As we are all in the same boat with this lock down I thought I would write my experience as a very young person living in fear of not knowing what the outcome would be. Every story has a touch of humour!
Gregory owned a cat, his name was Blandy the third, well, just Blandy really, he was a war cat and he knew the drill when an air raid warning went, as Gregory and his mum struggled down the stairs, Blandy would be passing them at the mid section and into Gregory’s bedroom, jumping onto his bed to the window sill and would leap from Gregory’s window straight into the shelter. He, having four legs would always be there to greet them. Gregory had a nasty mishap, because of his ability to sleep on a clothesline as the saying goes. One night the house took a direct hit. The electricity being cut off by the cluster of bombs that fell and the A.R.P. were in attendance. Gregory’s mum shouted out that her son must be still in bed. That corner of the house was ablaze, the room was full of smoke and the curtains were on fire and Gregory was sleeping soundly. An official came into the bedroom and swooped up Gregory in his arms, still asleep and then out of the house. Stirrup pumps were going and the ARP man and Gregory received a soaking. Neighbours from the garden that backed onto garden saw the situation and Blandy the cat, Mum and Gregory were accommodated for that night and many nights to come.
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Cleaning out chicken coops and runs were still high on the agenda and the chickens were still laying eggs, even though the noise on some nights was horrific, but chickens can drown out noises by making a racket themselves. However, it was phenomenal that chickens could survive with all that noise happening and mum and Gregory would sometimes sleep through it all, not bothering to go to the safety of a shelter and one particular night they had been up five times when an air raid warning sounded. On the sixth time mum poked her head through Gregory’s bedroom door, saying ‘I’m not bothering this time,’ so they each stayed in their beds. There were sixteen air raids that night. Gregory was bright as a button the next day for having slept so well.
One Sunday morning when Gregory was working in the vegetable garden, he was alerted to the fact that a lone Spitfire was swooping down from above onto the tail end of a Doodlebug (V1) and was firing his canon shells at it and Gregory noticed the sprays of dirt lifting into the air in his garden and made a hasty run to the nearest shelter which happened to be the chicken coop. He was able to see when the Spitfire levelled out and it was trying to tip the Doodlebug’s fins so that it would fall harmlessly away from the town centre. The Spitfire managed to do this and the Doodlebug dived into an Estate Agents just newly built on the side bank next to the railway station.
One of the most unfortunate moments in Gregory’s life happened one terrible night when the bombs were falling fast and a cluster of bombs fell very close to the house and shelter. The effect of the blast shook the very foundation of both house and shelter and as Gregory always leant his head on the inside skin of the shelter, the vibration from the blast was to be one of many set-backs in Gregory’s life. The optic nerve in the right eye had been jarred and Gregory and his mother had to visit Moorfield’s Hospital for many months hoping the specialists could do something to save the right eye sight. Luck must have been on Gregory’s side for they saved his sight but Gregory would have to wear glasses for the rest of his life.
But nothing was going to prepare him for what was going to happen in August 1944 when a V1 Rocket made a direct hit on the road where Gregory lived. Seven houses were completely destroyed and several other properties sustained really awful damage. Gregory’s house lost the whole roof, complete with chimney, the front door and the French windows at the rear. The Air Raid Shelter door had disappeared in the blast. Five people were killed and 30 odd injured. Gregory walked around the houses the next day and for one so young showed an emotion by crying over the devastation of the images he had seen. A nine year old boy seeing inert bodies strewn here and there was an appalling picture for even an adult who would find distressing and these pictures stayed with me for some considerable time. Even now in my eighties I find myself going back in my mind of those that had perished and then as now, there was nothing one could do to change that vision of destruction and death.
The authorities acted very quickly as tarpaulin was draped over each property that had lost roofs and makeshift doors had been constructed. They were not built to keep people out, only the weather.
In between these events World War Two had come to an end and Gregory’s dad had been repatriated and shipped off to Australia to convalescent for a year. The broken landscape was being repaired. Gregory’s road had been the worst hit during the war, so much so, he thought it might have been a private vendetta on Monmouth Close. Perhaps his mum shouting at the sky with a clenched fist during one night’s raid telling Hitler that she had snagged her last pair of stockings on a rose bush which was alight and burning brightly during an air raid, had somehow got reported back to Hitler!. With shrapnel flying here and there and me, shouting “Mum, for goodness sake get in the shelter” I might as well shouted in a wind tunnel, the noise was deafening and the devastation was heart rending, everywhere you looked was in need of reparation. Buildings were easy to rebuild, lives not so easy to repair and those lost were gone forever.