How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was given a brand-new football for my twelfth birthday, so I went out in the street to try it out – and kicked it straight through our living-room window. The ball was immediately confiscated. That night, the Luftwaffe carried out a big raid on Southampton. One of the bombs dropped on the road just a few yards from our house, and blew out the rest of our windows. In the morning, I got my football back.

John Summers, Southampton

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

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

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

Towards the end of 1944, the doodlebugs began their blitz on London. One day we were enjoying a swim in the River Roding, boys and girls together, all in the nude – the so-called pre-permissive days – when someone shouted: ‘Look up! It’s coming straight for us!’

We all jumped out of the water, grabbed what clobber we could and made for one of the trenches that they had dug in the fields to stop Jerry from landing. We had about 400 yards to run and, in our panic, it seemed to follow us. We all sat shivering in the trench, waiting for it to cut out. Luckily, when it did, it crashed in Epping Forest.

In the later war years, an old man by the name of Taters Green, who lodged in a house near me, asked his landlady to get him a bar of soap when she went shopping. When she asked him for his coupons, he replied: ‘What? Have they rationed soap as well?’

Evacuee on being asked to bathe for the second time in two nights: ‘Blimey miss, what do you want? An evacuee or a bleeding duck?’

LEILA MACKINLAY, LONDON

Leaving my grandmother’s house, my mother and I passed a horse in a field. I said to my mother: ‘What’s he got a gas mask on under his belly for?’ How was a wee girl to know that when a gentleman horse espies a lady horse in the field he becomes aroused? To me, he was wearing a gas mask! My mother bravely managed not to laugh and gave me a suitable explanation.

Early 1941. It’s about 7 p.m. and my mother, father and me, aged eleven years old, are going down to the Anderson shelter in the garden for the night, complete with supper. We’re duly settled in, with an oil lamp burning nicely, supper about to be served – crayfish sandwiches for my mother and father; I had a passion for breakfast-sausage sandwiches at that time – when we hear a lone bomber buzzing about, and a frenzied shout of ‘Put that light out!’ coming from an adjoining road, directed at a near neighbour whose bathroom light is showing brightly. Suddenly, there is the sound of a bomb coming down. Father throws himself over my mother, and she shields me with her body. There’s the most terrifying crash as the bomb hits a lamp post and bursts in mid-air, one hundred yards away. The oil lamp is blown out by the blast. I’m crying my eyes out with sheer terror; my father is worried that I’ve been hit or something. Sheer panic. Then my father says that he has been hit, blood is pouring down his leg. We get the oil lamp lit, Father discovers that the ‘blood’ pouring down his leg is vinegar for the crayfish sandwiches, and I am howling because I have lost my beloved breakfast-sausage sandwiches. Having sorted out the chaos, we all have a good laugh. Although the laughter is short-lived when we see the damage to our house. But I can still see the funny side of that incident – one among many – after all these years.

As a boy I lived in Brecon. One of the ‘county set’ became a special policewoman, and one night mistook the colour of the air-raid warning system. She sounded the siren and all over town, doctors, nurses and firemen crawled out of bed to await the onslaught. Ten minutes later she realized her error and sounded the all-clear. Alas, it was too late to save her brief career.

When I was a young lad and living in Thesiger Street, Cathays, Cardiff, there used to be a rather rough and ready family called the Hiats. Mr Hiat was a chimney sweep (among other things) and most of the soot he collected would be dumped into the air-raid shelter at the bottom of his garden or, as we used to say, ‘out the back’. Like many families, they used to stay under the stairs during the raids.

But this particular night, when Cardiff was really going through it with bombs dropping all over the place, they had no alternative but to dash ‘out the back’ into the air-raid shelter which was below ground. You can imagine the state of that family, which was a large one, when they emerged next morning covered in soot.

My mother often tells me about the time she took me to the local cinema, The Coronet (the ‘Bug-House’ we used to call it), when during the performance, the air-raid warning started up. When she got outside the cinema she found that she’d grabbed hold of someone else’s little boy, which is quite understandable in the dark and confusion that took place. Not funny for her at the time, of course.

One other incident comes to mind. I was sitting by the side of a lake at Rickmansworth, enjoying a peaceful afternoon, when I spotted an aircraft in the distance, and commented to my mother that the plane looked as though it was on fire! She lazily looked up from her book, realized it was a doodlebug, grabbed my hand, and we ran along the lakeside to the tent where we were camping. The doodlebug dropped in Mill End, Rickmansworth, and the tent sides ‘whoofed’ in and out with the blast. My mother suddenly started laughing and I couldn’t understand why until she finally stopped, and said: ‘How stupid, as if sheltering in a tent would give us any protection if the thing had dropped any nearer!’

My first day at school took place during wartime. I didn’t like school much that first morning, so decided to leave and not go back. I asked some ‘big ladies’ (I found out later they were sixth-formers playing netball) where the gate was and ran home. Of course, my mother was doing a part-time job and didn’t expect me to be back home so the door was locked. She eventually found me sitting in our neighbour’s garden eating some chocolate with which the neighbour had pacified me. Needless to say, I got skelped and sent back to school the next day. The teacher was worried, my mother was worried. ‘There could have been an air raid.’ I was ‘a wilful girl’ according to the teacher. From that first day I hated school and was never happier than on my leaving day and first job at sixteen. Goodness knows how I passed my 11-plus.

My late husband was on fire-watching duty one night when he heard an aircraft. As the young boy from next door, who was standing beside him, seemed very worried by this, my husband told him: ‘It’s all right, son, it’s one of ours.’ With that the boy ran inside to his family, shouting: ‘It’s all right, Mam, it’s one of Mr Ellis’s!’

Mrs F. Ellis, West Bromwich

When the war broke out, all schoolchildren had to be evacuated. Two of mine were sent to Leicester and two to Worthing. When the bombs stopped for a bit over London, the children were brought back home, only to find that very soon the doodlebugs started. So now it was all women and children to be evacuated. We all met at the local school to have tags put on our children. The next day we were taken to the station and off we all went. Nobody knew where we were headed until, after travelling nearly all day, and asking each other where we thought we were going, one little boy shouted: ‘I know where we’re going, I’ve just seen a Kentucky Minstrel!’

Well, it gave us mums a good laugh as we realized it was actually a coal miner. We were headed for the Rhondda Valley in South Wales.

We had some evacuee children from London in our village. They’d never seen the countryside before. They had no idea where vegetables came from. A friend of mine who took in a brother and sister told me that the children thought that potatoes grew on trees. It was the same with meat and eggs and milk. I don’t think they’d ever seen a real-live cow or a chicken, or a pig. But the funniest thing was a small boy who was fascinated by a goldfinch singing away in a tree. He said: ‘Look, it’s upset. It wants to get back in its cage.’

Beryl Pooley, Kent

My main memory of wartime was bath night. My mother had to bring in the tin bath – I think it was actually made of galvanized iron – from the backyard where it was hung on a nail on the fence. Then it was filled with bucket after bucket of water that had been heated up in the copper. There were five of us kids, and me – being the smallest and youngest – went in last. So you can imagine the state of the water, not to mention that it was only lukewarm by then. But the thing that really sticks in my mind is that the government had said that no one should have more than five inches of water in their bath, to conserve both water and heating. Well, my eldest brother complained about this, saying that since five of us were being bathed in the same water, then we were entitled to twenty-five inches. Then my father pointed out that it was extremely unlikely that an official would come snooping round demanding to see our bath night, anyway. But my mother, bless her, stuck to her guns. ‘No,’ she said, ‘if Mr Churchill says that it’s only five inches, then five inches it will be.’ And that was that until the end of the war.

Like the adults, us kids were all issued with gas masks. We used to play around in them and I had mine for years after the war. There was one daft little lad in our street – when I say daft, it’s just that he was always up to mischief, always on some adventure or other – who went missing one teatime. When he finally turned up at home – he lived a couple of doors away from us – and his mother asked him where on earth he’d been as she’d been worried, he just shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Sitting in the pig-bin, seeing if me gas mask works.’

Roy Marsh, Birmingham

I was twelve when war broke out. At the time my grandmother lived with us and she was a real cantankerous old lady. There was hell to pay when she was told that she had to go and collect her gas mask. She said to me: ‘What’s the point? Go and have a word with your mother. If we have to go to the shelter, there’s no gas laid on there anyway.’

Being a young boy during the war, I loved the blackout. I think we all did. We played a game called ‘wall-hopping’. The trick was to start at one end of the street, sneak down the passageway into the first garden and get to the other end by climbing over the garden walls. We played soldiers while we were doing it, even blacked up our faces like commandos using burnt cork. Anyway, there was this one neighbour called Mr Bottomer who was a real old grump. He caught me and another lad in his garden and we had the full interrogation. My pal said: ‘We just like playing in the blackout. It’s more exciting.’ And Mr Bottomer said, real angry like: ‘Blackout! Bloody blackout! I don’t know why they can’t fight this bloody war in daylight!’

Maurice Jones, Birmingham

It was a midsummer’s early evening – brilliant blue sky, still – and I remember looking up and seeing aircraft high in the sky. We had a lot of what we called ‘silverfish’ – little insects that used to crawl out of our hearth – and they reminded me of them. Silverfish, high in the blue sky. Then someone said that they were German and all hell broke loose. The man next door had a rifle – I don’t know where from but I think he’d served in the First World War – and he was always bragging that it had ‘one up the spout’, ready for the invasion. So he went to fetch it. Well, by the time he’d returned, the aircraft had disappeared. It was probably relief – relief that we hadn’t been bombed, but more relief that the old man hadn’t fired his ancient-looking rifle – but everyone in the street fell about laughing. All except the old man, that is. He stormed off back into his house, shouting: ‘If that’s your attitude, you can fight your own bloody war!’

One of our neighbours plonked herself down in our house while the bomb-disposal men were dealing with a UXB right outside. She said to my brother: ‘Go easy on that jam. There’s a war on!’ It was hard to ignore with an unexploded bomb in the street outside.

Once, in Victoria Street in London, I saw two ducks happily swimming around an emergency water tank in a bombed-out building. They’d flown in from St James’s Park.

I was seven years old at the outbreak of war, living in Rochester, near Rochester Airport that was being used by the RAF as a flying training school. We were directly in line for dogfights, stray bombs and anything else that the Germans wanted to drop on us. One afternoon the siren went and we fled to the shelter, accompanied by a neighbour who was on her own. We shut the door just as the sound of the approaching bombers grew louder. Next minute there was a tremendous explosion and the door was blown off. A rush of hot air seemed to come in and we were all hurled into a heap at the back of the shelter. When we eventually recovered, all very shaken, we crawled outside to have a look. A bomb had fallen in the middle of the road and the blast had blown in the front windows, doors etc. The curtains had been torn to shreds and most of the furniture ruined by the flying glass. My mother and neighbour stood speechless, obviously upset. A house four doors up was in ruins, and another bomb had fallen further up the road. The first person on the scene arrived, the local ARP warden, who told my mother off for not being still in the shelter as the all-clear hadn’t gone. In no time at all, the street was full of council workers and officials. There was no gas or water – they’d turned it off. My mother and neighbour whose house had suffered a similar fate were upset, naturally, and when a large van of WVS ladies arrived and began brandishing kettles and teapots, my mother asked if we could have a cup of tea. ‘It’s not for you,’ came the reply, ‘we have to serve the men filling in the hole first.’ And not a cup of tea did we get until every man had been served. Talk about helping the needy . . .

I always think I was lucky because during the war we lived in Kent, right under the Battle of Britain. That might sound strange if it came from an adult, but we were just kids. I suppose we spent more time searching around bomb sites, and places where aircraft had crashed, than anywhere else. In the long summer holidays it was great fun. We used to collect shrapnel and anything else we could find and swap it for other things like sweets – which were obviously in short supply – or perhaps even a football, if you had enough ‘currency’. Because that is what all these spoils of war were – currency. Sometimes, you’d just swap what you had for a ‘better’ bit of shrapnel to build up your collection.

Anyway, one day my brother was setting off for work and I was still in bed, and he called up to me that a German plane had been damaged that night and that part of its engine was lying in our front garden. I’d never moved so fast. I got dressed as quickly as I could and raced downstairs. There was no sign of anything in our garden. He was pulling my leg. That was the thing, though – we lived right in the thick of it and we just made a joke of it all. It was just part of our lives.

We were sitting in the air-raid shelter one night. The sirens had sounded but there was no sign of the bombers yet. My parents were discussing the chap down the road who had a bit of a reputation with the ladies. I was only about nine years old and wasn’t involved in the conversation but children pick up on these things. Anyway, they were pulling him to pieces when my elder brother – he’d be about fifteen at the time – piped up and said: ‘I know why he only goes out with blondes.’

Both my parents stopped talking and just stared at him. Then he said: ‘It’s because he’s afraid of the blackout.’ My parents didn’t know whether to laugh or tell him off. He told me later that he’d heard the comedian Max Miller crack the joke on the wireless.

When I was fourteen, I was evacuated to Hayward’s Heath in Sussex. There was a woman and her two-year-old baby living in the same house. Every night she told the little one: ‘If you go to sleep, then I’ll bring you a nice air raid.’ It was the other way round. As soon as the sirens sounded, the baby always dropped off sound asleep.

Eventually I went to work in a factory where they had gas-mask drill. Over the loudspeaker came the order: ‘Gas masks on!’ and then we had to carry on working until the order came to remove them. Imagine the discomfort. But we just had to carry on.

I used to live in a small village where very little ever happened, apart from a few stray bombs that had been targeted at nearby Bomber Command. My father was the local chief air-raid warden and, when the sirens sounded, the wardens gathered at our house.

When my cousin and I were about thirteen, a mock ‘invasion’ was planned and local people were asked to play the parts of casualties. We were very excited to be able to take part. My cousin had a card pinned to her that read ‘Broken leg’, while mine read ‘Bleeding badly’. We were told to sit under the hedge until the Red Cross found us as we were playing the part of badly injured casualties. We waited and waited and sat and sat. At first we could hear quite a lot of activity, but eventually, as dusk arrived and it fell quiet, we limped out from our hedge to take a look around. There wasn’t a soul in sight! We went to the Red Cross hut but it was locked. The exercise had finished, everyone had gone home and we had been forgotten! Desperately disappointed, we went back home to make the cocoa for the boys in the AFS hut. They laughed and laughed.

After one heavy raid a block of flats was damaged and sticking out of the rubble was the remains of a grand piano. No wood – just the insides. One of the local kids asked the demolition men: ‘If you don’t want that old harp, can we have it?’

After another raid, there was this old lady wandering around the street, shouting: ‘Sugar! Sugar!’ Mum thought she had lost her sugar ration so she sent me out with two spoonfuls. Then she discovered that the old lady was looking for her dog.

Boys will be boys – especially in wartime. At the height of the invasion scare in September 1940, Home Guards reporting for duty in Stockport found that their headquarters had been broken into and seventy-seven rounds of ammunition, some money and a bayonet had been stolen; they assumed it was the work of fifth columnists. But the offenders were much closer to home. Three boys, aged twelve, eleven and nine, appeared before Stockport Juvenile Court, charged with the offence. Two of the boys were sent to a remand home, the third was discharged. And the Home Guard took extra care when securing their HQ for the night.

JOHN ELLIS, MANCHESTER

There was this story that snoek was actually whale meat, although we found out that it was just another sort of fish that came from foreign waters. Anyway, me and my pal, who was a couple of years older than me, were sent to the fishmonger to get some snoek, and my pal asked the fishmonger if it was true – that it really was a whale. And when the fishmonger said that, yes, it was, my mate said: ‘Well, in that case, my mum says can you leave the head on for our cat?’ The whole shop erupted in laughter.

Anyway, we moved to the outskirts of Maidstone but that didn’t stop us being bombed. One afternoon the siren went and my mother collected my brother and we crawled under the bed and lay there listening to bombs being dropped on the town about two miles away. Suddenly there was silence. You could have heard a pin drop. Our front door had been left open – it was supposed that a bomb blast would merely rush through the house and out of the back door – and we heard heavy footsteps approaching. ‘My God,’ whispered my mother, clutching us to her, ‘it might be a German!’

We clung to each other as the footsteps came into the hallway and hesitated at the door of the bedroom. ‘Anyone about?’ said a gruff voice. We breathed a sigh of relief. It was the road sweeper, a man too old to be called up. He stood looking at us as we peered out from the side of the bed and then, without a word, he crawled under my single bed. We all lay there in a long row, saying nothing until the all-clear sounded, whereupon he wriggled out, nodded to my mother and returned to his work.

On the way home from school we used to go down Gas Works Lane and watch the gunner over the rail line have a go at any enemy aircraft attacking the trains.

One afternoon it was really going on, guns firing, German aircraft swooping past. Suddenly a huge bang! A bomb had landed, but it bounced up across town and went off in a sports field on the other side. There were tracer bullets everywhere. That was a great afternoon.

One of the neighbours told my mum that she had seen us boys cheering and shouting down by the railway, so she gave me a clip round the ear for not getting home while a raid was going on. Worth it, though.

My father had a big shed in the garden and it was converted into an air-raid shelter. But after the first nights of the Blitz, my mother decided that she would rather die in a warm bed than a cold shed, so she never used it again and, after a while, we all abandoned it in favour of our beds. But it was put to very good use as a ‘den’ when my two brothers and me, and some of the neighbourhood kids, played together.

To a load of boys with vivid imaginations it was everything – the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber, a submarine under the Atlantic, you name it. We still had to take our gas masks with us, though, and one evening my older brother discovered that if you put your mask on and blew hard enough, then it made a very rude noise. That kept us entertained until bedtime.

I can remember the last day of peace. It was a Saturday and my father took me to see Arsenal play Sunderland. The kick-off was delayed for about two hours because so many children were being evacuated from London that there was traffic congestion everywhere. Arsenal won 5-2 and Ted Drake scored four of them, but everyone was really quiet on the bus going home. I suppose the adults knew that there was going to be a war and that the result of a football match wasn’t all that important, considering.

Then one chap said, almost thinking aloud: ‘I reckon the Government will declare war on Hitler tomorrow.’

And, quick as a flash, a chap sitting behind him said: ‘They can do what they like as long as they don’t drag the rest of us in.’

Everyone laughed and it lightened the mood. I was still annoyed, though, when they abandoned the football season and Arsenal’s win never counted.

THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES