Last year, while I was in the process of writing this book, Britain celebrated the seventieth anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day and four months later commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Blitz. Newspapers, radio and television were full of men and women recalling the momentous day when they learned that the war was finally at an end, and the devastation of the earlier bombings.
It got me thinking about the significance and power of memories and their place in our shared history. I’m not talking about the memories of politicians, celebrities or high-ranking soldiers, whose opinions seem to be the first canvassed on such anniversaries. What I’m interested in is the voice of the working-class woman on the street. After all, it was such women who bore the cold, hard brunt of the war.
During the course of researching Secrets of the Sewing Bee, I had the privilege of meeting many astonishing women who were kind enough to share their memories with me of living through the Blitz, funny, feisty firecrackers who inspired the characters of Dolly, Flossy, Peggy, Sal, Daisy and Vera.
These women are hidden in plain sight. I attended many a tea dance, coffee morning, quiz night and bingo session in the East End of London and was always struck by how unassuming Britain’s wartime Blitz survivors are and, in turn, how easy it is to overlook their sacrifices and triumphs.
Whenever I made such a visit, I invariably came away feeling surprised and humbled. The unassuming silver-haired lady doing her crossword in a comfy chair? Dug out the bodies of babies from a bombsite with her bare hands. The sweet elderly lady in a powder-blue twinset tucking into sponge and custard round the communal dining table? Slept on nearly every station platform on the Central Line for months after her home was blown up. The woman fretting she may have accidentally taken a pencil home after last week’s quiz? Illegally broke into the Underground to protest against the lack of shelter.
The elderly seem to pale into invisibility as they age, yet the generation that survived the Blitz have the power to shock, move and amaze us each time they open their mouths.
Take my first meeting with Kathy. Nudging ninety and still line-dancing, this sprightly octogenarian told me in detail about her fears on the first night of the Blitz and her raw anguish at seeing the destruction of her community at the hands of the Luftwaffe. After the moving interview, I went to leave, but she called me back.
‘I nearly forgot, love,’ she said. ‘I knitted you something.’
How sweet, I thought, as she took out something in soft white wool from her knitting bag; she’s knitted something for my baby son. On closer examination, it turned out to be not a pair of baby booties but a willy-warmer! Kathy and her friend Vera took one look at my shocked face and fell about in raucous howls of laughter.
This always serves to remind me never to judge! Elderly women are rarely the doddery, sweet old ladies we at times perceive them to be. They are funny, fearless, robust and invariably full of incredible gems of wisdom and wit.
Their unique stories go on and on . . . Until they don’t. Sadly, occasions like the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Blitz also mark a point where living memory starts to turn into history, and that is why these women’s voices need to be heard more than ever. By the next significant anniversary, there will be no more reminiscing. It is so important that we listen.
There are insufficient words to express what a debt of gratitude we owe the women of Britain who saw their Home Front turn into a battlefront. They were called civilians, yet, in truth, they were soldiers.
The Blitz wrought unimaginable destruction but also bred great personal courage, strength, ingenuity and humour. Each of the women I interviewed recalls with astonishing clarity their ‘Blitz story’, the anecdote their mind automatically reaches for, even seventy-five years after the event. When pieced together, they make fascinating, and at times grimly humorous, reading, as well as proving that no one’s war was the same. Here, in their own words, are their Blitz stories. Told without embellishment or sentiment, they are an extraordinary reminder to us all of the sacrifices of an entire generation.
Dolly, 951
‘I was a tormenting bugger and always got a kick out of needling my older sister. When the Blitz broke out, I was twenty and bored stiff of being cooped up underground in a stuffy Anderson shelter. I wanted to be out dancing and having fun, thank you very much. So being young and silly, I used to tease my sister something rotten, which drove her and my poor mum mad.
‘One night, during a raid, she fumed, “I’ve had enough of you!” and stormed out to shelter underground at Columbia Buildings. Unfortunately, it was the same night a fifty-kilogram bomb whistled down the ventilation chute and exploded, killing fifty-eight people. Fortunately, my sister survived, but Mum told me in no uncertain terms that had she died, I’d have had her blood on my hands. Needless to say, I kept my mouth shut after that.
‘As the war progressed, I got all sorts of jobs, from sewing army uniforms to making tyres for trucks, to filling bombs and bullets with gunpowder. After that, I was too tired to tease my sister.
‘Looking back, it’s us women who were the true heroes. It’s us who deserved the medals. Six years we toiled, while the bombs dropped around us, risking our lives, working and raising families while the Home Front was turned into a war zone. My friend’s brother came home on leave during the Blitz. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t wait to go back into the army.’
Anne, 87
‘I was born in Columbia Buildings, a huge Victorian pile in Bethnal Green, which Angela Burdett, a renowned philanthropist and friend of Charles Dickens, built to ease the East End housing crisis. I loved growing up there. Me and my thirteen siblings used to play with dozens of other kids in a communal play area outside.
‘When the Blitz broke out, we used the vast underground public shelter beneath our buildings and the community continued underground. There was great entertainment: singing, piano-playing and so on.
‘On the first night of the Blitz, in a million-to-one chance, a bomb went down the ventilation shaft – or, as we called it, the “apple chute” – which led down to the basement shelter, killing and injuring many. We were in the basement next door that night. I don’t remember much about it. Noise, confusion, smoke and screams, then my mum rushing me away. My elder brother went to help. He picked up a baby and it literally fell apart in his arms. Such shocking scenes.
‘The King came round soon after to visit. He was in his army uniform and I remember thinking how pale he was.
‘As the Blitz went on, we all used to discuss it and say things like, “Is the moon out tonight? We’ll cop it, I shouldn’t wonder.” We were very accepting of things and just got on with it.’
Gladys, 83
‘An extraordinary thing happened two weeks after the Blitz broke out. I was a child living in Westminster when a great shout went up from outside my block of flats.
‘A German Luftwaffe pilot had been shot down in nearby Victoria and had bailed out in his parachute, landing in Kennington.
‘That pilot was pursued by a huge crowd of angry women wielding shovels, brushes, sticks and whatever weapons they could grab. They were hell-bent on annihilation.
‘One woman reached him and hit him with her saucepan with an angry cry of “That’s for my boy at Dunkirk.” He got to his feet and tried to run, but his harness was too much for him. Suddenly, an army lorry drew up and half a dozen members of the Home Guard with fixed bayonets jumped out and forced a way through the crowd. They rescued the airman, and the last I saw of him was when, looking very battered, he climbed into the back of the lorry.
‘You have to understand how much we hated them. Our anger was very real and very raw. The Germans started it, but we sure as hell finished it.’
Dorothea, deceased
‘The Blitz was chilling. I remember pushing my baby along Oxford Street in her pram when the alarms sounded. That was a sound that made your blood run cold. Just for a split second, everyone would stop and look around, to see what everyone else is going to do. And then you ran . . . You just hoped you’d reach the safety of a shelter.
‘Anyway, as I said, the siren went, I stopped, just for a moment, and there was a man walking towards me, from behind, going in the same direction. I didn’t know him, but everyone took concern for everybody in those days. He looked at me with my pram and shouted, “Run and get your kiddies safe. I am right behind—” He didn’t finish the sentence, because at that precise moment, a bomb dropped in another street, but the blast sent terrible shock waves right across where we were standing! I heard a bang, a whoosh and a whistling sound, and instinctively ducked as the plate-glass window was blown out of the shop we were opposite. It missed me, went over the top of my pram and sliced the man horizontally in two! For a second, he remained upright in one piece, but as he fell, the two halves of his body separated and then I couldn’t look anymore. I just ran all the way home in tears, oblivious to everything around me, and promptly got told off by my mother for not going to shelter!’
Pat, 88
‘How I used to love my job as a machinist at the Rego in Curtain Road, Shoreditch. It wasn’t just a job; it was a rite of passage. The East End’s own finishing school! All the girls singing in great lines, standing around giggling, smoking and plucking each other’s eyebrows on tea breaks. You’ve never seen the like!
‘Then the bombs started and everything changed. One time I was sitting at my workbench machining when the entire front of the building blew off and just slid onto the pavement in a great cloud of dust. We were so shocked we sat staring at the passers-by in the street from behind our machines.
‘During the war, you never knew who would be there the next morning. Quite often you’d come in to find empty seats where women had been killed or bombed out. They were very sad times, but despite this, by God we took the war on!’
Gladys, 86
‘When the Blitz broke out, I was thirteen. There was no adequate shelter in the East End, so civilians took over the Tubes. What choice did they have? They were getting bombed night after night. Not having a safe place was soul-destroying. No one was trying to break the law; it was simply a case of do or die. Self-preservation, really.
‘To begin with, until it was properly fitted out, Bethnal Green Tube was hellish – concrete, bare boards, cold; it was a building site, really, and I was terrified. You had to start filing down the concrete steps from about five p.m., to mark your spot. But at least you couldn’t hear the bombs, and the camaraderie was terrific, everyone laughing, joking, eating their dinners and singing. On Sundays, the Salvation Army used to come down and play music up and down the platform.
‘We caught everything going down there: scabies, head lice, you name it. You couldn’t take proper baths. Occasionally we’d go to York Hall Baths in Bethnal Green and pay sixpence for a wash. You’d have an individual cubicle and shout, “More hot water in number six!” to the lady attendant. Despite this, you were never really clean during the Blitz. As it waged on, we tried more stations, from Liverpool Station right up to Oxford Circus. I must have slept on every platform on the Central Line!’
Dee, 89
‘I wouldn’t have missed the Blitz for anything. Perhaps because I was young and full of spirit and youthful bravado, but it all felt like a great big adventure to me. I loved the camaraderie, the sense of us against them. I was working as a typist in a City firm at the time but living in the East End.
‘At the end of every day, the boss would make us lug our typewriters down to the basement in case they got damaged overnight in a raid! Great big heavy things, they were. I got thoroughly sick of lugging this thing about, especially when I should have been making my way home to the safety of a shelter. I didn’t want to get killed because I’d been looking after someone else’s office equipment, so one day, I stood up to him and refused. “It’s their typewriters, not ours,” I told the office girls in a great gesture of defiance. The boss sacked me! That experience taught me to stand up for myself in life.’
Dot, 89
‘One shouldn’t laugh, but there were some, albeit unintentional, funny moments during the Blitz. I was fourteen and working in a garment factory in Hackney at the time. Every night, I sheltered in a huge basement under a school near my home in Bethnal Green.
‘One evening coming home from work, myself and my mum and dad got caught short when the sirens went off, so we dived into the nearest brick street shelter.
‘The wail of the siren sounded just as loud inside as it had done on the street. Puzzled, I looked up and my mouth dropped open.
“Here, Mum,” I said. “Fat lot of good this shelter is. It’s got no roof!”
‘Mum put her head in her hands, but it made me laugh.
‘The school basement shelter was much safer. Well, it had a roof at least! The shelter warden there was called Jack. Poor chap was so bow-legged he couldn’t have caught a pig in a passage. God knows how but he managed to make it up on the school roof each night for fire-watching duties.
‘I still remember sitting down in that shelter Christmas 1940, singing “Silent Night” with some visiting curates, with the bombs crashing down all around us, and my friend and I trying to stifle our giggles. Looking back, humour was our best weapon for survival.’
Vi, 78
‘The Blitz gave me a passport to a better life. I was only little, so when the bombs started, I was evacuated out to the countryside, away from my two brothers and seamstress mother. It was glorious. I lived with an elderly widower who doted on me. I had my own bedroom overlooking lush green fields, slept on snowy-white sheets, ate fresh food, went to the village school and roamed the countryside. I didn’t even mind having to attend church three times on a Sunday.
‘Then the war ended and I had to go home. Talk about a shock. Mum did her best, but it was hard for her, as she was a single mother who had to scrape for every penny. Our new home was a filthy, rat-infested hovel behind the Barbican – three rooms in the basement of a bomb-shattered building.
‘“Who are those filthy boys?” I asked Mum.
‘“Cheeky cow!” she shrieked. “They’re your brothers.”
‘My new bedroom looked out on a rickety iron fire escape into a dark, narrow yard where everyone slung their rubbish. It was all a far cry from my country home.
‘Life was a grind, and there was never enough coal for the fire or food for the pot, just scrag-ends of meat that Mum cooked up into a stew. Mum had to go out to work to support us, so me and my brothers would roam the bombsites, getting into mischief.
‘One time, we couldn’t believe it when we found a big white rabbit in a deserted building. We took him home and named him Jiminy Cricket. I adored that rabbit and for months I fed him every last scrap of food I could find.
‘Then at Christmas, he went missing. Turned out, Mum had taken him to the butcher’s, where she’d had him slaughtered. She served Jiminy up for Christmas lunch! She hadn’t meant to be cruel, just practical, but I sobbed all through Christmas Day. People today don’t know the half of it.’
Len, 89
‘Do you know who the real heroes of the Blitz were? The mothers of the East End! Night after night they sat there being bombed, but they had no weapons to defend themselves or their children, no rifles with which to fire back or grenades to throw. Nightly they hid from the bombs; then each morning they had to get up and care for children or clock on to work. It was business as usual, see.
‘Me, I was just a skinny fourteen-year-old boy, working as an apprentice cabinetmaker on Brick Lane when the bombs started to drop.
‘The Blitz was the happiest time of my life. From about six or seven p.m. onwards, you’d hear the drone of the enemy planes, the sirens would start up, and off we’d go. Everyone would muck in together, no matter if you were a millionaire or a skinny cockney kid in tatty trousers like me. Money and status don’t matter when you could be dead in the morning. For the first time ever, society was on a level pegging and I felt equal.
‘There were hard times, though, of course. A bomb landed near my buildings in Russia Lane and I ended up digging out people I knew from a brick shelter that had been hit. Terrible, it was, seeing the look on the faces of the dead people I pulled out. They weren’t safe in that brick shelter: the concrete ceiling had caved in and flattened them. I broke down and cried my eyes out at the sight of them, but the next day, I got on with it. I tell you what, though, I swore after that not to use the street shelters. I took my chances and stayed out in the open, dodging shrapnel.
‘Four years later, I turned eighteen, got called up and went straight into active service in the last year of the war in the Far East. I saw some sights there in the jungles that no man should ever have to witness, but it was the unique camaraderie of the Blitz I shall always choose to remember.’
Glad, 79
‘My wonderful mum did an amazing job of hiding her fear from me and my six siblings during the Blitz. She raised seven children in Poplar by the docks, the worst-hit area. Mum did have us evacuated, but she missed us too much, so we came home. She used to calmly usher us all to the nearest street shelter after the sirens went off. God knows how she did it on her own with seven kids!
‘I remember her once in the shelters reading us bedtime stories to try and drown out the thump of bombs. When the bombs got louder, her fingers would curl round the spine of the book, gripping it tighter and tighter until her fingers were blood red. That’s the only way her nerves betrayed her.’
Kay, 93
‘I was eighteen when the Blitz broke out and went from dressmaking to working as a WAAF on ambulance duty, ferrying bomb casualties to hospital.
‘One night was particularly bad for fires. Even the fire hoses were burning. We were sent on a job to a point high up above London with sweeping views, and oh my, the scenes! The whole of London was on fire; countless churches and all the spires were blazing! Then the all-clear went. Suddenly, there was a terrific clap of thunder and fingers of lightning lit up the sky. Rain came down in buckets, drenching the fires, and in no time we were soaking and racing back to the ambulances. It felt like divine intervention.
‘“Now we’ll see what God can do,” said a man from the good old Salvation Army to me and my colleague Joan.
‘Joan was killed soon after that night. One minute she was working right by my side and we were talking; the next moment I turned around and she was dead on the floor with barely a mark on her. A piece of flying shrapnel had caught her in the neck. The tragedy is, she had only been married a few weeks when her husband, a pilot in the RAF, had been shot down and killed during the Battle of Britain, and now she too was dead. I didn’t have time to grieve for her or dwell on the dangers; I just had to get on with things. Seventy-five years on, though, I still think of Joan. I’ll never forget her. She was such a beautiful young woman, with turquoise eyes and gorgeous auburn hair, and so full of fun and mischief. We were together right from the start of the war, and I treasured our friendship. After the war ended, I developed a motto which I’ve lived my life by ever since: “You can’t please everybody, so you may as well please yourself.”’
Vera, 88
‘I was thirteen when the bombs started to drop. My dad wasn’t prepared to sit around and wait to be killed. He had a car-hire business, renting out a Daimler, so we used to drive it to Epping Forest each night and sleep in the woods.
‘One morning, we returned to find our house was the only one still standing in the street. A parachute bomb had dropped, and God knows how, but ours had survived. It devastated our vibrant neighbourhood, though. Before, our streets were full of kids, playing whip and top or hopscotch, and every doorstep was gleaming. The mothers on that street took such a fierce pride in their homes, and the street was like a village. The community was decimated by the Blitz. I never saw my friends again.
‘I visited the street many years later, in the seventies, and was saddened to see it had been turned into a big, faceless, high-rise council estate. The Blitz changed the face of the East End.’
Vera, 86
‘Jerry had a ball in the Blitz. On the first night they bombed the docks, Black Saturday, I remember going up to the top of the block of flats I lived in with Mum, Dad, seven siblings, dogs, cats, chicken and ducks. Great columns of smoke were billowing up into the skies from the docks, and a ring of fire surrounded us. I remember feeling absolutely terrified. It was the first time I’d felt fear in my life.
‘Mum refused to evacuate me. She wanted me where she could see me, and I didn’t want to live with strangers. I worshipped my mum – as long as I was by her side, I knew I would always be protected.
‘My sixteen-year-old brother worked as a messenger. He’d finish work in the factories at six; then he’d spend the night cycling round the East End, dodging bombs and delivering messages to fire crews where larger vehicles couldn’t get through. I don’t think he slept for eight months!
‘Everyone who stayed and defended London was a true hero. Apart from the villains, that is. No one talks about them much, but there were certain men in the East End who used to pretend to be wardens and then would go in and plunder from bombsites, taking gold rings from the fingers of dead women. It was disgusting. Not that you dared say anything, mind. You’d end up with a nail through your hand.’
Ray, 81
‘I was seven when the Blitz broke out and we used to shelter underground at Bethnal Green Tube. We even spent Christmas seventy feet below ground. Dad put a Christmas tree by the bottom of the escalators, and all the kids sang carols and each received one tiny present.
‘The adults tried hard to make it nice, playing the accordion and singing songs, but despite this, I hated living underground. We never got a bunk and it used to reek of Jeyes disinfectant. I can still smell it now in my nostrils.
‘They were very frightening times. In the morning, we would emerge blinking into the light and make our way to school, past the freshly smoking houses. No one expected to live until tomorrow.
‘People reading this might wonder why my mother never had me evacuated to the safety of the countryside. I must have been five or six when I overheard her talking to a neighbour over the back wall.
‘“My Ray stays here,” she said. “That way, if we die, we all die together.”
‘That really stuck in my mind and I never forgot it.’
Pat, 86
‘We loved sleeping at Bethnal Green Tube. It was like a little village underground, a sanctuary after the street shelters. You couldn’t hear the bombs and we had peace for the first time.
‘I used to borrow Milly-Molly-Mandy from the library and take free tap-dancing lessons. Us kids all used to hang out together in great packs, roaming for miles up and down the tunnels. It was great exercise, and our parents never worried about us down there.
‘I remember watching a wonderful baritone singer in the theatre one night. He sang in Russian and I had never heard anything like it. I was entranced and it sparked a lifelong love of music. Sheltering underground really opened my eyes to another way of life. You never had time to be bored, and I never saw anyone miserable, ever.
‘They had electric lighting, which at about eleven p.m. was dimmed and everyone quietened down for the night. There was never any trouble and I slept snug as a bug in a rug.’
Peggy, 86
‘It’s a miracle I’m alive. My dad worked as an ARP warden, and after seeing the deaths of so many at the Columbia Buildings tragedy on the first night of the Blitz, he was convinced the shelters weren’t safe.
‘“We’re stopping here,” he said, and so for the duration of the Blitz, I slept under the kitchen table with Mum, Dad and my sister.
‘We were bombed senseless every night for eight months. Strangely, I don’t remember feeling that scared. As long as I had my mum and dad there, I felt I would be all right.’
Emily, 88
‘I have never felt such heart-stopping terror in all my life as I did during the Blitz and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Centuries-old houses offered no protection.
‘There was no room in our tiny backyard for an Anderson shelter, so we used to share with the family that lived at the back of us. To me, the pulsating throb of the enemy aircraft overhead sounded as if they were saying, “For you . . . For you . . . For you . . .”
‘I still feel the heart-gripping fear now if I stop to think about it. I don’t care what anyone says, they were terrible, terrible times.’
Sally, 89
‘I know I shouldn’t say it, but I enjoyed the war years because you met up with people and there was a different kind of freedom. I missed it when it was over!
‘The whole community drew together and lived as one, and it brought out the best in people. We thrived in the East End because we are resourceful and stoic. We never stopped to think about it too much. We would never have been able to cope if we had dwelled on our misfortune.
‘There were some weird moments, though. One particularly bad night of bombing, I couldn’t resist and I stepped out the brick shelter we were in. A bomb dropped nearby and the building opposite literally lifted up in the air and the bricks came apart, vibrated and expanded, like you see in cartoons, before coming back together. It was astonishing. I’d never seen a building jump before.
‘I got in such trouble from the warden.
‘“Aren’t you afraid?” he said.
‘“No,” I replied, honestly.
I was fifteen or sixteen, and drawn to excitement and adventure. What did I care about personal safety back then? That building is still standing now, and seventy-five years on, I walk past it and wonder how on earth it didn’t collapse.’
Babs, 83
‘Me, my mum and my sister, Jean, evacuated to Torquay when the Blitz began. We hadn’t been there long when we decided to have a walk on the beach. Two planes came out of nowhere and flew down low over the beach.
‘“Look, Jean, what are those funny sparks coming out of them?” I said to my sister.
‘“They aren’t sparks; they’re bullets,” Mum shouted over the roar of the engines, as she pushed us down onto the sand.
‘Turns out they were two German Messerschmitt planes and they were machine-gunning everyone on the beach.
‘“Sod that,” remarked Mum, as she picked herself up. “We’ll be safer off back in the East End.” So back to London it was.
‘Back in Bethnal Green, I was so proud to have finally been entrusted by Mum with my own front-door key. I felt so grown-up and spent the whole night in the shelter boasting to my mates. I couldn’t believe it when I got home and found our front door had only been blown off! Strange times.’
Nell, 90
‘I was sixteen when the Blitz broke out and I worked right the way through it. My job was as a seamstress earning twelve shillings a week at a factory in Bethnal Green, sewing the netting into ARP helmets and the lining into sailors’ hats.
‘I was living in what was then rural countryside in Dagenham. It’s astonishing when you think about it. I had to take a blacked-out train into the heart of the bomb-shattered East End, and leave again each night, just as the raiders were returning. I was a sitting duck, really, on the District Line!
‘I’m sure my mum worried about me when she packed me off each morning with my corned-beef-and-Daddies-sauce sandwich, but she had no choice. We needed the money.
‘Tragically, my mother died just after the Blitz, and as I was the oldest girl, I had no choice but to leave my factory job to care for my younger brothers and sisters. My father was having an affair with another woman by then, and they certainly weren’t going to do it.
‘It was hard. I missed Mum and my job, and the responsibility fell squarely on my shoulders. No dancing up a storm up West with American GIs for me. Just hard graft and sacrifice.’
Kathy, 88
‘It sounds mad, like, but we had a good time during the war. We didn’t wait for someone to entertain us; we entertained them! During the raids, we would head down the crypt at St John Church in Bethnal Green and we would have enormous sing-songs. There would always be a fella down there with an accordion and everyone would join in. I never once felt fear.
‘Churchill and the King were around the East End lots during the Blitz to raise morale, but I didn’t need my morale raising, thank you very much!’
National Service Act
The Blitz officially began on 7 September 1940 and lasted until 11 May 1941. In that time, over a million houses were destroyed and damaged in London, and 43,000 people nationwide were killed. Seven months later, the second National Service Act was passed, introducing conscription for women. All unmarried women and all childless widows between the ages of twenty and thirty could now be set to work for the wider good of the war effort.
Lust, Lies and Law-Breakers – The Secret History of the Blitz Revealed
The Blitz was a time of terror and misery. Almost one hundred thousand people were killed or seriously injured over eight and a half months of brutal enemy action. For those directly affected, the Blitz started and ended there, a period of unremitting darkness.
For others, however, the Blitz was a time of possibilities. Shocked out of their rhythms by fear and necessity, ordinary people pulled together and helped strangers. They spoke to each other for the first time. They found common ground amidst the chaos where none had existed before. And at the same time, they broke rules and exploited each other. They were selfish in ways they could barely have imagined. People behaved very well – and they behaved very badly.
The Blitz, after all, was a time of extremes. Extremes of experience, extremes of behaviour, extremes of reaction. In every possible direction. Take the case of Ida Rodway. Ida was an ordinary law-abiding woman in her late sixties from East London. In early October 1940, she went to fetch her blind husband, Joseph, his morning cup of tea. But as the water boiled, Ida changed her mind. She picked up an axe and a carving knife instead. Returning to her husband, she attacked him with the axe. It quickly broke. So she slit his throat with the knife.
Ida was a devoted wife. Joseph’s brother never remembered the couple exchanging a harsh word. But they were as truly victims of the Blitz as anybody killed by an aerial mine or a high-explosive bomb. In September, they had been bombed out of their Hackney home, and after several days in hospital had begun sleeping on Ida’s sister’s floor. Joseph’s mental state was deteriorating and he rarely knew where he was. They were about to lose their labour money and Ida had no idea how or where they were going to live, or what to do about the bombed house that still contained all their possessions. Hopeless, helpless and overwhelmed, she did what she considered to be the kindest thing for her husband. Charged with murder, she was found unfit to plead at the Old Bailey, and committed to Broadmoor where she died a few years later.
This was truly a crime of the Blitz. Yet the extremes of the period had other, more positive, effects. They changed the attitudes and expectations of Britain’s citizens. And as expectations altered, the fight against Nazism became intertwined with the fight for a better future. Women, for example, were encouraged to step outside the home, to become independent, to contribute actively to the war effort. Yes, they were paid less than men to do their widely varying work. Yes, they were still required to run the home. And yes, when it was all over, they were expected to step aside and allow the men to replace them. But for the duration, their lives opened up in extraordinary ways.
Sexually, too, attitudes and behaviours shifted. In her diary on 7 September 1940 – the date on which the daytime bombing of London began – nineteen-year-old Joan Wyndham wrote, ‘As the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert.’ As good as her word, she went to bed with her boyfriend. ‘If that’s really all there is to it, I’d rather have a good smoke,’ she told her diary afterwards. But disappointing or not, her experience was not unusual. Many people had love affairs they would not have had before the war. These ranged from isolated experiences to ‘wartime marriages’, liaisons intended to last for the duration before being dropped – the sexual equivalent, perhaps, of powdered egg.
Many of the freedoms and attitudes that we nowadays take for granted were forged in the Blitz’s dark crucible. The country owes a far larger debt to the period than has been acknowledged. This was the time when the vulnerable in society began to be protected, when a sense of collective responsibility began to form, when plans were first laid for a National Health Service and an Education Act offering free secondary education to all. It was the period when a War Aims Cabinet Committee, composed mainly of Conservatives, delivered a paper declaring that economic, social and educational practices would, in future, have to be overhauled in order to secure a reasonable standard of life for the entire population. The Blitz was certainly a time of misery – but it was also a time when attitudes and behaviours changed. And it was a time when the sacrifices made by ordinary British people began to tilt the balance of society in their favour. For better or for worse – depending on one’s point of view – we have been living with the consequences ever since.
By Joshua Levine, author of The Secret History of the Blitz, Simon & Schuster UK
(30 July 2015)