A child in the blitz

We all have our memories, but do they come in the same form?
My early memories are in the form of single still snapshots. That is, with one exception; that of my most vivid early memory. It was in the summer of 1940. I was on my way to school at The Convent in The Avenue, Southampton. I was about 9 years old and I thought I was being machine-gunned by a Dornier fighter-bomber of the Luftwaffe. (At that age and at that time, we were all expert at aircraft identification.)

I was alone. That is very probable as I did sometimes travel the short distance to school across Southampton by tramcar. (Tramcar journeys were fun especially if you travelled on the open top where a waterproof apron hung down from the back of the seat in front, to be pulled over your lap when it rained to keep your legs dry.) Or I may have been with my sister, then 5 years of age, and in the charge of a maid but had escaped from her in the panic. I remember that the tram stopped short of our destination when the enemy planes came over. We all got off the car to take shelter but I ran off towards the safety of the convent and it was then, by a tree at the convent entrance, that I dropped my gas-mask in its cardboard box. I could not control my frightened fumbling fingers to pick up this box. It kept falling from my hands while I heard the noise of the bombers over-head, the firing of the anti-aircraft guns, exploding bombs and, I was convinced, the sound of machine-guns aimed at me. It seemed to be for ever. At last, I managed to pick up the precious gas-mask and I raced towards the school entrance where a nun, standing by the door, pulled me inside and down to the cellar and safety.

Not a very spectacular memory and certainly not a heroic memory of which I could be proud - but even at 9 years of age I knew, that I was not of the stuff of which heroes were made. Fifty-and more years later it is still one of my most vivid memories and one which returns more and more often in the early hours of the night.

The fact that our family was in Southampton was itself a tragi-comedy.

My father worked in the London head office of the hotel group, Trust Houses, for whom he had previously managed hotels including the Dolphin and Anchor at Chichester where my parents had got to know many fighter pilots from the nearby RAF Tangmere airfield. In 1939 we lived in a block of flats in Taymount Rise, Forest Hill in South London. I remember sitting at a table in the gardens with my parents enjoying tea while watching fellow residents play on the tennis courts in the grounds. It seemed in those far-off days "before The War" that many of us lived in blocks of flats and played on tennis courts. We did not then suspect that these courts were soon to be turned into vegetable gardens in response to the call to "Dig For Victory".

The day that war was declared I was helping (or more probably, hindering) in the digging of air raid shelters around the flats. I have a vivid snap shot memory of the view down Taymount Rise towards London Road as the first air-raid siren sounded that day to be followed quickly by the "All Clear". It was a false alarm.

But that was before we went to Southampton.

My father had done more than "his bit" in the 1914-18 War and, being on the Canadian Army Reserve of Officers, could not be conscripted into the British Army and to our relief did not volunteer his services a second time. For some reason, either by his choice to take his family away from the dangers of London, or at the direction of his employers, in 1940 he went to manage the Dolphin Hotel, Southampton. The hotel was "Below Bar" (the mediaeval gateway to the City) and close to the Southampton Docks.

This move was not a happy choice as the City and the Docks of Southampton were soon to be subjected to a series of savage air attacks by the German Luftwaffe. London had first received the brunt of the air attacks and between September and December 1940 over 17,000 London civilians were killed and 28,000 seriously injured while 1¼ million London homes were damaged in that short period alone. Even before those days minor day and night raids had been made on Southampton.

Maintaining the "black-out" of all doors and windows was a constant worry and I remember one experiment in which glass windows were painted blue while an orange light bulb illuminated the room; the theory being that in combination the two colours shed no light into the night. That idea was short lived was ended as bomb blast smashed the windows and our attention turned to sticking strips of paper across the windows to reduce the risk of injuries from flying fragments of glass. How many remember the cartoon character "Billy Brown from London Town" who asked us not to pick at the mesh glued to the inside of London bus windows; "Pardon me for my correction / that stuff is there for your protection", when not reminding us to "Please pass further down the bus /and so make room for all of us"? Weren't we polite in those days?

In Southampton, from the fire escape stairs at the back of the hotel I watched planes attack the Supermarine aircraft factories out on Southampton Water. In one attack on the docks a wharehouse containing butter and fats was set on fire and dark smoke filled the sky. But none of these had been as bad as the attacks on London and Coventry. The hotel cellars had been prepared for use as a shelter in air raids. One groundstair room had been "gas-proofed" with heavy curtains at the door and window and them window shutters tightly closed, but as the weeks went quietly on, it seemed that we had no cause for alarm. How wrong we were.

The first of the serious attacks was made on the night of Saturday, 23rd November, 1940. Bombs fell near the hotel, including what was described to me as a petrol bomb which fell with a screaming noise and I was shown the ugly black mark it made down the front of the building on which it fell.

I heard the grown-ups say that at the next week-end it would be a "Bomber's Moon" -- a clear cloudless sky lit by a bright full moon. I heard my school friends (I was now at St Mary's College) say that those who could, would go out of Southampton for that weekend. They were wise for it was on the night of 30th November / 1st December, 1940 that the people of Southampton endured their worst attack, that the City and Docks received the most damage and that most of the official total of 558 civilians killed in Southampton in 1940/41 were to die. The total was no higher because the attack was concentrated on the City centre and the docks where few lived. However, the Dolphin Hotel was right in the middle of this area!!

I remember, that night the air-raid siren wailed its stomach churning alarm just after dusk and my sister and I pulled our zip-fronted one piece siren suits on over our night clothes and were hurried down into the cellar with the 50 or so staff and guest of the hotel. Camp beds and chairs were in the cellar and blankets were hung from the arched ceiling to provide privacy around a bucket in the corner which was to be used as a lavatory. We had the warmth of the building above and electricity for lighting so we were in luxury compared with folk huddled in cold and dark corrugated Anderson shelters sunk in their back gardens.

Soon beams from Searchlights weaved across the sky, seeking the enemy planes and the arrival of the bombers was announced by loud explosions of gunfire from the Anti-Aircraft guns and the "crump" as their shells exploded in the sky mingled with the staccato firing of bofors guns which seemed so close that they may have been firing from the street outside. The engines of the German bombers had a rising and falling drone which we quickly recognised and seemed to be right overhead as they dropped parachute flares to illuminate their target....us!

My father had organised the staff and guests into teams to tackle incendiary bombs as they fell on the roofs of the hotel, hoping to extinguish them before they set the buildings on fire. Soon they saw large cannisters falling towards them which opened to shower down incendiary bombs and out on to the roof tops they went with their buckets of sand and water to aim their stirrup pumps at those bombs which they could not push off the roof - usually because the bombs (about 18 inches long) had become lodged in the guttering. At this stage of the war these bombs could be tackled without great risk as the Germans had not yet included explosives in these fire bombs which would then blow up and kill or injure many civilian firefighters and firemen. I built up a prized collection of extinguished/ half burned-out incendiary bombs and their tail fins together with a large tin box of large jagged fragments of exploded AA gun shells, which we wrongly called "shrapnell".

Well over 100 incendiary bombs fell on the hotel on this one night and it was thanks to the efforts of the staff and guests that the hotel survived and the only substantial damage was to a staff bedroom where a bomb fell through the roof tiles and set fire to a bed. My father collapsed in the smoke while trying to extinguish this fire and a naval officer carried him out of the room to recover while he put out the blaze.

While the firefighters were out on the roof attending to the incendiary bombs and we sheltered in the cellar, high explosive bombs shook the ground and buildings crumpled and collapsed around us. By this time the wooden flap doors of our cellarshelter had been blasted off by exploding bombs to be replaced by a blanket but not before I had seen fires raging all around us. I saw the hoses from the fire engines which covered the road. As the gas mains were hit, the burning gas leapt up to spread the flames and when, inevitably, the water main was hit the fire fighters found themselves without water to direct onto the fires. Tenders and hoses were taken down to the dock side to pump water to the fire crews but it was low-tide and firemen slithered across the harbour mud to find water at the edge of the sea.

The blanket hung over the cellar door, presumably to prevent our lights from breaching the black-out regulations, although it was bright outside as Southampton burned around us and soon blasts from nearby explosions blew the blanket away and as we watched, the buildings around us burned or blew up. We saw the pub on the other side of the road catch fire and between gaps in the noise of the raid I could hear the sound of the bursting of those beer bottles which the fire had reached ahead of the thirsty soldiers who were helping to fight the flames.

I say "I could hear", but I was trying very hard not to hear. At nine years of age I understood very well the danger we were in of either being blown to bits by explosives or suffering a slower death by fire. My father had made the horrors of war clear to me years before in Chichester when at about the age of 5 years, I had collected my two-pence pocket money from each parent and hurried to buy for four pence from the corner newsagent a set of garishly coloured stamped metal toy tanks. They had been made in Japan. When my father saw them, I was not permitted to play with them but they were to stand on the side-board and each time I saw them (which seemed to be for ever) I was to think of the little Chinese boys and girls that my four pennies were helping the Japanese to kill. Now it seemed to be my turn to be killed and I prayed very hard and very loudly to be saved. I recited the "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys" of the rosary continually as I paced up and down, too scared to sit still and despite mutterings for me to shut up. When the bombs fell very close I wet myself and it must have been most unsettling for everyone else to be incarcerated in a cellar with a panic stricken child, walking up and down wafting, the stench of his yellow stained urine soaked siren-suit among those who wanted to forget what was going on outside in the sound of the dance music on the wireless set. My mother later said she believed my prayers saved us but I think that God did not want the smell my siren-suit in heaven.

Later that night we heard the sound of the bells of the church next to the hotel. The ringing of church bells was the official warning of The Invasion and there was more alarm until one of the team of firefighters appeared and explained that the church was on fire and the bells were sounding as the tower swayed! Gradually the intensity of the bombing eased and as the "All Clear" sounded we emerged to gaze in horror at the devastation around us. I still have photographs taken by my father (against all security regulations) from the upstairs Dining Room of the hotel which show total destruction in both directions. I believe that no building survived from the Docks to the Bar Gate other than the hotel and the next door bank. God and the Hotel Fire Fighting Teams had done their best while other commercial buildings (some unoccupied at the weekend) had burned to the ground around us. A large brick built surface air-raid shelter behind a nearby public house, "The Star"? in which it was said customers and passersby, including homeward bound passengers from a tram car, had taken shelter, received a direct hit and there were no survivors. I remember someone telling me with scorn that the cape of a policeman had been found amoung the bodies and I wondered why a policeman was expected to stay out in the open if bombs were falling nearby. I decided that I did not want to be a policeman.

Later that Sunday morning we were told that there was an unexploded bomb in the church and we were all ordered out of the hotel and took refuge in open trenches cut in a nearby park. There we heard that the Authorities were organising coaches to take people out of the city. My father collected his band around him and we hurried to the bus depot where families with suitcases struggled to get on a coach - any coach, to escape from Southampton. We found ourselves on a coach which was going to Romsey where fortunately there was also a Trust House hotel, "The White Horse". The hotel was packed out but the manager agreed to "the Southampton staff" sleeping on the floor of the hotel's dining room and my father, mother, sister and I fell into a deep sleep in his bed to the sound of distant gunfire. I do not know where he and his family slept but I do remember his daughter playing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" on a wind-up gramaphone. Perhaps that accounts for my love of jazz!

Shortly after we left for Newport, Monmouthshire, where my father took over the management of the Westgate Hotel and was surprised to find the staff disappearing into the shelter each time the air-raid siren warned that the Luftwaffe was passing by on its way to bomb Cardiff. I joined the pupils of St Mary's College, Southampton who had been evacuated to a mansion, Pell Wall Hall, in Market Drayton, Shropshire.

In Southampton we had ignored day time alerts until the plane spotter on the roof had warned that the bombers were getting close. "Southampton Rules" soon applied in Newport -- which was not popular. In due course we returned to London, V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets (which illustrated to me the explosion and then implosion effect of the blast from a nearby rocket which blew one door on to me as I played with my train on the floor only to find a partition falling towards me a second later from the oppposite direction.

At the same time my sister started as a boarder at the convent in Bath, across the River Severn (or, rather in those day, by rail, "under" the river). When it was the turn of Bath to be bombed, and many were killed in the slum area near the railway viaduct, five year old Margaret attempted to comfort the other girls and nuns in the school shelter by assuring them that "This isn't as bad as Southampton." sixty-and more years later, I agree with her, Nothing since has been as bad as Southampton.

C..IBB 4.11.03

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