The Day War Broke Out Read online

  THE SPITFIRE WOMAN

  Molly Rose (1920–2016) spent three years as a pilot for the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), delivering brand-new planes from factory to RAF airfield, flying thirty-six different types of aircraft, including Spitfires and Hurricanes, through the war years.

  In 1939, she was an eighteen-year-old ground engineer, working in the family aviation business, Marshall’s of Cambridge. Launched as a small garage in 1909 by her father, David Gregory Marshall, Marshall’s expanded over time into an internationally renowned aerospace engineering company with its own airfield (now Cambridge Airport, which it still owns).

  In September 1939, the threat of war was overshadowing everything. By this time, my father was spending a lot of time down at our home in Hove, Sussex. He owned a small string of horses there and that weekend, my father, my sister Brenda and I were planning to ride on the Sussex Downs on the Sunday morning. We had a Buick at the time and we had a radio. So, I drove us down to Sussex on the Friday evening and on the Sunday morning, we went up to the Downs to ride, just as planned.

  We knew about the Prime Minister’s announcement. And so, at 11.15am, we heard Neville Chamberlain tell the country the shocking news. We were all listening while on horseback. When the speech finished, my father said we should all ride off in different directions – he wanted to be on his own. He believed it was something we ought to take in very seriously.

  I was the seventh child in a family of eight children. I remember my father saying: ‘In a family as large as ours, we shan’t all come through this.’ So, we all rode off to meet up again in an hour.

  When I thought about it, I knew he was probably right. One isn’t tearful in the same way that one doesn’t panic, but of course we didn’t know what was going to happen. So back we went to Cambridge that same night.

  By then, we were equipped with gas masks. And the sirens went off in Cambridge the same night. We had a cellar in our house there, but we didn’t go down, we just kept the gas masks with us. Which thankfully, were never used.

  Showing emotion then simply wasn’t done. Of course, it varied from family to family, but I think that was how people managed to get through.

  THE SCHOOLGIRL

  Vera Barber was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl living in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, with her parents and older brother, Arthur.

  Ours was an end-of-terrace house with a garden in front. The owner was a plumber so he had put in a bath and washbasin upstairs, but we still had to go to the backyard to use the lavatory. We were the only house in our street to have a bathroom.

  That Sunday, I’d just come back from a holiday with my grandparents. They lived in Bedlington, Northumberland – a pit town. My granddad was a miner. My parents had taken me there but everyone decided I should come back so my grandparents put me on the bus and sent me home.

  Of course we were expecting it. But it didn’t mean anything to a fourteen-year-old. I knew my parents were feeling it. My dad, Norman, had been a soldier in France in the first war – he had never talked about it to me or Arthur. Mum didn’t say much either. The radio was always on, anyway. But I remember everything going very quiet as the news sank in to Mum and Dad. Afterwards, she just carried on as usual, making our Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding while I was playing around the house.

  You didn’t know what was to come, really. We’d been given our gas masks, tried them on – that was horrible. You had to carry it with you everywhere in its little box.

  Then we sat down to eat our roast as usual – with rice pudding, we always had that.

  Arthur went out on his bike – he’d eventually go into the RAF at seventeen.

  Afterwards, of course, everything started to change quickly. The blackout curtains went up and children from Gateshead were evacuated to Bishop Auckland for safety because Bishop is seventeen miles inland. The schoolchildren from Gateshead were taught at our schools so my schooldays changed. I went to my school – a county grammar – mornings only and the Gateshead children came in the afternoon. I was quite happy with that arrangement.

  Not long after, we had a Gateshead evacuee living with us. Katie was the same age as me, though she wasn’t with us for very long.

  I left school at sixteen and went to work in a photographer’s in Bishop Auckland, doing bookwork and changing plates in the darkroom. Because we were inland, we didn’t have the worst of the bombing. There was only one incident as I remember it, a plane dropping its load – that was later, well into the war.

  That day – 3 September – when we just carried on as usual was really how it would continue to be for us in the war: you just got on with it. We were never hungry or anything like that; Mum baked her own bread. Ours was a way of life where you made the most of whatever you had. War didn’t really change that.

  THE CHURCHGOER

  Christine Haig was fourteen, living with her parents in Washwood Heath, Birmingham. She had just started work in a local steelworks.

  I’d just left school and my mother had already got me a job in the steelworks, so I knew I’d be going to work the day after war started. There was quite a build-up to it all during the week before, what with Poland and Hitler ignoring Chamberlain’s offer – the papers were full of it.

  Every Sunday, I’d go off to church: St Mark’s. Our house was 300 yards down the hill from the church. The service was 10am and we knew the speech was timed for 11.15, but not everyone in our area had a radio – things were tight with a lot of people. So, we had the neighbours come in to listen to the broadcast. There were quite a few people in our house, waiting for the news: people were expecting the worst.

  We lived in a rented house. I was born there and eventually I got married from there. My parents did whatever work they could; they brought in about £3 or £4 a week. We weren’t poor, I’d say we just managed.

  There were six houses in our terrace and six houses opposite. Toilet and coal house outside, no bathroom, no heat in the bedrooms. Everyone said you were better off in a new council house because you got a bathroom and a toilet inside.

  My mum looked after my grandmother, who lived about twenty yards away. She had a shop in the front of the house selling sweets, drapery and groceries – she’d started it when my grandfather died.

  Walking home from church that Sunday morning, it all seemed so quiet, not a soul about. My dad never went to church on Sundays, but as a child, I had to go three times every Sunday. I wouldn’t do that to my children, but in those days, there was no choice, you did what your parents told you. There was just the ordinary congregation for the morning service but later on, that church was chock-a-block with people.

  In our house there was just my mum and dad and me, the only child, making the next-door neighbours cups of tea. My father fought in the First World War – he didn’t believe for a minute that it would be all over by Christmas, as some people said.

  ‘I know the Germans, it’ll be a long war,’ I remember him saying.

  The country wasn’t really prepared for it. The men of my father’s generation knew that. My father, John Samuel James Osborne, was an inspector on the buses, but he was sixteen when he had volunteered in the Great War. He’d been in the London Royal Fusiliers – I think they took anyone, they gave him a shilling to join and he stayed until he was eighteen.

  When we all heard the news, the older women started to cry. My grandma was crying. Her two sons eventually went into the Army – fortunately, they came through. I came from a military family: my uncle was a sergeant-major in the [Royal] Marines, my granddad was a cavalry. All gone before this second war started.

  One or two of the women offered to help my mum wash up. The next-door neighbours just went home after the broadcast. Then we had our normal lunch. I didn’t realise it, I was too young, but everyone else knew what was coming: all the talk was of rationing and gas masks. We’d already been given ours: it was horrible having to carry it with us wherever we went, though we didn’t know we would never use them.
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br />   My father and two of my uncles had a little talk between themselves afterwards, discussing what they thought would happen. Their biggest worry was France, so close – that kept them talking away until about 5pm, then of course for me it was church again for evensong. So different this time, packed with people praying.

  Everyone took it to heart. Usually after the church service, we had a little social club for the younger people, but hardly anyone turned up – they all went straight home. Normally we’d be playing cards and darts but not that night.

  I didn’t really understand it all. When I got home from church, my dad sat me down and talked to me about it. ‘I don’t want you to get worried, it’s early days yet,’ he told me. He was very good like that, my dad. But I didn’t sleep easily that night. I worried: were we going to have air raids? But of course, the next day at work everyone talked about it all day long. They’d read in the papers about what had already happened in Europe. All the talk was, what would we do if they [the Germans] came over here?

  THE POOR FAMILY

  Jean Ledger was eleven when war broke out. Hers was a large, poverty-stricken family, hiding a scandalous secret:

  I was one of eight, three boys and five girls. We lived in a small terraced house in Rochdale, sleeping two – sometimes three – to a bed. My father had deserted my mother after our youngest, Dolly, was born. He must have met someone. I was a middle child. My eldest sister Joan virtually brought us up – she helped deliver Dolly. My grandparents had three farms, so my father probably worked there.

  When war broke out, I was still going to school – when my mum allowed – but my most vivid memory of the day is my brother Jack, the eldest, coming in at teatime and saying, ‘There’s not going to be any war’ and my mother started arguing with him, ‘Oh yes, there is’ – the sort of thing that happens in a family.

  We were poverty-stricken. We didn’t have a radio, so we didn’t hear the Chamberlain broadcast but we all liked reading the newspaper my mother bought every day.

  We had a tough life but we didn’t go hungry – my mother was a very good cook. As a family, we all lived with the shame of our secret: that our father had just walked out on all of us. Hiding that shame was very important in those days. If people knew, it was all whispers – no one ever talked to us about it.

  We got National Assistance. It wasn’t called that until after the war, but it was some sort of benefit which helped us after my dad deserted us. But Jack, our eldest, was a stone mason, so he contributed to the household and Jean was working too – in a factory, making shoes. My other brother Jim worked in a butcher’s shop so that all helped. But it had to be hand-me-downs for clothes.

  I wasn’t frightened when they said there was going to be a war – I was too young to be scared, the word ‘war’ didn’t mean anything to me. It’s only when you get older that you understand the pity of it all, but on that day, I didn’t understand what killing was.

  For us, poverty was a way of life. My brother went into the RAF eventually, but when I look back at how we lived on so little and how we all survived well – my three children are all lawyers – maybe because we were so used to having nothing at all, it helped us get through and move on.

  I went into the Land Army in my teens – hard work, but I enjoyed it. I was with country people, which was what I was used to.

  THE SCHOOL-LEAVER

  Just a month before war was declared, fourteen-year-old Eileen Weston left school. (At the time, the school-leaving age was fourteen; it was increased to fifteen in 1947.) Eileen was the oldest of five children.

  I had dreams of going to art school but times were hard for us and the only option was to find a job. They had just finished developing the huge aircraft factory at Castle Bromwich, a few miles from where we lived in Erdington and they were advertising for staff. I wanted to work in the drawing office, they said there were no vacancies but they would be prepared to train me on the machines in the accounts section. So, I was due to start my first job on 9 September: Ten shillings a week including Saturday mornings.

  I’d been reading the papers so I had a good idea what to expect, really. We knew it was in the offing. On the Sunday morning, I’d taken three of the other children to do some shopping for my mum in the old part of Birmingham called the Newton Road. Me and Raymond (twelve), Joan (ten) and Lois (four) were shopping in one of the old markets when I heard everyone talking and shouting to each other about the war.

  I stopped a woman and asked her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s going to be a war.’

  I did know what it meant. My dad’s brother had been killed aged twenty-four on the Somme. My grandmother knew all the stories about the first war – she’d lost a daughter to the Spanish flu [1918–20, the worst influenza pandemic in history].

  My initial reaction was horror. My brothers and sisters were not as aware of things as I was – I used to read everything I could lay my hands on. Anyway, we took a bus to Aston Cross, then a tram to Erdington and all the while they were chattering away as usual, but my mind was buzzing, knowing I’d be starting at the factory in a few days’ time. When we got home my grandmother, Nell, already had her gas mask on: like a lot of people, she thought it was going to start straight away. We all had the masks, everyone was told to carry them everywhere. We were just a few miles from the heart of Birmingham so a lot of the families around us were evacuating the children but my mother didn’t want us to go. If the parents said, ‘They’re not going anywhere,’ that was it. Eventually we’d go to the shelters all the time.

  My fear was very real that day – fear for the family, whether the house would be bombed. In the event, it turned out we were lucky: we had a bomb outside our house that didn’t explode and one bomb hit a shelter near by but there was no one in it at the time.

  We remained in our home right the way through the war. And I stayed working in the factory till the war ended, though one of the factory blocks was hit in an air raid and a lot of people were killed.

  Were we really prepared for war? I don’t think so. I vividly remember the few cars that were on the road then already had hoods over the headlights, little things like that. And I never forgot the big drums all up Tyburn Road. The Pioneer Corps would create the smoke that came up from the drums to confuse the planes overhead. [Use of smokescreens was common in land and sea battles in both world wars.]

  THE COURTING COUPLE

  John Young* was eighteen and working as a counter clerk in the Post Office in Kilburn, North-West London.

  For some weeks before war broke out, I had been visiting a youth club in Pond Street, Hampstead, with a couple of friends. I began to take notice of a lovely girl. In the week before war, I plucked up enough courage to speak to her. She quite happily agreed to let me walk her home afterwards – at least near to her home because on the corner of the road in which she lived in Highgate, we said goodnight. We arranged to meet again for our first date on the following Sunday morning for a walk across Hampstead Heath.

  By the time Sunday arrived, the world situation had changed dramatically. Poland had been invaded, there was a threat of war and Mr Chamberlain was going to speak to the nation on the radio.

  In those days the telephone was not in the widespread private use that it is now. She was not on the phone and I had no idea what her address was and therefore there was no way I could get in touch with my girl. I decided that all I could do was keep our rendezvous and hope for the best. To my great surprise and joy she was there waiting for me. I remember thinking then that she must really like me!

  Because it was such a beautiful sunny Sunday morning we decided to continue with our planned walk across the Heath. Some ten or fifteen minutes or more after 11 o’clock – when we knew Mr Chamberlain was due to speak on the radio – our happy walk was seriously interrupted by the wail of the air-raid sirens. We didn’t know what he’d said but we both knew it meant we were at war with Germany.

  We quite literally did not know what to do next. We sat on a benc
h, high on Parliament Hill, facing south towards the centre of London. We watched an RAF barrage balloon crew at the foot of the hill try, with considerable difficulty and little success, to winch up their balloon. It just seemed to flop around near the ground like a drunken sailor. We talked about what we should do for the best: should we find some shelter? Not easy in the wide, open spaces of the Heath. Should we make our totally opposite ways home to our families? Should we stay together? Without any experience of this situation we were totally confused and not a little afraid, but we agreed to stay together and face whatever was coming.

  We stayed on our bench, holding hands, and gazed towards London, waiting for the skies to blacken with hundreds of German bombers coming to obliterate London and probably us with it. We hardly spoke and just occasionally squeezed hands. There were no words of undying love, we had not known each other long enough for that; there was no kissing and cuddling – you did not really do that kind of thing in public in those days. We just sat there and waited for what we thought was inevitable but nothing happened.

  After a while the ‘all clear’ sounded and we knew we were safe, at least until the next time. We said our goodbyes and made our separate – opposite – ways home. I gave her my phone number at work and she promised to ring me in a few days. When I eventually reached home, I was instructed by my mother to take our dog Toby to the vet and have him destroyed! My parents felt we would have enough to worry about just looking after ourselves and it would be better for Toby anyway. (I never did understand that logic!) When I got to the vet’s surgery, there were dozens of people with pets of all kinds apparently employing the same logic: that was a very sad moment.