A Schoolgirl in Wartime

I was age 12 when war was declared. We lived at Cheam, about 14 miles south of London and on that Sunday morning we were listening to the broadcast by Neville Chamberlain. Then the siren sounded and we all thought we were going to be bombed straight away., but it was deathly quiet outside. What was it going to be like? Would we be killed or injured? After a while we heard the All Clear. So this was war.

I remember the start of the Battle of Britain.One Saturday afternoon there was a daylight raid on Croydon Airport. We were watching the dogfights in the sky, hearing the whine of aircraft in combat, and afterwards picking up pieces of shrapnel in the street. It was exciting , watching all this going on, and we all had a collection of shrapnel.

The Blitz started in 1940 with bombing raids on London every night. We had a Morrison shelter in our dining room, in the middle of the room where the table used to be. It was like a large metal cage with a solid steel top. We slept in it at night , being frequently woken by the drone of German bombers following their flight path to London, and by our own ack-ack fire. We could see the searchlights trying to pick them out., and we knew that a “bombers moon” of bright moonlight would be a heavy raid.

I had to get up next morning and go to school at Nonsuch County Girls School in Cheam. Air raid shelters were built at the side of the school, surrounded by trees.They were a large type of Anderson shelters cut into the ground with benches along the length of each side and a corrugated iron roof covered with packed earth. We carried coats and gas masks in the classrooms all day, ready to take into the shelters which were damp and cold.

I remember D-Day, 6th June 1944.The headmistress, Miss Dickie, came round to each class to tell us the news which she had heard on the radio. We were having a French lesson taken by our teacher Mme.Charbonneau.She burst into tears of thankfulness saying “ It is my country. They are saving my country.”

The final phase of the war brought the attacks by doodlebugs, the flying bombs. We could hear the horrible drone of the engine getting louder as it approached, then came the cut-out and the suspense of wondering where it was going to drop down and explode.When we heard the “bang”we knew we were safe from that one. By this time I had left school and I was training to be a teacher at Clapham and Streatham Hill Training College, south London. We studied with the lights on in the building all the time, every window was boarded up , having been blown out by bomb blast .Next came the rockets; no warning sirens, no engine noise, just instant death from the sky. We had to accept it, get on with our daily lives and hope that the next one hadn`t “got your number on it”.

VE day finally came and I had lived through six teenage years in wartime.

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