How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (31 page)

Another night I discovered two bearded sailors hunkered down against the wall, talking to my husband. They said they’d have preferred to take their chances at sea because they felt safer
aboard a moving target.

Mrs J. W. Graham, Lanarkshire

One early summer’s day, after I’d been through a high concentration of tear gas while training in full uniform but minus respirator, I travelled home on a bus. I sat
close to the open entrance because of the effect the tear gas had on my eyes. However, as the bus filled – eventually there were people standing – I caught sight of some passengers
surreptitiously wiping their eyes and blowing their noses. When I rang the bell to get off, the conductress, a friend of mine, was upstairs taking fares. When she came down, she said: ‘I
could understand this lot with hankies at the ready in winter, but what’s the matter with them today I don’t know.’ You can guess that I did, but I didn’t dare say a word.
My uniform had become impregnated with the tear gas, and as the vehicle filled and heated, the gas started to react until the whole of the lower-deck passengers were getting very weepy-eyed. They
just didn’t know why.

Mrs J. W. Graham, Lanarkshire

I was a nurse on nights at the Woolwich Hospital when at 5 a.m. on 14 September 1940, a high-explosive bomb hit the big main wards. I was buried under the rubble and I still
think it was a miracle that I survived unharmed, except for cuts and bruises. I wormed my way up and out and carried on helping to move the patients. Then it was noticed that I had a great red
stain on my back, but investigations proved it to be from a bottle of ink. Matron kept asking me: ‘Where is your cap, nurse?’ My hair was piled high with debris, dust etc. and I was
also stone deaf for about two hours and she was worried about my cap. Years later, when excavations began, my cap-brim was found under all the rubble, but the rest of the cap was lost for ever.

During one air raid, all our electric lights failed just as a baby was about to be born. However, we did have a gaslight that was quickly put to use and the baby was safely delivered. Then a
bomb hit St Mary’s Churchyard at Woolwich, and we were told that the coffins flew about in all directions. One corpse had the chin still strapped up.

Betty Sheperdson, York

T
ime changes everything. When, in 1978, I first made an appeal for amusing stories from the Second World War, many of those who responded were
middle-aged men and women. They had seen the war through the eyes of a child. Their perception of life on the Home Front was entirely different to those who were already adults when war was
declared.

One such man was Jim Phelps, in 1978 a forty-eight-year-old recreation officer with Derby City Council. On 3 September 1939, Jim was nine years old and one memory of that Sunday morning had
remained with him. Tears streaming down the faces of his neighbours finally brought home to young Jim the reality of it all. Up until then, war had been a game played with lead soldiers and a toy
cannon that fired matchsticks. But on the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939, Jim saw his mother’s friends hugging and weeping. For the second time in a generation, Britain had declared war
on Germany. In that moment he did a lot of growing up.

‘I went to bed on the Saturday, wondering what the morning would bring. At 11.15 a.m., we tuned in our wireless and heard the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, announce that we were at
war. I was so excited, I ran into the street to find my pals. Then I saw some of the neighbours. They could remember the last war. They were weeping. Suddenly I realized what it meant.’

Jim spent the remainder of the day helping to fill sandbags around his neighbourhood. At 3.30 a.m., the air-raid sirens sounded for Derby’s first alert of the war. The Phelps family
trooped to the public shelter nearby. Nothing happened. It was a false alarm. Of course, the sirens wailed many more times and sometimes they did herald German bombers. To Jim and his pals, though,
they generally signalled another adventure. Children are so resilient. They go where adults sometimes fear to tread.

However, like those of adults, children’s views of the war depended a great deal on where they lived. Jim’s hometown suffered air raids but remarkably little death or destruction by
comparison to bigger cities, from where children were evacuated to smaller towns and to the countryside. In the first few weeks of the war, almost two million children were moved from cities that
the government feared would become primary targets for German air raids. The scheme was voluntary and its take-up varied wildly from city to city. While seventy-five per cent of Manchester’s
children were evacuated, Sheffield gave up only fifteen per cent of its youngsters.

But from wherever they came, and however many, the official account was that it had all gone smoothly and that everyone was happy. In reality, many mothers were loath to wave off their children
into the unknown. And when nothing much happened in the first winter of the war – the so-called Phoney War – then thousands of children were taken back to the cities they had left.

Many were glad to be back. The shock of moving from poor urban housing to villages and farms proved almost impossible to overcome. Their hosts, meanwhile, complained of swearing, bed-wetting,
fleas and an increase in local crime. There were also problems where under-fives were accompanied by their mothers who sometimes proved even more troublesome than their offspring. It was a case of
two cultures colliding head-on. As a contributor to the Mass Observation Archive put it: ‘One half of Britain is now finding out how the other half lives.’

Yet, evacuees or locals, children proved particularly good at keeping calm and carrying on. In 1939, the
Northampton Independent
related the story of a tiny evacuee who greeted his new
‘mother’ with the words: ‘I’ve just seen a cah!’ When she said that she wasn’t surprised because there were lots of them about, he replied: ‘I know,
’ole ’erds of ’em.’

But children grew up in this war. In December 1945, Jim Phelps, the nine-year-old boy we met earlier, was now sixteen. On Christmas morning he went to his local Methodist Church where there were
some German prisoners of war in the congregation. They sat shoulder to shoulder with their fellow worshippers, some of the ordinary people of the town, and together they sang ‘Silent
Night’.

Jim said: ‘My mind went back to that September day when war was declared and I thought about all the horror, the hurt and heartache. And then I wondered what we had learned, and what
tomorrow would bring.’

My father had just bought me a pair of stilts. Being only twelve years old then, I was eager to go out in the street and try them out. Then came the sound of the sirens. I
didn’t take much notice of it because I’d heard it so many times before. I was up on my stilts in the middle of the road, when all of a sudden I heard a whistling sound. I left my
stilts standing and dived for the nearest shop doorway. There was an almighty bang when the bomb hit one of the houses in the nearby street. When it was all clear, I went back to my stilts where
they were, still standing in the middle of the road.

Mr R. Durey, Maidstone

I was eight years old when the war started. We lived on the edge of Epping Forest, about eleven miles from Marble Arch. ‘Old Wayo’ was a man of about sixty-five who
loved to get drunk, when he’d the money. He used to come down the road, rolling all over the place, and at the height of an air raid he would shout out to all he could see:
‘Jesus’ll bomb ’em! Jesus’ll bomb ’em!’

By 1944, most people had resigned themselves to a common philosophy: if we are going to die, we may as well die in our beds. So the Anderson shelters were becoming redundant and abandoned. This
was just the right atmosphere for a gang of us boys, mostly playing truant from school, to gather and have our fun and games. An old wind-up gramophone was acquired from somewhere and we’d a
battered old record that we played night after night. It went: ‘Look at the orchids blooming, blooming great flowers, ain’t it grand to be blooming well dead?’ You can imagine,
after a time, the word ‘blooming’ was substituted by something not so polite.