Child of the London Blitz
Most children grew up in family surroundings, with attentive parents, regular meals, and schooling. That was, until the outbreak of war.
Born of Welsh parents who carefully moved to London just before the outbreak of the war, I grew up in the Blitz. That was the maelstrom of German bombing which called us to the shelters every night, where people screamed in terror at the near misses, and by the morning, houses and streets had disappeared in a pile of rubble.
And that was our playground! Urchins were we! With no male adults around to curb us we ransacked the ruins, collecting the lead piping, and wooden floorboards for our purposes.
London was built on mud. So we dug it out, created moulds of our toy soldiers and cars, before finding old saucespans to melt the lead! It seems improbable in these days of Health and Safety that we, seven and eight years old, were fashioning boiling lead, but we did. Commercial lead soldiers were hollow, but ours weighed a ton, being solid metal!
The floorboards were used to make 'ball-bearing' scooters. A running board with a 'V' groove at the rear, held a steel ball bearing race, as a wheel. A block, connected by screw eyes to the front upright steering panel, was joined by four 'screw eyes', with a bolt dropped through. And it all worked! We made dozens of them, and would tear along the paved street striking sparks from the wheels, and making a huge racket over the joints in the paving.
The police, mostly men in their late fifties, used to chase us out, but they were past their best, and we were like little rats who knew all the cellars and holes where they couldn't go.
And we grew up thinking it was normal to be bombed every night. And then it all ended for my brother and I. We were evacuated to Southport, to live with my Welsh Auntie, who was the headmistress of the girl's grammar school.
Now, our London accents were swiftly disposed of. Victorian table manners were imposed by our grandmother, a kindly widow of a Welsh vicar, and we were changed for ever.
There was no room at the local primary school for us, so I remember walking hand-in-hand with my brother down the aisle at the grammar school, where we found we had a hundred little mothers!
When they finally found a place for us at the local primary school, they were unsure what to do with us as we could read and write so much better than our peers. I recall feeling that they were slightly annoyed, as they had originally been quite condescending, so they ended up putting us in the school library to read what we wanted all day.
The bombing eased and we went back to our mother in London, only to find that we now had two accents, which was further complicated when we visited Wales after the war!
When the 'V1 Buzz Bombs', and the V2 rockets came over in the final years of the war we were sent back and forth to Southport.
We children could imitate, very effectively, the 'raspberry', sound of the V1's, and would stand behind the adults making the noise, having them all anxiously searching the sky. One bomb, near Camden Town in North London, was crashing towards a primary school, when the wing caught the spire of a church, and it spun round crashing into a dairy. The top of the spire is still missing!
