very early in the morning and wasn’t
home until way after school time. We were all catered for though and had
breakfast, dinner and tea at school. The headmaster was a wonderful man
and he and his wife would stay at the school with us each evening and
play games, such as drafts, dominoes etc. We would then just have time
to go home, and prepare to go to the shelters.
A fter
these heavy raids we children would go around looking for pieces of
shrapnel – each of us trying to get the biggest and best piece. Most
of the children in my area were evacuated at the beginning of the war
but I didn’t want to go away from home and my mother and father didn’t
take much persuading to let me stay. It was suggested that I went to a
friend's sister in Winnipeg, Canada but after a ship carrying evacuees
to Canada was torpedoed my parents felt we should all stay together!
Most of my friends at home and school went away – that is why the
school could cater for just the few pupils who were left – and I
really didn’t feel too lonely because there wasn’t much time between
lessons, school food and the shelters to get lonely. There was just one
other girl who lived near me who wasn’t evacuated so we would play
together. However, this situation didn’t last very long as one by one
the evacuees returned home. I don’t remember anyone staying away too
long.
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Story copyright © 2000 Patricia
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