How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (7 page)

Ivy Moulton, Clacton

We lived in Ilford at the start of the war. Our neighbours had been offered an Anderson shelter in 1938, but had refused. By September 1940, the London Blitz had begun and they
changed their minds. By this time, however, the demand for shelters was high and they had to wait. In the meantime, they dug the hole, ready for the delivery of the shelter and we took some palings
out of our fence to enable them to use our shelter. One night there was a particularly heavy raid. We were already in the shelter when Mrs McC came down in her nightdress with a thick eiderdown
wrapped around her. When I tell you that Mrs McC was around fourteen stone, you’ll know that we weren’t surprised when she got wedged in the shelter entrance. Her husband, Jack, began
to push her from the rear, as we were pulling her from inside. Suddenly she fell in head first, leaving the eiderdown wedged in the entrance. Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt and we all had a
good laugh.

After a while, Mrs McC asked where the gas masks were. Jack said he hadn’t got them and that they must still be on the kitchen table. Jack was a silly old fool, said Mrs McC, and
he’d better fetch them ‘before we were all gassed to death’. So Jack went inside to fetch the masks.

After a while we heard a terrific crash, followed by a few muffled choice words, then another crash, followed by Jack falling head first down into the shelter. He’d put on his gas mask in
the house and, of course, couldn’t see where he was going. He fell down the hole he’d dug for his own shelter, hit his head on the crossbeam of the fence and knocked the snout of the
gas mask upwards and sideways so that it finished somewhere above the region of his left ear. He never heard the end of that.

We left Ilford soon afterwards and came to Derby. Some years after the war we went back to Ilford for a visit and happened to be walking past the McCs’ old house, just as some workmen were
removing an Anderson shelter from their garden.

Eileen Godfrey, Derby

My friend’s husband had extremely bad eyesight and had taken off his spectacles before getting into bed. He placed them on his bedside table along with a jam tart that
he’d taken up with him in case he got peckish in the night. He was fast asleep when the sirens sounded. As a fire warden he had to be on duty, but preferred to ignore the summons. His wife
nudged him with some urgency to ‘go and do your job’. The room was in total darkness and after scrambling out of bed, he groped for his specs, floundered around the room in the dark and
eventually ended up in the wardrobe. When the light went on he was wearing his wife’s sunglasses and clutching a sticky jam tart.

The same couple were again woken up by the sirens. Firebombs were falling all over place and, again, the wife urged her husband to do his duty. This time he went to the window, saw the mountain
of blazing fires and asked: ‘Which one would you like me to tackle first?’

When I was directed to go on fire duty for the first time I would also have preferred to ignore the summons, but my mother reminded me: ‘You’ve got to go out and help the girl next
door. You’re both on duty.’

Sticking my helmet on my head I went outside, assuming that the other girl, who knew the ropes better than I, would guide me along. She wasn’t there. In fact, there was no sign of life in
the whole street. There was I, facing pockets of fire and puzzling as to what I could do alone. Suddenly, as I stood there pondering on this problem, a piece of shrapnel hit my helmet with an
ominous ping. That was enough. Crouching under the porch I rang the bell of our flat and my mother came hurrying downstairs. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been
hit,’ I told her. ‘And I’m not going out there again. That girl hasn’t shown up and I’m not fighting the war alone.’

My mum wasn’t at all impressed and it wasn’t until next morning that I could find the piece of shrapnel as evidence of my ‘injury’.

‘That?’ said my mother sarcastically, ‘That’s nothing . . .’

Peggy Saunders, Richmond

It seems that our next-door neighbour was a bit of a coward. Every time the sirens sounded, he used to panic and run like mad to the air-raid shelter. We lived at Hucknall,
only a few minutes from the Rolls-Royce Works aerodrome, so the sirens went fairly frequently. One day it seemed worse than ever. First the warning sirens, then the all-clear sounded, one after the
other all day long. Each time our neighbour did his ‘minute-mile’.

In the evening my mother was on her own with her four children because Dad was on the evening shift at Rolls-Royce. By a quarter to midnight, she was fed-up of going back and forth to the
shelter. She was in bed, just going off to sleep, when the siren went off again. Through the wall she heard a mad scramble going off in the bedroom of next door, and our neighbour running
downstairs, taking them about four at a time. She heard him shouting in the back garden to his wife to hurry up. When his wife joined him, my mother heard him ask where we were. His wife replied
that we were still in bed. At this point he began shouting up to my mother’s window urging her to get up and get to safety. My mother opened the window and peered out. She told him she was
staying where it was warm and dry and comfortable and, if she was going to die, that was where she was going to do it. Our neighbour wasn’t impressed. He called her ‘mad’ and went
off on his ‘minute-mile’ once more. My mother laughed as he nearly tripped himself up trying to put on his trousers and getting two feet into the same leg hole.

Once, while I was playing for a sergeants’ mess dance at a POW camp near Rochdale, there was a breakout of prisoners. The first we knew was much later when a sergeant said to me: ‘It
was all your fault! You shouldn’t have played “The Prisoner’s Song” followed by “If I Had the Wings of a Swallow”.’

Hannah Wheatley, Belper, Derbyshire

One late spring night in 1940, the first air-raid warning sounded in Smethwick. At the time I was newly married. My husband was in the armed forces and I was living in rooms
with a very old and very deaf lady. I was in bed and, since it was a very warm night, I was wearing no nightdress. However, at the sound of the siren, I jumped out of bed and ran to the old
lady’s bedroom shouting: ‘Mrs B, the air raids have started! The sirens are going!’

She, poor soul, being very deaf, said, ‘What?’

I said, ‘The bulls are blowing!’ The ‘bulls’ were the pre-war factory sirens telling everyone it was time to go to work.

With that, panic-stricken and, I am afraid, cowardly, I ran downstairs, grabbed a coat and a pair of sandals and raced to the nearest shelter, which was down a steep hill in the local park. On
my flight I tripped and cut my knee. Reaching the shelter, which was dark and empty, I stood there trembling for what seemed like hours but could have been no more than five minutes, when a man and
two small children entered. I spoke. He nearly jumped out of his skin; he thought I was a ghost. I told him that I’d fallen, and with the aid of a match – in the circumstances I was
glad he’d no torch – he bound my knee with a clean handkerchief. A few minutes later, more terrified people came in and my ‘Sir Galahad’ said he would take me to the
first-aid post when the all-clear sounded. There the first-aid officer dressed my knee and I managed to hold my coat together this time.

When he took me home, we found that poor Mrs B had barricaded herself in her room. When she peeked out of the window and caught sight of the first-aider still wearing his helmet, she panicked.
‘The Germans have got her! Please don’t have me, I’m only an old woman!’

The first-aider was an old neighbour and knew Mrs B well, and realized there was no point in him trying to calm her, so ran down the street to fetch her son. After some difficulty, Mrs B’s
son managed to get to his mother, who clearly still thought she was in the hands of the Germans, and was yelling and crying. Only when she saw her daughter-in-law did she calm down. I didn’t
stay much longer with Mrs B, but I reckon I was the first air-raid casualty in Smethwick.

Mrs E. R. Smith, West Bromwich

We were in London during the Blitz, and we had an Irish lodger living as one of the family. Her name was Sheila McSweeney and she was about twenty-six. She never worried about
bombs dropping.

All she ever did was read a book and smoke a fag, and nothing took her away from these. Well, one night in 1941 we were getting a terrific bombing. All the docks were ablaze and our street was
hit very badly. In the space of one night, a high explosive and an oil bomb were dropped on the street. Then another bomb fell but remained unexploded, and then a Molotov Breadbasket [a bomb that
combined a high-explosive charge with a cluster of incendiary bombs that were released as it fell] and several incendiaries were dropped. My parents and sisters were all in the shelter in the
garden, while Sheila stayed in the kitchen with her book and her fag, never bothering about the carnage in the street. My brother and I were racing in and out of the house, fighting the fires as
they broke out, but every time we came indoors, she was still sitting and reading. We kept asking her to come and give us a hand, but never once did she look up or answer us. We were absolutely
beat at the finish, so for the last time of asking we begged her to help. Well, she put down the book, took the cigarette out of her mouth and retorted: ‘This is not my war, it’s your
war. So you can get on with it!’ With that she put the cigarette back in her mouth and carried on reading, leaving my brother and I not knowing whether to laugh or cry. What an answer. As if
the Germans would know there was an Irish neutral in the house and not attack it. Anyway, a short time later she was in the thick of it, and if anyone deserved the George Medal that night, it was
Sheila McSweeney.