Carrying on at home....

My mother died in 2001, but I should like to include on this site some of the information which she gave me about her experiences in London during the war, and those of my father, who died in 1975.

At the outbreak of war my mother was 24 and working as a shop assistant in a jeweller’s shop in Camden Town. She was called up to work in the “Telegraph Office”, where she was trained and worked on teleprinters sending telegrams, some of them coded, all over the world. She enjoyed this work and the companionship of the other women assigned there. She told us that this Office was near St. Paul’s, and was underground. She often worked night shifts there and described walking home (to Islington) through the blackout and through bombing raids. When I see photographs of the devastation which took place around St. Paul’s, I can understand that sometimes these raids were heavy. I have to say that later in life my mother was sometimes aggrieved that the experiences of other workers such as those in the Land Army were recognised whilst those of her colleagues and herself were not!

My mother’s attitude to the bombing was fatalistic and pragmatic, and I am sure that this was the same for many others living in heavily attacked areas. Certainly she hated going to bomb shelters and, she said, she never went to the Underground where she would have hated being crammed in with so many others. She lived with her sister — her mother was dead and her father elsewhere for much of the time — in rented rooms at the top of a large Victorian house in Queen’s Avenue. Two floors down lived a very pleasant woman with grown-up sons who used to worry when a bombing raid started and my mother and her sister remained upstairs in bed. Mum told us that this lady would send one of her sons up to ask if they wouldn’t please come down to the shelter, which they generally agreed to do for her sake. However, their greatest inconvenience and concern was that before going down they had to take the curlers out of their hair as they couldn’t possibly be seen with these in!

My mother's notes, which she made at my request a while before she died, describe another occasion when the top floor of this house was hit by a bomb and her pragmatism again came into play!

My mother met my father at a holiday camp in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight in 1940. In fact, wartime arrangements meant that the men stayed in chalets at the camp but female guests were lodged in a large house in the village. My father had not yet been called up because he was slightly older — 31 in 1940. He, like my mother, was from London — Shoreditch — and they courted for two years and married on 24th May 1942. They went away for a week’s “honeymoon” to Bournemouth, despite the fact that the beach was inaccessible because of the coils of barbed wire on it and that normal seaside activities in general were suspended.

When they returned to London, my father’s call-up papers were waiting for him. He had to leave almost immediately for training in Aberystwyth to join the Royal Artillery (359 Field Battery). My mother recalled travelling to visit him and her train being held up outside Birmingham which was undergoing a bombing raid. Immediately after this period of training, my father’s unit left for North Africa. After the fighting there they crossed to Italy and started the battle northwards. In Italy, and certainly at the battle of Monte Cassino, my father was a motorcycle despatch rider. He did not return home until October 1945 when he had 28 days leave in the UK. His unit was then sent to Villach in Austria as part of the occupation force and he remained there until June or July 1946. He was finally discharged in October 1946.

During the whole of this time my mother continued working in the Telegraph Office and, for a short time at the end of the war in the Food Office which was based in Shoreditch Town Hall.

My parents’ wartime experiences did not involve medals for gallantry or records in history books. Nevertheless, the sheer strength of character of my mother in being separated from her new husband for four years, knowing only for most of this time that he was on active service, not to mention my father’s own experiences over this time, I find remarkable. I am sure, too, that their experiences were commonplace in the sense that this strength and ability to carry on was replicated in families all over the country. The capacity, also, to pick up and develop their civilian lives after the end of the war must have drawn on great strengths.

My mother's notes are as follows:

"1939: When the first warning went soon after Churchill had announced we were at war, I think most people dashed into the Air Raid Shelters (I know we did). I was at a wedding and the bride and groom were on their way through London to their honeymoon, and went into the Underground for shelter, , but the rest of that year nothing happened apart from everything being blacked out, and of course people being called up for the Services or war work.

1940: The bombing of London (and opther cities) started and was really bad. Children were evacuated to country areas and I saw them going away in coach loads. We always knew when a raid was coming because the radio went off, then you would hear an air raid warning, then hear the drone of the bombers. This went on all night. Hundreds of people slept in the underground stations on the platforms; this went on until the end of the war. Trains would still be running, and the passengers would be trying to avoid treading on people.

Everyone was called up to do some kind of war work or to the Forces, except those with young children. In spite of the bombing, shops and offices would open as usual. Cinemas and dance halls, which were closed at first, all opened again, and in spite of the raids people carried on as normally as possible. I was in a cinema in Tottenham Court Road when a bomb was dropped quite close by but no one left the cinema, we stayed to see the film; that was how most people carried on. The worst part was the lack of sleep, and having to get up, and to work the next day.

I can remember incendiary bombs coming down while walking down the road, and seeing houses set on fire by these, in fact one came through our roof, but we just moved our furniture to a downstairs flat because the people from there had been evacuated. Sometimes we had to leave a packed suitcase ready when we went to work, because there was an unexploded bomb in the road. We all seemed to take this in our stride as the war went on. Of course there were many people killed in the bombing, and at times the fires could be seen burning fiercely.

My friends and I walked home in the blackout through the City of London where we worked underground in an office by St. Paul’s. You didn’t hear of anyone being mugged although it was at night in the dark!!

We heard the first V1 fall in the East End one night, which awoke my sister and I. We didn’t know what it was until the next day, then of course there were many after. In fact during the day you could see, and hear, them but you knew that when the noise stopped they would drop anywhere.

After the raids, there would be a lot of damage; one of my memories was seeing a bus embedded in the front of a building at Camden Town.

In spite of all this we did have some laughs and happy memories. One night my sister and I had been to the cinema (this was before we were married). Coming home we were walking along when we heard the hiss of a bomb coming down, so we dived into the front garden of a house, then we heard a tram coming, so dashed after it. When we got on we were absolutely collapsed with laughter, the other passengers thought we were mad, but people did have a lot of funny incidents. Of course we were worried about our forces and the news, but we had to carry on as best we could.

Every Saturday I used to travel to Leicester Square and meet my husband-to-be to have a drink with him during his break from night work, then travelled home on my own in the blackout with air raid warnings on. There were plenty of people around Leicester Square, but very few outside London, probably they were all in their shelters.

Food was very short, but we managed to survive on our rations. We had to queue for everything, especially for buses or trams. I never saw anyone panic — they may have done where the bombing was really bad, like in the East End where some shelters and undergrounds were badly bombed".

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.