Regarding history, I made an observation on the politics thread recently that ‘The Left Behind’ series is really not that popular in the UK or in Europe except with a minority audience – and Tim Le Haye provoked widespread disgust in here when interviewed about his books. I think this may have something to do with a sense of history. Countless Americans died adn/or suffered terribly in the Second World War and in wars since them – but total war has not taken place in America since the Civil War. The American combatants and victims of war since then have mainly been soldiers – who tend to keep their stories secret or have their stories of pointless suffering marginalised for more heroic tales (even the widows and grieving families of soldiers tend to keep stoical as a fitting memory for the fallen) . However, when a civilian population is involved in total conflict the women do tend to pass on their stories and these become a part of living memory. Below I post some memories that came out of a reminiscence group I recently facilitated. I hope some of you may read them – I think they might explain why violent fantasy of the Left Behind variety might be less popular in Europe and the UK.
A South London Tragedy
I was walking home from school at lunchtime when I heard a very loud noise. I looked up and saw a German aircraft flying in under the Barrage Balloons. To my horror, I saw the pilot’s face leaning out over the side of the cockpit. He had a leather helmet on his head and was grinning from ear to ear. I stood stock still, frozen to the spot in terror, but was pulled into a pub by some men for my safety. The pilot and his crew flew on to Catford where they gunned down a whole lot of children and teachers in a school playground, then to Lewisham Street Market where they strafed the shoppers, then on to New Cross where more people were gunned down. When their ammunition was used up they flew over the English Channel where British planes shot them down. In Catford there are a group of adjoining streets named after each one of the children who were killed that day.
Marie
Looking out for Sister in a Bomb Blast
My father, being a fireman, was often on duty for long periods of time. So, of course, when he was on leave he used to like to take my mother out just for a social drink with some friends not going too far from our home.
This particular night my parents had gone out and my two younger sisters were asleep – one in the pram downstairs and the other upstairs in the front bedroom. I knew my parents would only be away for an hour or so, so I settled down with my brother to play his favourite game which was identifying all the footballers on the cigarette cards that my father collected for him – he was a passionate football fan and I regularly tested his knowledge. We were laughing and joking when suddenly we heard an almighty bang and whooshing noise and the windows in the room where we were playing just smashed and fell covering my brother with broken glass. My first reaction was to pick him up which I did mainly by grabbing hold of his jumper and standing him on his feet. I then looked in the pram but fortunately the hood had protected my baby sister. I told my brother to take care of the baby and then rushed upstairs to see if my other sister was hurt. I ran into the bedroom and there she was lying in the bed wide awake covered in glass. I gently took her out of the bed and wrapped her in another blanket and took her downstairs. She was very lucky because my mother had net curtains at the window and that saved her. I did not realise at first until I came down from the bedroom that our front door had been completely blown off its hinges and was lying flat in the passage.
After about ten minutes I heard my name being called and my father, mother, and my father’s best friend came running into the house – I shall never forget the look of shock and then relief when they found that the four of us were safe and not injured. Apparently they were told that a land mine had dropped just across the road from our home and obviously they feared the worst. That night my father blocked the front windows with some very stiff material that he had brought home that day, but during the next day the council men came around to assess the damage and started to do some repairs just to tide us over until new windows could be fixed.
That incident will stay in my memory forever, but I can honestly say that I was not at all scared and take on the responsibility of the older sister. I was 13½ at the time.
Joan P.
Too Old to Fight: a Very Ordinary Hero of the Blitz
My father was a sign writer and had a shop in Spurgeon Street, in the Borough district of Southwark. He would work upstairs at the top of the building, which looked like something out of “Oliver”. I used to go to work with him sometimes in the school holidays. His friend upstairs was a French polisher. They had a pot of glue on a burner all the time. The air was quite heavy with it. We were the original glue snifters! My father could also do French polishing. When a table or sideboard was mended with veneer he would give it about six coats of polish. It was wonderful to watch him with a piece of cotton wool with old rags over it, dipping it into the polish and rubbing it round and round on the surface until this shone. During the Second World War the air raids were very heavy – but he kept on working; you had to. One night, his shop was damaged by a bomb blast. Unfortunately someone came in and stole all his sable brushes and other things.
Sometimes my father worked from home. Again it was lovely to watch gold leaf being placed over the wet paint so that the gold stuck to the letters on the sign. He would rest his hand on a long stick which had a pad at the end of it and we had to be very careful not to knock his chair when he was working. He was a chain smoker, which meant he lit one cigarette up with the next one to help him concentrate. He lived to 88, but unfortunately he did die of cancer.
When he died he had no debts but he left nothing. He only worked when he needed money; it was the way he was brought up, coming from a family that had never had to go out to work {he was from a rich family who lost all of their money at some point}. Sometimes he would do a job and then pay a year’s rent in arrears. As he never had a regular wage, I can remember having holes in my shoes, and putting cardboard taken from a packet of cornflakes in them. The cardboard soon wore through, and I cried one day. So my parents both found some money from somewhere, and I had two pairs of shoes come the evening. This was typical of the way they lived - ‘from hand to mouth’.
Amy
One Family’s Tragedy
In 1939 at the start of the Second World War children were evacuated from London. I was sent to Hastings on the south coast. As I’ve said, I had been a sickly child, and I was ill when I was away, so my parents came to take me home after three months. Many other children returned too because all was quiet for a while and it seemed the bombs would never fall. Unfortunately, when the bombing finally started my sister Joyce was killed; she was only sixteen at the time - I was nine. I remember Joyce going out with my other sisters Joan and Sis. I heard my parents say, “Look after Joyce”. The girls were going to a little café where all the young people met. They used to drink lemonade with ice cream in it. I remember it being a lovely drink and one of my favourites too.
Joyce was standing outside a shop talking to a boy of her own age when a bomb dropped, without any air raid siren sounding to give a warning. It hit a gas main in the middle of the road and caused an enormous explosion. All the windows in the shop were blown out. It was early on in the war and the windows had not been boarded up.
The glass went into Joyce’s back and the top of her legs. My sister Joan ran all the way home to get my parents. They arrived at the scene just as the ambulance was taking Joyce and the boy away - both of them had been badly injured. They all went in the ambulance to Kings College Hospital. Joyce died in the night; the boy lived for a week. My sister Joan visited him every day without telling him that Joyce had died that night.
I had waited at home with my brother John. We did not go to bed, but waited up until very late. When my parents arrived home I said, “How’s Joyce?” and my mother replied, “She’s gone to be with the angels”. I could not understand this as I was only nine years old at the time. It was a very sad time in our house with relations coming and going to the front room; everybody was crying. Her coffin was in the front room, but I did not see her and was not allowed to go to the funeral. I stayed with the lady who lived in a house opposite and we watched through a window as the coffin was taken away. I liked to look at a photograph of Joyce which was put into a drawer in the front room of our house in Upstall Street; it reminded me what she looked like when I was forgetting. After a time of grieving, the family began to do things together again; like playing cards around the big dining room table. However, my mother would not come home; she went to the pub instead. That was the beginning of her drinking too much Guinness, which she did to the end of her long life. She died at 94. I don’t know what that says about drinking; perhaps she was pickled in Guinness.
From 7th September 1940 and 11thMay 1941 we had unrelenting bombing for 76 consecutive nights which became known as the ‘Blitz’. I learnt that a lot of civilians were killed. We went to the Imperial War Museum once and saw my sister’s name as one of the casualties of the 1939-1941 Second World War. I think this episode had an enormous influence on our lives; as a result we came to accept illness and death as things that just happen.
Amy
‘Above the Nations is Humanity’ -Shades of Edith Cavell
Trying to see both sides of the situation made me very unpopular for a while during World War 2. I was working as a nurse, assigned to an isolation ward at The Brook Hospital in Shooters Hill where there were German Prisoners of War who had contracted diphtheria. Some were subdued some very arrogant, and I felt sympathetic towards them, young and old.
My favourite was Herman as he spoke some English and was ever willing to translate. Although a Catholic, he translated services for the Hospital Chaplin who was also the local Anglican vicar. The Chaplin brought in a gramophone for the prisoners for which he received hate mail and rat poison from his parishioners. The most played record was the ‘The Drinking Song’ from ‘The Student Prince’. Herman came from Lindau (Lake Constance). My hope is that he returned safely to his parents. He showed me a photo of them looking very proud with him, so young, in his uniform. So I am glad I lent him my scissors to cut his nails, and even bought him a pair out of my meagre wages. Also I gave him my cigarette papers to use up any dog ends! After he was moved on he got a message though to the Staff Nurse saying he was working on the roads in Tunbridge Wells. The fact that he contacted her rather than me was not a case of seniority; she was much prettier than me.
Another Prisoner of War was a Stewart Granger look-alike who told me he had a pregnant wife he was most anxious to get back to. He was lucky to be alive as he had fought on the Russian Front and seen the golden towers of Moscow in the distance before retreating and suffering frost bite, then to be captured in France.
The patients suffered in more ways than one. A boy soldier had terrible nightmares, shouting and screaming. He was in pain too as his leg was in plaster with a drawing on it of his shattered bone. It smelt too. An elderly soldier was visibly shaken when heavy bombers passed over head, wave after wave on their way to Essen because he knew his family was there. There were guards posted at the ward door who constantly rattled their rifles. They appeared nervous.
Joan B.
A Close Encounter and Some Good Advice
Once, when I was living in Nottingham I was threatened with a pen knife on a bus in broad daylight by an Air force sergeant. He pressed the knife into my back and told me to get off at the next stop with him –so I had to obey because I was very scared. Luckily I remembered a conversation I once had with my workmates (which I hadn’t understood at the time because of my green innocence). They told me that if you were ever cornered by a man the best thing to do was to bring your knee up – which I did to the Air Force sergeant after he first forced me into a telephone kiosk. Not only did I bring my knee up into his groin - as he bent over in pain I also brought my other knee up which met with his chin and knocked him out. Later he was arrested – and serves him right.
Eileen
Deep Mourning and Sadness in the North of England
I was from a close knit community, a terrace of small cottages on the edge of a ship building town in the North east of England. It was heavily bombed during the Second World War and the worst of the bombing was on the night of the 24th May 1943, which proved to be the last air raid of the war on the town. All the people in the area were sitting in a surface air-raid shelter, when it took a direct hit. Seventeen people were killed, thirty people badly injured, and five people slightly injured. I survived without injuries and suppose I was lucky. So when VE day came in 1945 there was no cause for celebration, no party for these families which had been devastated by their loss, not just of family but of many friends. It left scars which remained for years.
Mary
The Beginning and the End
I was from a broken home, brought up by my father and adopted grandparents. My younger sister lived with us too. I remember hearing Neville Chamberlin’s speech on the radio, saying that we were at war with Germany; we were all in a state of shock. My grandfather announced that if Hitler and his armies set foot in England he would kill all the family and himself. He had fought in the First World War, so maybe this was behind his threat. My father drank heavily, but I never knew my grandfather to drink except a glass of whiskey at Christmas. He always said, when the war was ended he would get legless, which he did, much to Mum and my sister’s horror. He and my father went off on a bender with three of my uncles. We saw them return home, one by one, the worse for drink. This we didn’t mind, but on seeing my grandfather legless stumbling down the terrace of cottages my sister and I just broke down and cried. I don’t know which was worse for me, the day war was declared or the day it ended.
Mary
Loving Kindness Endures (Death be not Proud!)
When I was growing up in Bermondsey it was a close community where neighbours and family blended together. Three generations lived in my house. Granny and Granddad Whitby lived in the bottom half; and I lived in the top half with Mum and Dad. Mum’s eldest sister lived next door and another sister lived a couple of doors down. It is hardly surprising that Mum had sisters to hand because like many of her generation she came from a large family and people were more likely to stay in the area they were born in than they are today. My Granny Whitby had given birth to fourteen children – including Mum; four of them died, but ten survived.
I still have a clear memory of Granny. She was short and dumpy and round, with a rosy countenance. She always looked well scrubbed, clean, and shining. She wore her hair scrapped up into a bun. She was the sort of person you would trust instinctively.
From around the age of four I realised that Granny Whitby went on trips out from time to time wearing a big, coarse apron made out of hessian type material. Sometimes she came back happy, sometimes sad. I was a quiet and reflective child, and a good listener and I soon cottoned on to what she was doing. Sometimes she was delivering babies in our neighbourhood and sometimes she was laying out the dead. She was faithful to her calling before the war and during the war – and her neighbours even called on after the War and after the National Health service had been set up.
I remember the mantelpiece in Granny’s living room. It was covered in a chenille mantle cloth with ornamental pom-poms hanging down from the mantel shelf. On this shelf Granny kept two weighty cartwheel pennies. These were part of the tools of her trade. They had a grim use as ‘eye coins’ which she placed over the eyes of the dead to stop these from opening – in those days bodies were laid out in the home so that relatives and friends could come and pay their respects and say their goodbyes, and a corpse with open eyes is a distressing sight to a loved one. I remember Granny having to stretch up to reach for the coins because she was so short – and I quickly realised that when she took these with her on her trips she would return solemn, with sadness in her face. Fortunately, because people had large families she would go out more often to help with a birth and would come home with a face full of happiness
A Doctor’s call out fee at the time was ‘two and six’ (that is, two shillings and six pence). This would have been a tremendous amount of money for a large family on a small wage to pay out. People simply could not afford the Doctor. So good women like my Granny would fulfil the Doctor’s role – and the midwives, and part of the undertakers. Indeed Granny was also on hand for general first aid duties – she was often called on to salve and bandage the local boys’ cuts and bruises. I don’t know whether she charged for her services, but I suspect not. I can clearly remember that thankful neighbours would leave gifts of fruit and food on the doorstep for her.
It seems natural to me that I always wanted to be a nurse. Although my first job was as an accountant’s clerk, I trained in first aid with the Red Cross in my spare time and became an Instructor and Examiner. When the opportunity arose I eventually became an Industrial Nurse, a job that I loved and which gave me great fulfilment. Granny Whitby was my inspiration who planted my seed of destiny.
Marie
Hope Reborn for a New Generation
After the war was over and I was thirteen I joined a youth club called ‘Club Land’ in the Walworth Road. It was run by ‘JB’ and his wife Anna Butterworth. They were ‘do-gooders’. Anna Butterworth came from a very rich family, ‘the Costains’, and ‘JB’ was a Methodist Minister. However, they had good hearts and really did do us some good and gave us some hope after the War. I was from a family who had been rich but became poor, but most of the other kids at the club came from families that had always been poor. I feel sorry for kids today – they just do not have the same opportunities even though people, on the whole, are a lot richer these days.
To join the club we had to attend the Methodist Church on the last Sunday of the month – but we were no t pressurised to become ‘religious’. And also we had t attend the club Parliament which met weekly – and we all had to get involved in reporting back about club activities, organising jumbles sales and rotas or helping out our neighbours, and putting new ideas to the vote. It was such good training.
After joining, the first thing I did was to enrol in the drama and music classes. We did lots of singing and play reading. One day a boy named Bobby came into the class. He said he joined because of all the pretty girls there. We would read plays together and seemed to click. Once I remember very well we read a scene from a play which was a bit like an American romantic film we had seen together; and I mimicked the voice and airs of the actress form the film. When he walked me home from ‘Club Land’ I told him I was copying the actress and he said “I thought I recognized it”
The two of us used to go to the pictures after school, with me taking jam sandwiches for us to eat. We were quite close for about six months. He always walked me home from the youth club and we would talk about our ambitions. He said he wanted to act or do something in the movies such as directing. We would talk for ages not realizing the passing of time, as you are prone to do when you are young. I think he must have been in trouble at home, because one night he hurriedly said goodbye and ran for his tram. I was quite frightened walking home alone that night as I had to go under a railway bridge and then by a park to get home. After that we were still friends but he didn’t see me home anymore.
At fifteen I had my first real holiday when, in 1947, about fifty of us went to Guernsey for a vacation organised by Club Land. I left for the station on my own with my suitcase that I could hardly carry and my friends met me at the bus stop. As there wasn’t enough room for all of us on the bus I got left behind and had to catch the next one on m own. I arrived at St Pancras Station, to find my friends crying their eyes out worrying about me.
My mother had given me £5 to spend on clothes, but I spent it all on one dress before I went away. I felt bad about it as my mother had to give me more spending money. I brought her home ten shillings that I hadn’t spent, as I knew my parents were hard up. I really felt I looked so good in the dress though, and it lasted me a long time.
We were in Guernsey for a month. Can you imagine how wonderful that was? The girls were in one hut, the boys in another. We had a swastika on the wall which had been painted over, but it still showed through; it was there from the time during the war when the Germans occupied Guernsey. The boys would frighten us at night when it was dark. One of them would put a torch under his chin, and say he was ‘Hermann the German Officer’.
My friend Bobby had been paid for by the club, because his family didn’t have any money. He was supposed to help out while we were there, but he never did in case anyone knew he had been paid for by the club. He told me of course, as we were very close friends. One night I wanted to go for a shower before a dance and I asked Mick to come with me because I was scared. He waited outside like a gentleman. They were very innocent days. The only thing we did was to kiss goodnight.
I went to the camp again the following year, but I had started work by then so I could only go for two weeks. I was working in Covent Garden Market in an office. We had to start early in the morning, doing all sorts of different jobs, and I enjoyed it very much. I had gone for the interview with someone ‘JB’ the leader of the youth club knew. While we were in Guernsey ‘J.B.’ said to me he would write to my boss and get me another two weeks holiday. I knew this wouldn’t be fair to the other employees and also wondered if he was testing me to see if I would take advantage of my situation. I said, “No I will go back to work when I am supposed to.” I still had a wonderful time. ‘J.B.’ used to take us to the beach by coach. We spent the day there, swimming and playing ball. We then had to walk, in single file, to the next beach to be picked up. ‘J.B.’ would say, “I am not taking you from your bed to the beach and then back to your beds again.”
Amy
