WW2: A Brief Personal History

I had just celebrated my 13th birthday when WW2 was declared and clearly remember listening to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast with my parents. I was about to start my third year at the Sir George Monoux Grammar School in Chingford when we were evacuated to Colchester for a short period and then to Marston Moretaine in Bedfordshire where I was billeted, with another boy, with a young couple, Mr and Mrs Hall. Mr Hall worked at the local brickworks. They had a large chow dog named Shirley who used to like to drink the soapy water in the bowl we washed our feet in.
We did have lessons but I can’t recall much about them. After school we used to play on a lake formed after the clay for the brick making had been excavated. We lashed up makeshift rafts and sailed on them; all very dangerous looking back and our parents would have had a fit if they had known.
When we broke up for Christmas I came home to Leyton in northeast London but never returned as an evacuee. My school had shut for the duration and those pupils from other grammar schools who stayed home went to the Leyton County High School for Boys. I completed my education there in August 1942.
Just before Christmas that year I started work as a junior draughtsman with the London Ferro Concrete Company in Vauxhall Bridge Road, near Victoria Station for the princely wage of one pound per week.. Most of the time I cycled the ten or so miles to the office. One of our wartime contracts was to make parts for the Mulberry Harbour for the D-Day landings. In those days, builders needed permits for most materials and I was sent to get these from a ministry building. There were always long queues but by announcing that my permits for the Whale Contract ensured I got to the head of the queue, much to the annoyance of the others who had been waiting for ages.
There was a tracing office on the next floor and the two men who ran it employed about half a dozen young girls. It was there that I met Eileen, who was few months older than me. We used to go to the cinema and to symphony concerts. I used to see her on to her train home to Carshalton and went back to the office to sleep when I was on fire watching duty but there never were any incidents.
It was a strange time especially when the V1 ‘Doodlebug’ phase began. As I cycled through the East End to Victoria, I came across roads where houses had been demolished and people killed and injured. We never knew, from one day to the next, if we’d ever see each other again. But this didn’t affect us and there was never any such thing as counselling for such traumas; we just got on with our lives.
Until July 1944, our house in Leyton had never had so much as a window broken or a roof slate dislodged. In fact we were so blasé that we always slept upstairs. Then one morning there was a big bang at around 6.00 o’clock and when I awoke, the window had been blown in and shards of glass had embedded themselves into the wardrobe opposite, which had fallen across the bottom of my bed..
It was pitch black so I thought it was the middle of the night. But the darkness was all due to the dust from the loft and the shattered ceiling and, when it began to clear, it was a lovely sunny morning. The V1 had dropped on some houses a few yards away in the road backing onto ours. My parents were yelling, “Are you alright?” but I didn’t have a scratch. I used to have a glass of water on a chair by the side of my bed and the blast had knocked it over. The water went into my slippers which had filled with dirt.
We stayed with an aunt in a nearby road for a day or so while the house was made habitable again. The men who did the work were from the neutral Irish Republic and it wasn’t until some months later that we realised that dad’s half-hunter gold watch, a cheap camera and various other trinkets were missing. Several more V1s dropped in the district and later on a V2 landed a few hundred yards up the road and demolished quite a few houses.
After starting work I took evening classes, cycling to the South West Essex Technical College and School of Art in Walthamstow. The lessons were in railway coaches parked in the quadrangle. There were often air raid warnings, but we never bothered to take any notice. During this time my mother was often on night work. She was only just over five feet tall but had over two dozen jobs, including at a factory making parts for the famous Mosquito aircraft.
During the blitz of 1940, my dad’s firm. W Lusty & Sons Ltd in Bromley-by-Bow was destroyed so he worked for the Plessey Company in Ilford until he retired. Much of the machinery for war production was installed in the tube tunnels in what is now the Central London line.
We all survived to war with no injuries. Eileen and I became engaged for a few years after the war but didn’t marry. Even so, we still see each other on a regular basis after nearly sixty years.

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