A child's view of war

My name is Garry Watkins; I was born in 1938,the same year as the Munich crisis, and my sister Lois was born in 1934. Looking back, like most people do, I can see my life as a series of vignettes, mostly at my home in Dartford, Kent, where I lived with my mother Edna, and Lois. I leave out my father Howard, or Joe, as he liked to be called, because he was mostly away in the army from 1939 until 1945.

From our back door in Priory Close, we could see the Thames marshes. Over the river was Essex where my father helped to man the AA guns protecting London from waves of bombers trying, almost successfully, to destroy London. It was possible for him, sometimes officially and sometimes not, to come home through Blackwall tunnel to be with us all.

In my earliest vignette, I can see myself in the kitchen fascinated by the breech of my father’s Lee Enfield rifle that was later found to contain pieces of toast; sabotage no less.

Another time I can see ‘Sergeant Watkins’ (my Dad), digging out our Andersen shelter and assembling it in the small front bedroom of our bungalow. With the addition of a few sandbags it kept Lois and me sort of safe for the next few years.

This was the time of war when the drone of German bombers and all the noises of airial warfare went on in the skies above us.

Later on during the V1 raids, Mum would press us to the floor waiting for the motor of the doodle bug to cut out. That wait before the explosions was the only time she let herself show any fear in front of us. Then when we heard the explosion in the distance, she would say to us ‘it’s all right, it went on to London; some other poor bugger may be.’

Earlier in the war, Mum decided that we should evacuate to Cornwall as the raids had intensified. This never worked out for us as a permanent situation as she could never get used to the meanness of our west country cousins who called us ‘they evacuees’. But the farm where we stayed was quite all right. Hesicot farm near Launceston lived up to all the expectations of a rural idyll; at least in my vignettes it did.

There was Mr Wills the farmer, his wife and two sons and I can still see them now, in sepia, with the dogs, cattle, milking sheds, barns and horses for pulling the ploughs. Mr Wills, looking after his family as farmers do, had been keeping an unregistered sow in an old shed. One day an inspector called and I nearly blew it by telling him ‘There’s a piggy in there’. But why should he listen to a three year old evacuee?

I went back to the farm in the nineties but there was not much going on. Just the farmhouse and barns and a young fellow who seemed vaguely interested in the 1940s. Even so he invited our party back.

In the March of 1944, I was woken from sleep by Lois screaming. Incendiary bombs looking just like a firework display had hit the street in front of us. After we had been calmed down, we went back to sleep to the sound of the neighbours talking and drinking tea in the kitchen. In the morning I found out that a stick of bombs had peppered the street. No one had been hurt but some homes had been set on fire, including ours.

A bomb had fallen through the glass roof of our veranda; cut a smooth notch out of the table, ruined my toy train and set fire to the coal store below. A fire in the garden shed had also been extinguished and my train, with a smashed boiler, never ran again.

By the end of 1944, the doodle-bugs were coming to an end as the launching sites were being destroyed by British and American aircraft. The news on the radio gave the impression of a huge mopping up going on as the Russian, American and British fought their way into Germany.

For us there was a lightness in the air, which I can still feel. Although there were still a few raids at night, the home front tasted the first course of victory.

It was during this time that I saw my first banana being eaten in the barber’s. A few boys scraped away at the skin with their teeth. Not me though, I could wait.
None of us received any injuries during the war except Mum. While we were walking up the avenue in the blackout, she walked straight into a smoker: a large bin with a chimney. I didn’t really understand the words she used, but who does like the skin taken off their shins. These smoking things were supposed to obscure the target areas on moonlit nights. A sort of good pollution, maybe.

With the news of victory in Europe in 1945, the population went crazy. There were bonfires blocking the streets from what little traffic there was. I was swooped up by some old lady and danced around with everyone else. This must have been the second armistice for her and I suppose she was probably born in the 1870s.

Lois came back from the town and told me that she had seen mum dancing with a sailor. The next day we were sworn to secrecy.

No one told me when Joe would come home, but one evening, as we stepped off the bus from Gran and Grandad’s, a group of my friends were there, gleefully jumping up and down. ‘Mr Watkins is home! Mr Watkins is home!’ We all ran the quarter of a mile to our home and there, in the kitchen, was this huge stranger with a booming voice.

He had been fighting with the eighth army in North Africa; then in Italy at Salerno, Anzio and Monte Cassino, and it showed. I don’t think he had much stomach for looting because the only things he brought back were two alabaster gold fish from Italy and a German penknife for me, which he later borrowed permanently. It took him a long time to come down from those six years of his life to working six days a week as a milkman. Lois and me spent a lot of summer evenings playing in pub gardens as Mum and Dad carried on the war inside with other veterans.

In 2003, a few years after both Mum and Dad had died, Lois and I went back to look at our old home. We had chosen a good time because there was a loft extension going on and two workmen let us have a look around. They were quite talkative until we mentioned ‘The War’, and then they started on their work again.

From the new window in the roof, we looked down onto the marshes and the Queen Elizabeth Bridge over the Thames. The river is quiet now and ships no longer come down from the docks. No sailing barges with their red sails can be seen either. Long Reach Tavern on the river bank was pulled down in the Sixties and the fever hospital which fought an earlier war against smallpox has gone too.

Then as we stared out feeling quite melancholy, I could still hear the wail of the air raid siren from those troubled years: it was sounding the ‘all clear’.

Post script: Joe and Edna died in 1996 within two weeks of each other.

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