The war changed everything.
The closure of the docks would eventually cause a radical transformation of the whole social and physical fabric of the East End, but before that the defining moment of change was the devastation brought about by the Second World War.
As in the Great War, the docks, railways and high-density population made east London an obvious target for German bombers, and very quickly anti-aircraft measures, including barrage balloons, searchlights, guns, air-raid shelters and the blackout, and evacuation were introduced. The East End was under threat.
That Sunday morning in 1939 when the Second World War was declared, I was ten years old. The news on the radio, and then the sounding of the air raid siren was so frightening. That sound still turns my stomach.
When war was declared, we’d all gone out to an all-night party up in Stepney Green, and everyone ran out into the street because the siren had gone off. They were all shouting, ‘I haven’t got me gas mask!’ We all thought we were going to get gassed that same morning.
Yet with all the precautions and the initial fears of air raids and even of imminent invasion, life in the period which would become known as the Phoney War soon settled back into a routine, returning almost to normal.
[It] started very quietly; rationing began but still no expected air raids of any strength, so it began to lead us into a false sense of security. Men continued to be called up – I received my papers to start at the beginning of February – but it was the Phoney War. Life seemed to go on as usual, although rationing began to bite, and industry was fighting to retain key workers, which, in a lot of cases, was allowed if they were reserved occupations. It was a shame for these men, who felt self-conscious with so many other men around in uniform.
The attitude of my generation was different from that of my parents’. While they had experienced the first war, we, in our ignorance, were treating it as a new experience, and, with our indoctrinated, childish pride in the nation and our Empire, and not knowing what war was all about, we had a kind of sang-froid attitude towards it when called to the colours. Like the young of all times, [we were] full of our own importance. The wives shed a few tears, but were soon just as embroiled as their menfolk. So, the 1930s ended with uncertainty as to the future, but with changes minimal compared with what was to come.
Many homesick cockney children and their mothers were happy to return from the strangeness of evacuation in the ‘sticks’ to the familiarity of their own London streets and homes.
I hadn’t wanted Jimmy, my youngest, to be evacuated in the first place, so, when it seemed safe, I fetched him home. It might not have been the right thing to do, to keep him with me once that bombing started, but I didn’t want him to be away with strangers. But the bombing did get bad.
She was not exaggerating. The bombing, as anyone who lived through it knows, was more than bad. On 7 September 1940, on a clear summer’s day, the Blitz began to wreak its vicious havoc on the men, women and children of London’s East End.
If the war changed everything, then it was the Blitz that changed the war.
The Blitz was the most traumatic thing of my life in the East End. My school was in East Ham [and] because where I lived [was] in such close proximity to the docks and Beckton Gas Works, it was number-one danger zone for the aerial bombing which was expected. They closed the school within weeks of the war starting. I was nearly thirteen years old when we evacuated, but no Blitz had started at that stage [and] things were so bad where we went that Mum brought us back. Because there was no school and we were so close to leaving at fourteen years, the town hall said we would have to go into the ARP. We were employed on filling sandbags and looking after the stirrup pumps. This was around the chemical factory, Beckton and the docks, or wherever they decided to send us. The Blitz had still not started. That summer, up to the September, when they bombed the docks, we were filling sand buckets and having a good time, a lot of lads together. The bombing of the docks and Beckton was horrendous. I was there when it started. I ran home at about four p.m., absolutely terrified. We had an outside toilet and I sat in it and cried. I would not come out. That was the beginning of the real war for us. As a family, Mum and Dad decided we would stay together.
While we were in London [on ‘holiday’ from evacuation] the Blitz was starting in earnest. With raids every night, we had to more or less sleep in our clothes to be ready to dash to a shelter. We ran along the street to a neighbour’s house, where they had built an Anderson shelter in their yard. One night, the siren went and we dashed along to the shelter, but as we were running through the house we heard some ‘screaming bombs’ coming down and stopped in the back doorway until they had landed and gone off. They were a frightening weapon, designed to cause panic. They had things attached to the fins which made this screaming noise as they rushed through the air and they sounded as though they were about to land just in front of you.
The docks, a primary focus for the Luftwaffe, were attacked relentlessly: 400 German aircraft bombarded the area, in full view in the bright sunlight, with a further 250 bombers returning after dark. They came in wave after wave, leaving homes, docks, warehouses and factories burning. These sustained attacks lasted into October – fifty-seven days of bombing – with surface shelters offering little protection.
When you saw the damage that high explosives could cause, you just knew those flimsy surface shelters would have been as good as useless.
We either went to Bethnal Green tube or the surface shelter they had built just outside our house. I preferred the tube, because you could buy a baked potato under the railway bridge at the Salmon and Ball, or you could sometimes buy crisps in the shop in the tube. Not only that, it was much warmer than the surface shelter. [But] the surface shelter saved my parents’ lives one day. They heard the siren and were just going out of the front door when a German plane swooped down and started machine-gunning the street. They managed to run behind the wall of the shelter and the bullets went all along the pavement in front of the house.
People flocked to underground stations, cellars beneath local factories and, if they had them, shelters in their backyards. But there were stories of the domestic shelters being little more than death traps for those who entered them.
My older brother took our house when we moved, with his wife and two children. They were lucky. They had the Anderson shelter in the garden and it got a direct hit. All they found was my sister-in-law’s knitting, but they were out shopping in Stratford. They were very, very lucky.
On my eighth birthday, my mother’s sisters and brothers came to tea. There were jellies and a cake… In the middle of all the laughter and fun, the siren sounded and we all trooped down to the shelter in the garden. [My] auntie laughingly said, ‘You know what it is – Hitler’s heard it’s your birthday and he’s sending you a birthday present, a bomb with your name on it.’ I took her seriously. I really believed that Hitler was being particularly malicious because he knew it was my birthday. It almost did have my name on it. A huge shell exploded about 200 yards from our house. It made an enormous crater. If it had hit our house and garden, being in the Anderson shelter would have been no help.
It might seem odd, but for those who were children at the time many memories of the war were of the excitement at the tumult that was going on around them. The disruption of normal schooling, sleeping in air-raid shelters, kindnesses shown by strangers who quickly became friends, and even the novelty of queuing for rations were all remembered with childlike wonder.
Adults were very good at helping children feel OK and not terrified at what was happening all around them. I have good memories of air-raid drill in class, where we all squatted under our desks, and of sing-songs and games, I-Spy and reciting the multiplication tables in the school shelter. It even had a piano in it! Everything was made light of, so that sitting in the damp shelter at home, with a candle in a flowerpot, comments were made about the feebleness of Jerry’s aim as shells whistled down and exploded nearby. We got used to the blackout, to glass with criss-crosses of tape on them, but I was sorry when the bus windows were fitted with obscure safety glass. I liked to sit in the front and ‘drive’ the bus. How could I ‘drive’ when I couldn’t see out?
One of the buildings that got blasted and couldn’t be used again was a pub called the Crocodile. In the pub was a stuffed crocodile, which the kids managed to get out. It was around the streets for a good few weeks. Then we had the bright idea of leaning it against someone’s door when it was dark and then knocking and running a safe distance away to listen to the shrieks as the person opened the door and the crocodile fell in on them.
Our spare room was filled with gas masks, which [my father] fitted and issued to all the families in our street and those close by. People came to try them on, bring them back and so on. I had one in a case that I took to school; my brother had a toddler’s one in coloured rubber with Mickey Mouse ears. My baby sister’s was a closed box like a carrycot with a lid, a grey, wrinkled hose pipe with a pump that was meant to be worked by an adult. I remember wondering if a reliable adult would be around should we ever need it.
When war came in 1939, shelters appeared in the streets and gardens. We went to shelter in the railway arches near Cable Street and also in the Free Trade Wharf, sleeping on orange boxes. I was never afraid – you don’t know fear at the age of seven. Coming from the shelters in the early mornings, the streets were always different from the previous night: houses were just a pile of bricks, craters, dust and glass, and there was always a smoke haze.
One of my most vivid memories is of German bombs accurately hitting an old ammunition dump near our house. Every piece of glass and china in the house broke. We spent the rest of the war drinking from jam jars. My mum mourned the loss of her wedding present cut-glass bowls. I was lifted from my glass-filled bed by a fireman, without a scratch. The blast had made wardrobes and sideboards, cupboards and tables all fall over. But we were alive and OK. I remember the fireman carrying me outside. Even though it was dark and cold, the bedroom was brilliantly lit from the oil-dump fire. The fireman held me and we stood and looked at it, great plumes of smoke and fire lighting up the sky. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. I cried when they took me away from it. Dad was praying, thanking God we were all alive and safe, [but] Mum was furious – angry for ages – because of all we had lost in the blast.
I was a twelve-year-old boy being bombed. I saw aircraft plunging out of the sky, on fire and in bits.
I remember the incendiaries coming off the roof when I put my head out of the shelter. My father wasn’t there with us because he was running around Whitechapel, driving an ambulance. I saw many a dog fight in the Blitz. You could hear their guns firing overhead.
Every self-respecting kid had a collection of motley metal pieces – shrapnel from exploded bombs or falling aircraft. Once, when I was visiting my grandmother, I was playing out on a bomb site with my youngest uncle when we found an unexploded bomb. We took it home to Nanny and showed it to the adults, who screamed at us. It was put in a galvanized bucket of cold water – as if that would have prevented an explosion – and carried by my uncles to the police station, where they confiscated it, much to the relief of the adults.
Among the excitement and adventures, of course, there were the tragedy and horror that even a child could not avoid seeing around them.
There had been a direct hit in the night at the end of our road, and there was rubble and chaos everywhere. Ambulances stood quietly and the firemen were frantically scrabbling at the rubble, trying to rescue whoever was entombed in it. I dared not be late for school, so I only stopped to watch for a few seconds. My eyes lighted on the pavement. They had found a severed arm and it lay there, mutilated.
Some wartime events in the East End stand out as being particularly terrible. One such occurred on 10 September 1940, when a school in Agate Street, Canning Town, that had been taken over as a centre for bombed-out families awaiting rehousing, received a direct hit. The tragedy was made worse by the fact that if the transport which had been promised to take them to temporary housing had arrived at the time arranged, the school would have been empty. Instead, all the occupants were killed. The official figure of seventy-three dead was questioned by local people, who believed that far more lost their lives.
Local people have also continued to question the official version of events that became known as the Bethnal Green tube disaster. Theories, some more shocking than others, have been put forward about the cause of what was the worst civilian incident of the Second World War, when, on the evening of 3 March 1943, the air-raid warning sounded just after eight o’clock and an estimated 1,000 people hurried towards the supposed safety of the underground. For some reason, panic ensued and the disaster happened. People close to the entrance stumbled and fell forward, crashing on to those already at the bottom of the stairs, and 173 people were killed, with another sixty-two seriously injured.
It was the sound of these new anti-aircraft guns in Victoria Park that started the rumour that enemy bombs were dropping and people took fright. They surged forward to get down the steps to safety.
Do you know, there were lots of stories around at the time about what really happened at Bethnal Green. The worst I heard – my dad told me this – was that some bastard was trying to dip people [pick their pockets] while they were preoccupied trying to get down to safety with their kids and that. Someone realized and the cry went up, and the struggle that started – as they tried to get hold of the bloke – caused someone to fall, and then, well, you know what happened next. Terrible, whatever the cause.
Dad was in the heavy rescue service and had to work on some pretty horrible incidents, including the one at Bethnal Green tube, where lots of people were crushed when someone tripped as they were going down some poorly lit steps and the guns went off close by… People were piling on top of each other in the rush to get to the shelter.
Like those in the rescue services who had to deal with the consequence of the tube disaster, supposedly ordinary young men and women showed themselves to be heroes and heroines. The simple fact was that there was work to be done, no matter how difficult, upsetting or demanding. It is sometimes hard to believe that so much responsibility was put on the shoulders of such young individuals.
The first woman is speaking about when she was a nurse of just nineteen years old, and the others were not much older.
We had to do one night duty in five at the hospital and had to prepare lists of casualties for the police to distribute. I was not so afraid when I was working.
I saw the destruction… whilst the bombing was taking place. I will always remember how people I had known all my life were coping with that destruction, and could still clear up and carry on with the cocksureness of the cockney. I was proud to be one of them.
Although we often came close to losing everything, we never expected it to be us who would take a hit. Everyone must have been constantly living under stress, but we… were protected by warmth and closeness and neighbourliness.
It was 1941. Our place had just had a blasting; all the windows were in. And we’d just been to the pictures and his brother came in, saying, ‘Here you are, here’s your papers. You’ve got to go in the army.’ So he said, ‘Shall we get married?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ Very romantic it was, we’d just been to see Love on the Dole! We got a special licence and had four days to prepare. As you know, we were rationed and couldn’t get a drink or anything. If you went to the pub you were allowed one tot per person, [but] we took bottles and managed to get them filled up. Goodness knows what went in it. A drop of everything. They all got blotto! Anyway, we got married and off he went to the army.
It could not have been easy for those young men and women who had to leave home and join the forces, but, in different ways, the war was as difficult for those left behind on the home front.
It was hardest to comfort those women whose men were ‘missing, presumed dead’. Half-news is always worse than certainty.
Some of my brothers would come home on leave and we’d have an air raid, and they’d say, ‘You’re putting up with far more than we are in the forces.’ Nobody dreamed it was going to last for six years. We had a lot of near misses. On one occasion, when they’d come home on leave, we were sitting down having something to eat. All of a sudden a buzz bomb came over. Me and my sister made a dive outside for the Anderson shelter. It dropped and the blast blew us both right into the shelter. When we came out, the men were all covered in soot. [My husband] had been blown right up against the street door. All the sausage and mash was covered in soot.
Having to find somewhere to stay if you had been bombed out was just one of the problems.
We’d heard there’d been a really bad raid in Poplar and I just wanted to get home to see if my family were all right, but they said at work [near the City] that I had to wait in the shelter till it was over. As soon as the all clear went, I was off. I don’t know how I got there, I don’t remember, but I know when I did I saw our place had had a direct hit. I nearly died on the spot, but a neighbour came over and said, ‘Don’t worry. They’re all right. They were out. They salvaged some of your stuff and they’ve gone looking for somewhere to stay. I said I’d tell you.’ I was so relieved. It wasn’t an unusual sight where we lived, close to the docks, seeing someone with their stuff on a barrow looking for somewhere empty after their place had copped it.
In June 1944 the East End was confronted with a new horror: the Vi, the first of which fell by a railway bridge in Grove Road, Bow, a matter of yards from my childhood home, killing six people and injuring and making homeless many more. They had a particular place in people’s wartime memories.
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When the characteristic whine of the doodlebug, the pilotless, flying bombs, stopped, you would count to ten and then know it was about to hurtle to the ground and explode, causing terrible damage.
We were in the shelter and heard a buzz bomb – doodlebugs, we called them – coming across the sky. Suddenly the engine cut out and we could tell it was going to fall close to us. There was a massive explosion and we found out afterwards it had fallen only two streets away.
We suffered damage as a result of the bombing, but escaped being driven right out until the buzz bombs [and then] we lived on the dance floor of the town hall for some time.
I was at [a relative’s house] when the sirens went off. She had cooked a tasty stew for our dinner. We heard the sirens, then ran out the back to go into the Anderson shelter. I was aware of a doodlebug – one of the pilotless German planes targeted on the docks – right above us in the sky. I gazed up, transfixed, and, as I looked up, my plate of hot stew and dumplings tipped down my front and on to the path. Annie, already at the shelter entrance, screamed at me and I ran, counting to ten as I heard the engine stop. I got inside the shelter with seconds to spare. The doodlebug dived into houses a few hundred yards along the road and exploded. Many people were killed and the houses flattened. There is now a park where those houses were. When the all clear sounded and we came out, we did not yet realize how close a call it had been. I was really upset at the loss of my stew. Like everyone else, I was really relieved that, once again, we had not been hit, but the loss of the stew really distressed me. Then, all the rest of the day and throughout the night, I watched the emergency teams digging for survivors. It felt like an invasion of privacy to see inside bedrooms, where the walls were ripped off. The mirrors still hung on walls, wallpaper flapped, fire-place and chimneys open to the sky, and, everywhere, scattered personal belongings.
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Listening to some stories, it might have seemed that the war was no more than a nuisance through which normal life had to be lived. But I had been told so often by people that they had no stories to tell, that they were just ordinary, and then, after a few minutes of listening to what they had to say, it would become obvious that if there is such a thing as an ordinary person, I had yet to meet one. Whether it was the casual way in which they described an undeniably frightening time in their lives, or the humour and generosity with which they had somehow managed to retain their dignity, all the people who shared their memories were extraordinary in one way or another.
Where we had moved to, there were just surface shelters, they didn’t have room to put Anderson ones round there. In our little house we had gaslight and some of the houses further down only had oil lamps. We only had two up and two down and the scullery, and my brother and his wife and children came to us when their house was bombed. So we had a crowd. But I was seventeen then. We took that sort of thing in our stride, but we were scared. You couldn’t say you weren’t, but you deal with it at that age. We used to go down to the church, go underground. The barrage balloons were above on the ground and we were underneath. It was like going into a tunnel, all concrete. You slept along with anybody then. There were three tiers of bunks and you got in where you could. You didn’t know who you were sleeping with. We only stuck that for a while and then we thought, ‘Oh, well, we’ll go back to bed. Chance it.’ We used to go up the pub. You could hear the [anti-aircraft] guns from in there.
Sometimes schools were hit. Twice during the war I was sent to a different junior school because of bomb damage. Classes were doubled up, with teachers having to teach more than sixty children. We sat on the floor, on benches, in the hall, in shelters, we sat three to a desk. I don’t remember us being naughty. We realized times were difficult and accepted we had to get on with it.
Bombs were simply a fact of life and no one could do anything about them and we just did not worry about them. But there were far greater terrors. One day, I saw a rat suddenly whisk by me on the path and shoot down the shelter. I told my dad and he began a frenzy of banging with a stick and shaking the blankets in the shelter. He swept and poked, thumped and hollered, but no rat was revealed. Later, when we were in the shelter and I was thought to be asleep, the rat episode was discussed. My aunt told very graphically how, if a rat feels cornered, he would try to escape by jumping over your shoulder but was much more likely to go for your throat with his sharp teeth. She told stories of babies in prams having their faces gnawed off and of whole armies of rats marching down the street when their sewer home had been destroyed by the shells.
I was getting ready to go out, we were courting then, and he was coming round to collect me. I was standing doing my make-up, with my mirror propped against a sandbag, and the Battle of Britain was going on overhead. I said, ‘He’s a blooming long time getting round here.’ Well, of course, they’d got bombed down the docks and there were no buses.
One night we were in the shelter and there was a fairly heavy raid going on. The guns were firing and bombs were dropping. It was damp out on the road and Dad was wandering around outside, and we could hear the shrapnel falling and sizzling on the wet road when we heard Dad’s footsteps across the street. He stopped and then we heard him say loudly, ‘Sod it.’ He had been to pick up a piece of shrapnel and it was still hot and burnt him.
When there was a raid we would get up when the siren sounded and go down in the damp and the cold to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden. If the weather was really bitter, we would get into the Morrison shelter instead. This was a thick steel table. We would be put to bed under there and the mesh sides would be put up [around us]. We would often wake to find our parents were there squashed in with us too. Dad was knowledgeable about bombs, as I’m sure all adults at the time were. He could identify each whistle and crump as a shell, an incendiary, a hundred-pounder or whatever else it was. We [children] learned to do the same, but less expertly – we knew when they were close. The house shook and the china and windows rattled. It was often too noisy to sleep, so we played I-Spy and other games. I wasn’t very afraid. We often needed to go to the shelter in the daytime. At school we learned to crouch beneath our desks when the siren sounded. We ate our school dinners so often in the shelter that I thought ground rice was, in fact, ‘underground rice’ and that you only had it when you were underground.
When the bombing was at its worst, a lot of the women and children who had come back to London during the Phoney War were evacuated again. While it was the safe option, it could still prove disturbing enough for a child to want to plan his own return home and for adults to be willing to risk the bombs.
I started to save my pocket money to pay my fare. I hadn’t realized how homesick I was. I eventually saved sufficient to be able to write home and say I could pay my own fare, so it was arranged and Dad came down to collect me.
My mother hated being evacuated. She hated village life. There were no shops, no buses, no electricity and you had to walk everywhere. She missed her sisters and was glad to get back to London, even though the bombing was bad and we spent a lot of time in the air-raid shelters.
I was in the ARP and had to look after my elderly mother, who stayed in the East End. I didn’t want my children evacuated, but I was persuaded. I think I was as unhappy as the kids. I used to try and visit them, but I only had Sunday. One boy was evacuated to Wales, my daughter was near Uxbridge, and the one of nursery age was at Bury
St Edmunds. I’d go to Wales and my husband would go to another one. We used to go by train and it got too much. I couldn’t get them all together. The youngest was in Lord and Lady X’s house with all other little children. It was more like a children’s home. I used to take sweets and loads of things, but they were only allowed one and then they’d be put away. Very strict they were. I said to the welfare lady that I’d like my two youngest together, so they said the girl could go to Bury St Edmunds to keep an eye on the boy as she was four years older. That was the worst day’s work I ever done. I went there, this day, and I’d bought her a big doll like a baby. When I got into the grounds with the other mothers all the children were crying. What an alteration I saw in my daughter. Her hands were raw – where she’d been before they’d rubbed her hands for her when she had chilblains. They were all crying. And they’d cut off all her hair. And they were all hungry. I gave her this lovely big doll and I’d got sweets for her and everything. And she kept saying, ‘Give us the sweets, Mum, don’t give them to the lady and the man.’ But they wouldn’t have it. They said they had to be distributed.
Evacuation was a short-lived experience for different reasons for this little girl.
The war began when I was two and a half years old. When the opportunity came for evacuation, my dad’s sister, Annie, accompanied my mum and I to Devon. I was in the field one day when I heard a shout. It was my beloved dad coming over the stile. His shout echoed up the whole valley. He had walked miles from the station. It was a surprise to see him and what happened after is a blur. He had brought dreadful news. Annie’s husband, Arthur, had been killed in the docks, and he had come to tell her and to take her back for the funeral. So we all returned to London. Our evacuation had only lasted a few months. I don’t remember the journey back, but I do remember two policemen with tall helmets coming to tell us what had happened. It seems Arthur had had a load of timber dropped on him. The crane driver, who was too old to be called up, had suffered a stroke or a heart attack and had let the timber go. I remember Annie crying bitterly. So did my dad when the policemen left. Seeing my dad cry was terrifying.
Even so, she remembered her time in the countryside with great fondness.
We went almost immediately to Lincolnshire on an evacuation scheme. We were only there a few months, but it is a shiny, idyllic time in my memory. It’s a curious thing, I can recall the tough times in my life fairly easily, but when I reach a happy oasis like the time we spent in Lincolnshire, I am instantly overwhelmed by tears. At first we stayed with the village postwoman, who went on her bike delivering letters and much dreaded telegrams from the War Office [around] the village. I remember her kindness… Her cottage was small and dark, without electricity or running water. I helped fill galvanized buckets from the well. But I wasn’t good at carrying them and always got wet socks. I suffered with chilblains, but most people did then.
The experiences of this boy, his brother and the unfortunate J. were rather different.
The evacuees weren’t liked and I suppose it was to a degree understandable, when we were just dumped on people, and when one considers the effect it must have had on their quiet village life, but if anything went wrong it was usually ‘those Londoners’ that were to blame. I’ve no doubt we did cause chaos at times with the things we got up to, but in the main we were too young to appreciate this. Some of the evacuees were poorly treated by the people who were looking after them. There wasn’t much we could do about it, because our parents were too far away. One of our billets was the vicarage. We had to live in the servants’ area and had our meals in the kitchen, except J., who had to eat in the dining room on a separate table in the corner because he was a ‘naughty’ boy. [His] family never sent him any clothes, so we were made to give him some of ours, and when Mum found out she went potty, because it was enough of a struggle clothing us two. I don’t know if J. had a mother, because she never came to see him, and his father only turned up once. Because we were kept separate [at the vicarage] we had some of our rations given to us individually each week. If we ran out there was no more. As J. had to have his meals in the dining room, because he was a bad boy, he wasn’t served by the maids in the same way as the family, but had his meals put on a plate in the kitchen and had to carry it in himself. Well, one day his plate got broken, either by him or one of the maids, and they wouldn’t give him another, so he carried in half a plate with the gravy dripping off it. If we broke anything we had to make an appointment and ‘confess’ our sin, and we were told to pay for a replacement or do some jobs to pay for it. Because J. couldn’t read very well, he had to go into the nanny’s room to have reading lessons, and while he was in there he saw she had a cupboard full of tins of fruit and things and packets of biscuits. We never saw those things on our plates.
Another little cockney boy found himself isolated in a village in deepest Devon.
When I started at the school, all the other boys kept looking through my hair. I was upset, because I thought they thought I had nits, but the teacher explained they had never met a Jew before and were looking for my horns.
Others remember their experience of being evacuated in a matter-of-fact, almost businesslike sort of way.
In September 1939 [my brother] and I were evacuated with the school. Mum made us haversacks, which had our spare clothes and some other things in, and, with these on our backs, we marched from the school to Bethnal Green Junction and caught a train. I was only nine years old and [my brother] was eleven. It’s only now that I realize the responsibility he had of having to keep an eye out for me. I thought we were going away on a holiday, little realizing how long we would be away from home.
There were only two shops in the village. We went [in one] to buy Gibbs Solid Dentifrice, which we ate instead of sweets, which were rationed. There wasn’t a barber’s shop in the village so we had to go to ‘Smoker’ to get a haircut. [He] did the hair-cutting on a kitchen chair in an alley between the houses, and one of his sayings was, ‘How’s your father’s leg then?’ God knows what he meant.
Being the older boys, we got the job of making all the evacuee labels: cardboard cut up to size on a guillotine – I cut my finger and still have the scar – punches for the eyelets and then folded over, doubled cord for the tie. Indian ink to write the names.
Village life was strange and quiet for children who had been brought up in the bustle of the East End, but we managed to find lots of new things to do. The only sign of the war they knew of down there was if the Germans were trying to bomb the sugar beet factory at Bury St Edmunds, which was five miles away. We would hear the sirens in the distance and go to the Morrison shelter under the living-room table, but I only remember this happening a couple of times. The only other incident happened when [my brother] and I were on holiday in London and a couple of stray fire bombs fell in some bushes but did no real damage, though, of course, the villagers thought it was horrendous.
After six long years, it was at last time for all the evacuees to go home, not just for a holiday but for good.
It was strange at first, being back in London. I’d become a bit of a yokel, I suppose. But you couldn’t beat being home with your mum.
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Adults too were returning to their East End homes.
One of my earliest memories – I was not quite three – is of my uncle coming home from the war one Saturday morning. My aunt was waiting in our house, and I can remember the excitement but not knowing why we were all excited. Aunt Marie gave a loud scream and a strange man in khaki was running down the street with a kitbag over his shoulder. I rushed ahead, having no idea who he was, [or] why I should be so pleased, and he scooped me up in his arms. I can still vividly remember the roughness of the material of his jacket against my legs.
At last, it was really over, and the celebrations and congratulations could begin.
Luckily, every one of our family came through the war. All six brothers were in the forces. I was doing ‘special work’… making direction finders for the ships and submarines. The work was secret and we had to be locked in the room, unlocked when we came out. We were not to divulge what we were doing. We had our family record in the Stratford Express, the family’s war record. All our names: the six brothers, the three brothers-in-law, and all us girls on war work. We were proud of that.
People must have been preparing for street parties and celebrations everywhere. In a few hours, all the men in our street put together a wooden platform with a stage. Everyone dragged out timber they had been saving for a huge bonfire. We kids had been roaming the bomb sites for weeks, collecting anything that might burn. Every street had a fire. All the neighbours were up on ladders, hanging out bunting and Union Jacks. One neighbour’s piano was pushed out on to the platform. As the day wore on, the preparations for the street party were frenzied. Every household provided something. There were sandwiches, cakes, jellies and trifles, and we children ate until we ached. A fancy-dress competition was announced for the young ones. The bells rang out and, best of all, the streetlights came on. We no longer needed to cover our torches with crepe paper to see our way home in the dark.
We had heard that Walthamstow town hall was to be floodlit and my dad took me for a walk to see it. It’s a plain, municipal building, bureaucratic and boring, but on this night the fountains and the ornamental ponds were all floodlit. After the blackness of the blackout, I thought it was fairyland. Fireworks exploded in the sky above it, searchlights danced around it, and the water in the fountains rose and fell in sparkling drops of light. I was totally entranced and wanted to stay there.
Everyone sat out in the street on chairs or on the windowsills. We saw a bonfire and celebrations at every street corner. Many of them were burning effigies of Hitler. One in particular was most realistic. It had a moustache with black hair plastered down and a full German uniform. He hung on a gibbet over the fire, waiting for dark to fall and the fire to be lit. I shivered, despite all the joy and relief all around me. It had been light when we left home, but as we returned all the fires were up. The sky that was usually so black was now full of dancing sparks, glowing orange from all the thousands of bonfires throughout London. It was magical.
The bonfires burned all night. People brought out the fireworks they had been saving. Us children had never seen fireworks before and we were very excited. Even now I can’t begin to describe the beauty of those fireworks. For all my living memory, until that time, nights had been really black, darkness was really dark, and now it was exploding with light and colour all around me. The war had ended.
A future without air raids, sirens, shelters and shortages beckoned.
I was allowed to stay up as long as I liked and I could eat as much as I wanted. I managed to stay awake until one a.m., protesting, ‘No, I’m not tired. No, I don’t want to go home yet.’ It would not have been any good going to bed anyway. The whole world was awake and singing. The relief was almost tangible. Being woken at night for several air raids was much more exhausting than if we were awake all night long. The prospect now of having unbroken sleep at night was wonderful!
Even after the parties were over, there was more fun to be had for cockney kids liberated from the restrictions and rigours of a London at war.
In the morning, the bonfire was a great smouldering pile of hot ash with a glowing red heart. The streets were deserted, absolutely no traffic on the road, quieter than a Sunday. With a group of friends, I trekked from street to street to see if the other bonfires were still alive. It was a piece of new information for us that fires could burn all night; our coal fires at home always needed lighting in the mornings. For a few euphoric days it felt as if we could do as we pleased. Adults were too tired, relaxed or too hungover to pay much attention to us kids. So we went around collecting spent firework cases and looking for shrapnel, because we knew we would not be getting any more.
If it is inevitable that the number of people who can share their memories of the Second World War is decreasing all the time, how much truer this must be of an even earlier conflict.
While living at Finnis Street [Bethnal Green] the Great War broke out in August 1914.1 was still at school at the time. I remember Victoria Park being taken over by the army and the troops digging trenches, signalling with semaphore flags, and Lord Derby’s army of volunteers marching to Bethnal Green station with their red armbands with a gold crown in the centre, but no uniforms, headed by a band. We had plenty of warning of an air raid, as the lights on the station would go out, then a policeman would ride round on a cycle blowing a whistle to take cover, then the maroons would go off and we waited. The Zeppelins would fly high, but one night a searchlight caught one and it was shot down by Lieutenant Ball of the Royal Flying Corps. The Zeppelin came down in flames near Cuffley and we stood on our landing and cheered. The air raids were not as bad as the Blitz of 1940, but bad enough. One Wednesday, in school, there was a daylight raid by German planes and a school was hit. Then, on a Saturday, I was cleaning some knives and forks when I saw six German planes flying over. Again damage was done. These were the only daylight raids I remember. We had potato rationing, so we had swedes instead, which were like turnips. I liked them. In Bethnal Green Road there were some German-owned shops, Stoltes by name, and a pork butcher’s. [When, in 1915,] the Lusitania, a liner, was sunk by U-boats, German submarines, it caused such bitter feelings amongst the public that a crowd of boys smashed the windows of those shops and, before the police could interfere, ran off with legs of pork, sausages and joints of all kinds. There were loaves of bread, cakes and flans scattered on the pavements. Some families had a nice dinner that day.
After 1945, the people of the debris-strewn, bomb-ravaged East End would experience massive changes in their lives. Following the period of post-war austerity, there would be increasing affluence and opportunities for working men and women; promises of decent housing; a National Health Service worthy of the name; universal education and a welfare net to catch those who had previously been in peril of falling through to the bottom of the social heap; and real, if slowly achieved, improvements in living conditions that came with great hopes of full employment and prosperity for everyone.
But not all change was a cause for celebration.