The Secret History of the Blitz Page 7

  Yet despite their mistakes we should not be too critical of the government. Not only was it dealing with an unknown quantity in enemy bombing, it was also facing unfamiliar problems concerning its own role. The population was (or else soon would be) told what to wear, what to eat, where to live and where to work. Politicians and civil servants were devising plans for most of the people most of the time – and sheltering in the tubes and sleeping on the moors (or with Mr and Mrs Hutchins) did not constitute any part of those plans. And while it was arrogant to disregard deep shelter, short sighted to close the tubes, and unfeeling to ignore the trekkers, the government was having to adapt to new conditions just as the people were. It was feeling its way on these and many other issues. Particularly alarming to the authorities was the realisation that the people would have to be rewarded for their efforts and sacrifices.

  British citizens were, after all, being asked to volunteer on an unprecedented scale, as ARP, AFS, WVS, firewatchers, firemen, policemen, Home Guard and in countless other roles. Their work in the factories kept the war effort going. They made up the armed forces. And they were in daily physical danger from enemy bombs. This amounted to far greater responsibility than they had ever been asked to bear, and it was why, in the end, the government couldn’t keep them out of the tubes, and it was why deep shelters began to be constructed – and it was why trekking was finally acknowledged in May 1941 (the government being forced to accept that its previous position had been wrongheaded). It was also why down-to-earth policeman’s son Herbert Morrison became Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security in place of the more distant Sir John Anderson. ‘It’s essential that the man for the job should understand the people,’ Churchill told Morrison when he was appointed. Within days, Morrison was allocating new funds for shelters. ‘What does money matter?’ he asked. ‘There are thousands of lives at stake!’ In Britain, during the Blitz, a lot of relationships started changing. The loveless marriage between government and people was only one of them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shelter Life

  Roy Bartlett was an ordinary boy living an ordinary life in west London. He had a cat called Stripey, he attended Little Ealing School, and his parents ran a hardware shop in South Ealing. But as war approached, his life became a little less ordinary. He was issued with a gas mask that scared him so much that it made him cry. He was glad when it misted up, because the mist hid his tears. He started laughing, though, when one of his friends discovered that the mask made a rude noise when he blew out, and soon the whole class was competing, like an obscene dawn chorus, to make the best mask-fart. And when war arrived, life became less ordinary still. Roy was evacuated twenty-four miles – though it felt like hundreds – to the farming community of Wooburn Green in Buckinghamshire.

  In the village hall, Roy and the other children were paraded before the locals. The biggest boys were picked first: they would be useful on the farms. Then the girls were taken: they were less likely to cause trouble. Roy was among the leftovers – so he was bundled into a car and touted around the village. ‘Don’t he look pale?’ said one woman. ‘What funny accents!’ said another. Eventually a nice young couple said, ‘Would you like to come and stay with us?’ In the modern world of Child Services and Emergency Protection Orders, it is strange to consider that, not very long ago, children were being handed out as casually as gas masks. And the results could be tragic. In April 1940 the chairman of a bench of Sussex magistrates was almost in tears, according to the Daily Mirror, as he sentenced Edith and Ruth Sills, a mother and daughter from Hailsham, who had beaten a four-year-old boy sixty-four times with a stick. The unnamed boy had, apparently, stolen biscuits from the larder. His ‘whole life might be affected by this brutal chastisement’, said the magistrate, and he urged the boy’s mother, who lived in London, ‘to give him the tenderest care to help him forget’. Roy’s evacuation tale, fortunately, was very different to this. His foster couple, Bill and Connie, proved to be exceptionally kind, and he remained close friends with them until Connie died in 2006, aged ninety-four.

  Roy returned to Ealing in May 1940. London was not, at this point, any more dangerous than Buckinghamshire. In the meantime, however, the cellar beneath his parents’ shop had been converted into a public air raid shelter. The roof had been strengthened, pillars were added, and a street entrance built. An Elsan chemical toilet, screened off by hessian curtains, stood in the corner. The shelter could accommodate fifteen people, sleeping in double bunks. Little Ealing School, meanwhile, now had large shelters of its own, in the form of twin tunnels under the playground, lit by hanging hurricane lamps.

  In August the sirens began sounding and life in the school was disrupted by endless trips back and forth to the shelters. As this became increasingly tiresome for the teachers, the children were kept at their desks until an unfamiliar noise suggested that danger might actually be close. Inside the shelter, the children sat on benches singing and chatting, until the teachers decided that some simulacrum of education should be attempted, and the children were given quizzes and puzzles. But there were no lessons in the shelter, and Roy and his classmates were having a good time.

  On 7 September 1940, when the daylight bombing of London started, Roy was in his parents’ hardware shop. The sirens sounded – and, as was usual by now – no one moved. But then Roy, his father and his mother heard the heavy droning of aircraft. This was new – and they went to the top floor of the house to see what was happening. The drone became louder, ack-ack guns began to fire, and the family ran down to the cellar shelter where they were joined by customers and a few passers-by. Everybody was scared. No one knew what to expect. For several hours, this random grouping huddled in the shelter. When they emerged in the dark, Roy’s family went back to the top of the house to look out over London. Fires were burning everywhere, and a black cloud was forming. They returned to the shelter later that night when the bombers came back, and every night for the next fifty-six nights. Life was changed utterly.

  Rules and customs were soon imposed on shelter life. When people across the country went to the shelters they carried cases with savings certificates, cheque books, property deeds and wills. In Roy’s shelter it became silently understood that good toilet etiquette involved waiting for the drone of an aircraft or a burst of ack-ack before getting down to business. If one’s timing was good, any embarrassment would be spared. And though the shelter was cold, damp and musty, and though the smell of carbolic disinfectant from the Elsan was overpowering, life was bearable. People brought in bits of curtain to give their bunks some privacy, and pictures of relatives in the armed forces (not behind glass, of course) provided comfort. One day Roy’s father fetched some distemper from the shop, and painted everything light blue, though the consensus was that this made the atmosphere cold. Everybody liked listening to the wireless. Tommy Handley’s ITMA had been on air in early 1940 and would be again in mid-1941. Featuring depressed laundrywoman Mona Lott (‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going!’) and other wartime archetypes, it kept bores around the country supplied with catchphrases. As the bombs began falling, comedy programme Hi-Gang! – with Vic Oliver (Churchill’s barely tolerated son-in-law), Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels – was popular. Roy’s shelter also had an old wind-up gramophone, but it proved impossible to find new needles. After a while, every record began to sound like sizzling fat.

  One night, a bomber passed low overhead, releasing bombs which came down whistling. Instinctively, everybody left their bunks and came together on the floor. One man said aloud what everyone else was thinking: ‘This is bloody dangerous!’ The bombs fell harmlessly two or three miles away. Later on, a bomb fell three hundred yards away – and the shelterers learned what a near-miss really felt like – the pressure in the shelter changed suddenly, causing a vacuum in the ears. The bomb made a huge crater behind a nearby block of shops, damaging five houses beyond repair.

  As the weeks passed, Roy started to learn a new skill – knitting. He was taught by a seventeen-year-old girl who had been injured by a landmine. (Though known as ‘landmines’, these were, in truth, huge magnetic anti-shipping mines with adapted detonators. They parachuted down, causing huge devastation on landing.) This girl had been at a local dance when planes were spotted. The dance stopped briefly but the decision was taken to carry on as the aircraft seemed to have passed over. But as the music was restarting, a landmine floated gently down, exploding with devastating effect. The dance hall’s plate glass windows shattered, lacerating the girl’s arms. Time had passed, and she was now spending her evenings with Roy. They were unravelling old jumpers, and transforming the wool into bunk bed covers.

  Roy had, in the meantime, become known as ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ to a twelve-year-old girl who shared the shelter, and, for a long time, he had no idea why. Whereas everyone else there walked around in dirty old clothes or siren suits (these were one-piece jumpsuits popularised by Churchill – one of whose siren suits sold for £30,000 in 2002), Roy’s mother made sure that he was always correctly dressed in pyjamas. One night, Roy stood up, carefully undressed, and began sleepwalking across the shelter, before climbing the stairs to his bedroom. He was followed by his mother, whispering, ‘No, we won’t sleep upstairs tonight. Let’s sleep downstairs in the shelter.’ Eventually, Roy turned round, and made his way slowly back to his shelter bunk. The twelve-year-old girl was watching him, giggling, and when he woke up the next morning, he had a mysterious new nickname.

  Siren suits were available in all sizes.

  Shelter life involved all kinds of new experiences. One night, Roy woke with a sense that his head was hurting. He opened his eyes and found himself on the floor. A thick fog of dust filled the cellar, and he felt as though he was choking. He could see nothing. When he tried to
stand up, his leg hurt. In confusion, he could make out shapes. There seemed to be others on the floor. After a while, the shelterers began to collect their thoughts, and a group – including two soldiers who had missed the last train back to barracks – headed outside to find out what was going on. In the street they were confronted by a red glow. The house next door was on fire. Walking through rubble and broken glass, they made out the gable end of the next row of shops – and then nothing. All seven shops were missing. On the other side of the road, a large house was destroyed, and the fire station next door was damaged, its pumps mangled. Roy, meanwhile, was relieved to find that his parents were safe. His mother had been in the shelter, while his father had been sitting in an armchair in the kitchen upstairs. He had been listening to aircraft and ack-ack guns, and then heard what he described as ‘an exploding roar like Dante’s Inferno’. The kitchen windows came in, there was rubble and dust everywhere. But he was unhurt.

  The blast was caused by a landmine. It seems that it had dropped on the butcher’s in the middle of the row of vanished shops. Seven people in those buildings were killed, twelve badly injured – and the butcher and his family were never found. Meanwhile, the house next door to the shelter was burning to the ground – though this blaze had been started by a small incendiary bomb. At first, it was thought that the owner of the house was missing – she usually sheltered under the stairs – but she had behaved differently that night. Her son, home from the navy on leave, had persuaded her to spend the night elsewhere. And in spite of the shock, the shelterers had escaped serious injury. The only casualty was Roy – his right foot had been slammed against the wall, crushing his cartilage. The house and shop, however, were in a pitiful state. The windows were gone, the frames were loose, and every room was filled with rubble, dust, and bits of glass. There was glass in the larder, and this created a dilemma, acted out all over the country. While official advice was not to eat from a bombed house as slivers of glass could infiltrate food, waste was unthinkable in straitened times. And so, at every meal over the coming weeks, as food was served up, Roy’s mother would say, ‘Look at it, chew it slowly, don’t gulp it!’

  The morning after the blast, Roy’s father took him to Mattock Lane Hospital. The roadway was full of rubble, so Roy hung on to his father’s arm, and hopped until they reached the first working bus stop. When they arrived at the hospital, it was crowded and chaotic. The area had suffered badly during the night, and Roy saw trolleys dripping with blood; his injury seemed very minor relative to others. When he was finally treated, the hospital had run out of plaster, so his foot was dressed in a mess of sticky bandages. The emergency services, meanwhile, had spent the day removing bodies from the wreckage. By the afternoon, the road had been cleared – and expressing a mood of defiance, Roy’s father decided to open his shop. It was already open, Roy’s mother said, seeing as it didn’t have windows or a front door. A few customers appeared, more out of prurience than anything else. One lady, who lived a hundred yards away, marched in carrying a paraffin oil stove with a ‘Bartlett’s Hardware’ label tied to it. She said that she had found it in her garden, and despite its long flight, it had only a small dent in it.

  A few weeks after the blast, Roy came home from school to find the local handyman, George, clearing a blockage on the roof. A drain was overflowing, and Roy, being a nosy child, watched closely as George climbed the ladder. Suddenly, George ran back down and was violently sick in the gutter. Roy was eager to know why, but was quickly ushered away by the adults. George, he figured, must have spent lunchtime down the pub. But he was wrong. As George was clearing the drain, he had pulled out a mane of long black hair. Attached to it was a scalp. It must have belonged to the butcher’s wife from down the road.

  Roy’s story is important because it offers a genuine picture of shelter life, untarnished by the consensus. It involved changes in the way people lived, and in the way they viewed and treated each other. It brought periods of genuine fear and danger, it brought sudden, intensely lived experiences, but it also brought mundane experiences and sometimes a feeling that life was on hold. All of this is present in Roy’s memories. And the landmine that landed on South Ealing also brought him an unwanted souvenir. His ankle injury – insignificant at the time – became more troublesome as he grew older. An x-ray revealed that he had no cartilage left in the joint, and years of limping resulted in having to have both hips replaced. But as he reminds himself, ‘There were plenty of other people worse off. It was one of those things.’ It is worth noting, however, that Roy received his injury while asleep in a strengthened shelter. His father, who was sitting in an unprotected kitchen above ground, was unhurt. A shelter was no guarantee of safety – as Gwen Hughes could testify.

  When Southampton was heavily attacked on the night of 30 November 1940, twenty-seven-year-old Gwen was in a public shelter at the bottom of High Street, together with her children, four-year-old Gloria and three-year-old Anthony, as well as her dogs, Pronto and Peggy, and a litter of newborn puppies. The shelter was really a large medieval cellar, divided into three chambers by modern brick walls. There was wooden seating around the sides, but Gwen and her husband Monty, a fireman, had brought a bedstead down, which they placed in a corner reinforced by the modern walls.

  That evening, the siren sounded and the sky was lit up with parachute flares. Down in the shelter, Gloria and Anthony, dressed in siren suits, sat under a ledge built into the corner, while their mother stood beside them. Gwen announced to the shelter that she had only one cigarette, and apologised that she couldn’t hand any round. She asked whether anybody had a light. A man named Pat Powell walked over, stood in front of her, and struck a match. Sitting nearby were local sweetshop owners, Mr and Mrs May, and their thirteen-year-old daughter. They had recently returned to Southampton after a time away, escaping the bombs. ‘Oh, why did we come back, why?’ moaned Mrs May. ‘The business, my dear, the business . . .’ said her husband. As he spoke, the wall in front of Gwen caved in. Pat Powell, shielding her, was killed instantly. A bomb had exploded on the pavement above and to the side of the shelter. A moment later, another bomb fell into the shelter from the restaurant above. It landed on the May family. And it brought the upper floors crashing down into the cellar.

  The Southampton cellar in which Gwen, Gloria and Anthony sheltered. Photographed in 2014.

  For a while, Gwen wasn’t sure whether she was alive or dead. She could hear screams coming from all around her, but she couldn’t move her head. All she could do was dribble dirt out of her mouth. She realised that that she was buried. Then she heard her daughter’s voice, calling out, calmly, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Are you all right, Mummy?’ She couldn’t answer. At some point, she remembers her husband Monty – who was on duty as a fireman – shouting from above, ‘Gwen, Gwen, are you all right?’ before calling to someone, ‘Come and help me! My family’s under there!’ and receiving the answer, ‘No good going down there, mate! They’re all finished!’ Ignoring this advice, Monty fetched volunteers to start digging. Gwen, meanwhile, could hear her son screaming. He was alongside her, his head beneath one of her hands. She now knew that he was alive – but after a while, he became quiet.