Vol 6. Issue No 2

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Broken Nights with Bombs

by Margaret Smithers

My childhood before the war started was very mundane. I was happy, the days seemed to be always sunny and nothing very eventful happened. Then in 1939 the Second World War began. Children did not have the benefit of television news as they do now and I had no warning that life was about to change so drastically. I remember seeing my father sitting on the stairs crying and I knew something earth shattering had happened.

For most people, nothing much happened during the first months of the war. But for us it was different because, living in Ramsgate, we were so near the narrow part of the English Channel, where the Contraband Control set up by the Royal Navy encouraged German war planes to lay mines just off the coast to catch unwary merchant ships. We there­fore spent that first wartime winter going to our shelter as the ack-ack guns dropped shrapnel in our streets and I spent my nights in the cold, re-opened WWI chalk tunnels trying to read an adventure story while the neighbours gossiped.

The time came when there were no schools left open to attend and my mother, sister and I were evacuated to Surrey. Adult nerves were very much on edge at the time of Dunkirk in June 1940. The grown-ups sat listening to the radio and even we children began to realise the dreadful happenings. We were forced to move on from our new home because the lady of the house had been able to acquire two or three new laid eggs - a great luxury as they were in short supply. They were boiled, and my little sister and I invited to eat one each but my sister was having a childish tantrum and refused to touch hers. Words were exchanged resulting in our leaving and moving to Acton, to stay with my aunt. At that time in 1940, London was still normal. A few weeks later, however, the Blitz started and my sister and I spent our nights at the far end of the cupboard under the stairs, said to be the safest place in the house. The whole attack was such a novelty at first that we were taken to a pedestrian bridge over a nearby main road from where we could see the East End where the Tate & Lyle sugar factory at Silvertown was burning.

However, broken nights with bombs falling near enough to make a lot of noise and even noisier ack-ack guns driven round the local roads sent us back to Ramsgate.

This was a bad move. We travelled from London by coach and had to try to cross the Thames by at least five bridges before we could get across because of damage to the bridges or unexploded bombs. We drove through the East End and saw the bomb damage, but a little girl who had lived a very sheltered life found it absolutely devast­ating to see houses half collapsed. Bedding was hanging out of upstairs windows, women standing crying and children playing in the wreckage – children who had been evacuated but found life in the country so boring that they had returned.

Halfway back to Kent, the coach stopped and the driver said the dogfight overhead was a bit too near and he suggested we ran across the road to a surface shelter. As we ran we were machine gunned and I remember not being afraid of the bullets but was more put out that a friendly serviceman put his tin hat on my little sister’s head and no one gave me one.

Back in Ramsgate, halcyon days followed. There were no schools open but I read everything I could lay my hands on. My father obtained an arithmetic book with answers in the back and I spent hours solving problems, doing long division and percentages, and checking to see if I was right.

The Luftwaffe were busy bombing London and we only had the odd enemy plane over Ramsgate. I had learnt to tell the tell tale throb of the German planes as distinct from the friendly Merlin engines of Spitfires and used to sit on the roof of the Anderson shelter reading. At the first sound of an enemy plane I would shout to my mother, who was deaf, to come to the shelter, a heavy responsibility for a ten year old.

There were tunnels under all parts of the town so we took our walk from one tunnel entrance to the next. Indeed one day the siren sounded when we were at the far end of the town and we were able to walk underground all the way to the nearest exit to our house and by then the ‘all clear’ had sounded. There were street signs under­ground at junctions of the tunnel and from time to time we met people my mother knew.

Although we used the Anderson shelter in the day time, we usually went into the deeper tunnel at night.

However, all this came to an end. Early in November 1940 there was a mass raid by Stuka bombers on Ramsgate. The radar system was unable to give coastal towns warning, but luckily I heard them and got my mother and sister into the shelter. Bombs fell all round, one only a few yards away next door, but my main memory is of my sister saying that she was going to be sick and I remember feeling very impatient that, as always, she wanted the limelight.

This was too much for my parents and within a few days my mother, sister and I found ourselves evacuated once more. This time to a North Devon village where the lowing of the cows in the fields was the loudest noise and where the locals spoke almost a foreign language. Also they patently had no idea of what life was like in ‘Bomb Alley’, as the area around Kent was called, and they did not want us.

1940 marked the end of my childhood. It could have been a lot worse and has certainly left me with many memories.

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