Just in Time: Travelling to Cardiff at the Outbreak of War

We were nearly late for WWII! Well, not exactly. My father, feeling sure that war would never happen after two major earlier crises had been averted, decided to take us on a holiday in Brittany rather than the usual annual trip to Scotland, and then decided to wait in France until the panic to get the ferry back to Dunkirk had died down. Result: a mad scramble to get to Dieppe in the trusty Old Vauxhall, only to find the front in that coastal town littered with the abandoned cars of more panicky Brits who'd gone already.

But, get the ferry we did the day before the September Sunday when Neville Chamberlain declared over the wireless that "Britain was now at war with Germany." First a mad dash across southern England to our home in Cardiff, much of it in pitch darkness because the government had declared a trial blackout ahead of ime. No headlamps were allowed. I can remember a hysterical scream from a voice in some town as he flashed on the lights very briefly, "You are endangering our lives!" But of course he had to avoid hitting people. A kindly person had put up blackout curtains in the house which my mother wisely had anticiplated would be need eventually

We had earlier started to renovate another house
nearby with the intent to move, and that continued despite dwindling building supplies. A vivid picture remains of my father later digging s big pit in the front garden and building a sunken brick shelter heaped with soil in case of bombing. Bombing in time we had, but the shelter was never used. It was so cold and damp that we took our chances.

My memories of the war have been resurrected in the past years from over one hundred letters which my father throughout the war wrote to his sister and brother on this side of the Atlantic, where I now live. He wrote graphically, not just of family things, but of bombing, firewatching, rationing, travelling, the very real fear of impending invasion and a host of other obstacles in daily life. Such many vivid memories.

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