War is Declared
The new year came and Madge vowed that she’d help Mum and her sisters recover from Dad’s death. As the months passed they all tried to put on a brave face, but couldn’t help but notice the gap at the head of the table where Dad used to sit.
On 3 September 1939, Madge, as usual, took her sisters to Sunday school in the stark Wesleyan chapel near their home, and found herself staring out of the window as she daydreamed. She had left school that summer, aged sixteen, and had enrolled at a commercial college to learn skills that included shorthand and typing. Madge had always wanted to be a hairdresser but you had to pay a hundred pounds to serve an apprenticeship and that sort of money was out of the question. Dad hadn’t left them much and Mum was struggling to get by as it was.
She suddenly realised the rest of the Sunday school pupils had begun whispering. The teacher was usually very strict about talking in class but she wasn’t at her desk in front of the board. Instead, she was huddled around the radio along with some of the other volunteers.
‘Turn it up, I can’t hear,’ someone said.
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s clipped voice echoed loud and clear around the hall.
‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street. This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’
Madge’s stomach dropped and she couldn’t help but think about the Great War and what Miss Radford had told them about her brother imagining blood pouring out of the straw sack and the way her dad had looked when she’d asked him about the history project. She didn’t normally pay much attention to the news but she had overheard her mother’s worried conversations with the neighbours about Hitler and everything awful that was happening in Germany.
Madge saw their teacher’s face blanch and, as the announcement finished, she quietly told the group to go straight home. Madge gathered her things and walked out with her sisters.
‘What do you think will happen now?’ asked Doreen.
Doris opened her mouth to speak but was cut short because they had barely walked out of the doors when an air-raid siren started shrieking. The sisters looked at one another, eyes wide in fear.
‘Leg it!’ Madge said, and the girls ran back home, encountering many panicked neighbours on their way, and hid under the dining room table.
‘Will there be bombs, Madge?’ asked Doreen.
‘Probably not, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s just a drill,’ Madge said, although she wasn’t sure at all.
The sisters stayed under the table, huddling close together, for what felt like forever, even after the siren had stopped howling. All three of them jumped as they heard the front door lock turn and rushed to hug Lily as she walked through the door.
‘It was the awful noise that really frightened us,’ said Madge, as Doris and Doreen burst into tears of relief at the comforting sight of Mum standing in the hallway. ‘Thank goodness you’re home. We didn’t know what to do.’
‘Oh, girls, you poor things,’ said Mum. Lily had been just one year older than Madge when the Great War started in July 1914, so she knew all too well the fear they were feeling. ‘Everything’s OK. It’s over now. Let’s all have a nice cup of tea and some biscuits.’
A little while later Madge caught Mum on her own in the kitchen preparing dinner. ‘I told Doris and Doreen I thought it would be better if they didn’t go out to play,’ she told Lily. Mum nodded in agreement. ‘I’m scared, Mum. What do you think’s going to happen?’
‘Oh, love. I don’t honestly know,’ she replied. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’ She sighed deeply before turning back to peeling the potatoes, and Madge could see the concern etched on her face.
By the following morning rumours about what the Germans were and weren’t going to do were rife throughout Dover. Just a few days later, the authorities began letting families know that instructions would soon be issued for the mandatory evacuation of school-age children from the area, probably to Wales. Raids by German bombers were expected sooner rather than later.
In fact, just two months before the outbreak of hostilities with Germany, the Civil Defence Service had issued a leaflet, ‘Evacuation – Why and How’, that explained the steps that would be taken in the event of war. Because Doris was thirteen and Doreen was eight and Dover was such an important port, making it a prime target for German bombers, Lily accepted the inevitability of another family upheaval. However, after losing her husband Charles, Lily certainly wasn’t going to let the authorities take her precious daughters away. As the early months of the war got underway, Wales and the West Country were being named as safe havens, but Lily had already decided on another venue for when the time came. She waited until Doris and Doreen had gone to bed one night and talked the situation over at length with Madge.
‘I think we should go to High Wycombe,’ she told her eldest daughter. Madge knew that was where her mum had grown up. ‘It was a safe place during the Great War and that’s where I would like to take your sisters when the evacuation orders come through,’ she said. ‘And I would very much like you to come with us.’
The discussion went on long into the night because Madge, after completing the course at the commercial college, had just recently started a job with excellent prospects at Wiggins Teape, the paper manufacturers. John Husk, a friend of her father, had contacts at the company and had been very helpful in pointing her in the right direction. Of more importance was Madge’s ability to take shorthand at 180 words a minute and she was already a valued member of the company.
‘This job has real prospects, Mum,’ Madge sighed. ‘The truth is, I really want to stay in Dover and see if I can make a success of it. I’ll miss you all but I don’t want to be a financial burden on you any longer,’ she added. ‘It’s about time I made my own way.’
Mum reluctantly agreed to let Madge remain on condition that she lived with Beatrice and Mark Spice, her aunt and uncle. As a midwife, Mrs Spice was well known in Dover and always got a cheery wave from the many young mothers she had cared for.
Auntie Bea was a veritable font of local knowledge and told Lily that she had heard that plans were in place to flatten every single building on Dover’s waterfront so the army would have a direct line of fire if the invasion fleet of German Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s Kriegsmarine ever hove into view. That was the final straw for Mum. She took Doris and Doreen soon after to live in her brother William’s house at 97 Dashwood Avenue in High Wycombe.
Lily’s decision to take her youngest daughters away from danger proved to be a wise move. Within months the vibrant south coast port became the target of Luftwaffe bombing raids and soon become known as ‘Hellfire Corner’. When the night raids happened and the sirens howled, Madge often found herself wishing she had followed her family to High Wycombe. She would run to the air-raid shelter, looking up but unable to see the bombers in the pitch-black sky, and huddle up to her aunt and uncle who, like her, flinched every time they heard an explosion. As well as bringing life into the world as a midwife, Aunt Bea also became the neighbourhood ‘layer out’ of the bodies of people killed in the bombing and shelling.
Wailing sirens and strictly enforced blackouts became the norm and so intense were the bombing raids that there were spells of a fortnight or more before Madge finally got a night in her own bed instead of the Anderson air-raid shelter at the bottom of Auntie Bea’s garden. It wasn’t very comfortable but Madge soon found herself accepting it as part and parcel of everyday life. It almost became an adventure after a while!
During the day she was so busy with work and helping Auntie Bea around the house that she barely had time to miss her family. But after so many months apart, every time she thought of Mum, Doris and Doreen there was a tug at her heart strings. Auntie Bea was an expert at sensing even the slightest of emotional changes and over dinner on one of the few nights they weren’t in the air-raid shelter she very gently and diplomatically mentioned that she had been thinking of Lily and the girls and wondered how they had settled in.
‘I bet your mum is missing you,’ she said. ‘Do you think it might be time for a little visit to High Wycombe?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Madge, the thought bringing a big smile to her face. ‘I’d love to see them all again and have a bit of fun with my sisters.’ She sighed and the smile faded. ‘But getting there will be the problem. You never really know when the trains are going to be running these days.’
As luck would have it, a neighbour, John Husk, son of John Husk Senior, heard that Madge was planning a visit and kindly offered to give her a lift up to Buckinghamshire where his wife and children were also sheltering from the bombs of Dover. Madge was given time off from Wiggins Teape and after just a few days’ anxious wait, she set off with Mr Husk in his car.
‘It’s really good of you to give me a lift,’ said Madge. ‘Your father did me a favour over the job at Wiggins Teape and now you’re being so kind as well. I’m incredibly grateful.’
‘Well, we were all very fond of your dad,’ said John, as he looked at his watch and apologised for the length of time the journey was taking. ‘I had no idea it would be this slow.’
Road closures, checkpoints and air-raid warnings meant he had been driving for more than six hours.
‘I wonder when they will put the road signs back up,’ said Madge as they came to a T-junction with no signs showing.
It was almost seven hours by the time she was dropped off in High Wycombe.
‘You’re here!’ Doris and Doreen yelled in delight as Madge walked through the door, and they ran to hug her.
‘Hey, my turn!’ Mum laughed as she stepped up to embrace her daughter in a tight hug. ‘It’s so wonderful to see you, love. It feels like forever since we were last all together. And John,’ she said, ‘you must stay for a quick cuppa as a thanks for being so kind.’
The few days back as a family passed all too quickly and Doris and Doreen quizzed Madge relentlessly about the German bombers, and anything else they could think of.
‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ asked Doris, who was told by a laughing Madge that it was none of her business.
She played endless games of Snap with the girls and they even got Mum to have a go with a skipping rope in the back garden. It was almost like those happy days when Dad was still alive. Almost, but not quite.
Once the girls had gone to bed on Madge’s last night with the family, Mum grilled her on just how bad the damage was in Dover.
‘Come on, love, tell me truthfully. I’ve heard some terrible things are going on down there. And it nearly broke my heart hearing about all those hundreds of kiddies being evacuated to Wales and taken away from their parents. Auntie Bea said that the mothers were weeping even more than the kids. I’m so glad I brought Doris and Doreen up here when I did,’ she added.
‘Oh, it’s really not that terrible,’ Madge said, trying to stay as cheerful as possible before changing the subject, not wishing to worry Lily. ‘I’ve had such a lovely time seeing you all but I suppose I’d better pack for the journey back tomorrow.’
‘I don’t think so, Madge,’ Mum replied, fixing her gaze on Madge’s shocked face. ‘Everyone down the greengrocer’s was just saying that the Germans are going to land up on the south coast and there’s no way in hell you’ll be there on your own when the Nazis arrive.’
‘Mum, come on, they’re just rumours, and in any case, I’ve got Uncle Mark and Auntie Bea!’
But Lily had put her foot down and no amount of pleading from her eldest daughter would change her mind. There was simply no way that Madge was going to be allowed to return to Dover and that was that!
Because the port of Dover had been designated as a ‘Restricted Zone’ it was many weeks before Madge was granted official permission to make the journey back to pick up her clothes. By the time she eventually got there, the population of the town had halved as worries over a German invasion increased, causing people to pack onto trains carrying more than 800 people at a time away from the coast. Dover Priory station was eerily quiet and the journey had taken almost twice as long as normal.
Madge was shocked to see that many of the shops on her way back to the family house were boarded up, if not blasted to bits. She looked around in horror and clutched her suitcase with white knuckles as she came to the streets on which she’d grown up. In a nearby road there was a space where Mrs Hanley’s house should have been.
Madge stumbled on rubble as she walked towards her childhood home and, finally, stood in shock. The brick walls were still standing, albeit almost completely blackened, but the front door was open and some windows had been blown in. Madge felt a lump in her throat as she thought of all the happy times they’d had there as a family, before Dad had died. She peered into where the window had been and there, on the dust-coated piano, were her mother’s brown leather gloves, a treasured gift from husband Charles.
Madge stood outside the blast-damaged house as she remembered how Dad told the sisters that he had bought a special present for Mum’s birthday. After being sworn to secrecy the girls were allowed to see the gift that turned out to be the gloves, which he had bought at a shop near Dover Priory station.
‘Your Mum has lovely soft hands,’ he told the girls, ‘and these gloves will keep them warm in the winter.’
One by one the girls had been allowed to try on the gloves and they’d all laughed when Doreen’s tiny hands and wrists completely disappeared from view when Dad helped her to put them on.
‘They are so soft and smell really nice,’ Doris had said in awe.
Mum will be absolutely delighted when I hand these over to her in High Wycombe, Madge said to herself. Especially as they were the last gift from Dad before he died. She tiptoed gingerly through the wreckage, picked up the gloves and took one last look around the home that would never be quite the same again.