My war life doc

D.E & S.H.Wroth ,
Spring Cottage
4 . Malden Way ,
Selsey ,
PO20 0RW
01243605793
davidwroth515@msn.com
Monday, 25 July 2005

I was born on the 5th June 1932 , and was 7 years old at the outbreak of the war , we were living just short of Northolt Racecourse on a side road from Whitton Avenue called Keble Close,our house was next to a large Hotel called “The Greenwood “. When the bombing of London started , my parents were very friendly with the owner of the Hotel and an arrangement was struck that we would sleep in the cellars , which proved to be good in some ways , and not so good in others , I would lay awake at night and watch the beer going along the pipes to the pumps in the bars above , although the arrangement was useful it soon became obvious that if a bomb hit the Hotel we would probably be trapped .
The area was a target for the Bombers because of Northolt Airport which was only a few miles away , and was well camouflaged , and the racecourse which was full of Army units and the field itself was covered with ack-ack units and searchlights .
On one nights bombing run a stick of incendiaries was dropped which went along the Whitton Avenue ,into the Hotel Car Park and down the side of our house , no damage was done to the
house , my Father put a bucket of sand on it before anything could spread . On another night a stick of bombs was dropped which put large craters into Whitton Avenue , and one fell into the Garage of the house next to the Hotel which blew his car four houses down the road . The car park fence was supported by a large concrete base about 2 feet square that went all the way round the car park , a section of this was blown up into the air and it came down through my Uncles Garage which was four houses down the road , and finished in the back seat of his Austin Seven . He spent several
weeks chipping it away to get it out , the car performed afterwards as if nothing had happened .
We stopped sleeping in the Hotel after this and my Father had a Morrison Shelter , this was a steel box which came in several sections , and was constructed in the dining room where it served as a table during the day , and we all crept into it at night . It was strong enough to take the weight of the house if it collapsed
but would not take a direct hit . I don’t know if this was a free issue or we had to pay for it , there was a choice of either the Morrison or Anderson shelters , the Anderson was supplied to the house next to us ,and they had to dig a large hole in the garden about 4 feet deep and 8x6 feet oblong , they cemented the structure in to the hole , it was several corrugated sheets bent at one end to form an arch which was bolted together with a shaped end panel and front panel with a door , steps led down to the floor. The neighbours made it comfortable by constructing beds inside and they had camping kits for tea etc . My dad could not bring himself to sleep in the garden in all weathers , very wise I think.
My Father was a very keen gardener and kept his garden and an allotment full of vegetables for us to eat , it was thanks to him that we were never short of food , he also had a barter system in place with other people in the neighbourhood where he would swap vegetables for a chicken or rabbit , that was another reason for him not to have an Anderson shelter , it would have taken up too much garden .
My Parents were away early every morning , my Father was medically unfit for the forces , and worked in the Post office Savings Bank at Blythe Road Shepherds Bush , he would cycle there every day a distance of some 40 miles and back at night , he was a Night Watchman there and spent several nights a week on the roof looking for fires etc.
My Mother worked on munitions at the Hoover Factory on the Western Avenue , they were building the fuselages of Wellington bombers and later Lancaster Bombers , I did not see very much of them . If there was a raid on , I used to stand in the doorway of our house and watch the dog fights going on in the sky above after they had left , and would not have to leave until the all clear sounded . When I got back from school the house would be empty and cold so one of my jobs was to light the fire so that it was warm when my parents returned .
I left for school about 8am and had to walk a distance of about 5 miles to Horsenden school , I used to meet up with some other boys and we would walk together in the kerbs picking up pieces of shrapnel from shells that had been fired the night before , we had a trade in the stuff , if it had writing on it then that piece was highly valuable , sometimes one of us would find a nose cone with degrees marked on it , this was a prize possession .
We had a strict rule to observe , if the siren went off when we were on our way to school , we were to either go to the nearest shelter ,( these were spaced along the side of the roads at
intervals ) Or if we were nearest to the school we were to go to the school shelter , we of course ran back as far as we could go to a street shelter even if we were at the school gates .
We spent about half of our school time underground in the shelters , which were damp and smelled musty , the floor was covered in duckboards to keep the water away from our feet , we played noughts and crosses , or battleships and cruisers , and were given Horlicks Tablets , a small brown pill made of Horlicks , also sometimes we had Ovalteen Tablets which were similar .
Learning was next to impossible , the real teachers had been conscripted into the forces , and the school was run by volunteers which were mostly older women who could not do War Work
my education was non existent like most of my mates .
The environment of the shelters produced a situation with a lot of us which prompted us to steal cigarettes from the newspaper shop where we worked in the mornings as a dare , because the shelters were the ideal places for a smoke , I started when I was about 8 and only managed to stop completely when I was 30 , when I discovered what damage I was doing to my lungs , I was very lucky to survive . My Father was less lucky and died at the age of 75 from lung cancer after suffering for a while .

We became fed up with the shelters and while the flying bombs were the threat we used to skive off out of the shelter while the whole school was down there , we would grab our bikes to cycle to Horsenden hill which was close to watch what was happening
until one day the flying bomb was heading towards us and was almost overhead when the engine stopped , we would have been safe if we had stayed where we were , but it scared the life out of us and we got on our bikes and shot down the hill into the arms of a police patrol , who marched us back to school , and were we in trouble , the cane did not stop for some time as we all bent over .
Just after we had all gone to school one day a v2 rocket fell onto a block of houses in Whitton Avenue and demolished the lot , when we went home there was a massive hole in the ground , I don’t know if anyone was in there at the time , some days later another fell onto an Ordinance Depot at Greenford killing a lot of my mates parents , they had a pretty rough time after that , I often wonder how they faired in life .
We used to spend a lot of time on the tow path of the Grand Union Canal watching the barges go to and fro with different loads , one day one of our mates little brother fell in and he drowned trying to rescue him , we were banned from there after that .
By the end of the war I was 13 , and had been in the St Johns Ambulance Brigade for some time , a position I found very useful
I had to use my skills on several occasions , we would go on summer camp , I was on one of these camps when the war ended on the Isle of Wight , we were at Sandown , I can remember it well because there was a gas works near to the camp and the smell of tar products was very strong , when we heard the news we packed and went home to join in the celebrations that were going on in London itself . I went into London on my own from Sudbury Hill on the underground which was free for the day I think , it must have been because I had no money , I walked around central London from Westminster to Buckingham Palace watching to people going mad , there were Fire Floats on the Thames with water jets firing up into the sky , fireworks , hooters going off all the time , I finished up at Hyde Park Corner and got the train home , not the sort of thing that would be safe today , but a memory I will never forget .
Life returned to some sort of normality from there , VJ night was a celebration but low key compared with VE night . The teachers returned from the war , but too late for me , I had about six months for them to realise how much I had missed , but I had to leave that term and my future was very difficult because I new little and could not pass entrance exams for anything , I was taken on as an apprentice clockmaker because I was useful with my hands , but part of the apprenticeship was to go to evening classes where I picked up a certain amount , my saviour was to join the RAF as a regular where I received an education .

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