World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ENGLAND: The Blitz and One Man

The impact of the Germans’ robomb blitz on the lives of London’s working people has not been told by the daily communiqué’s “Damage and casualties were caused.” This is the story told to TIME Correspondent Sherry Mangan by a London toolmaker in a defense plant. (Place names are necessarily fictitious.)

The factory went on holiday the 17th of June. I didn’t want my holiday that week so I went on working. Alerts were steady and we were taking spells on the aircraft-spotting tower. Well, at one particular imminent-danger warning I was on the tower and over a flying bomb came. She missed and fell and I thought, “Christ, right smack on Hillford Garden,”—that’s where we live. So when the imminent passed I went to the gate and got on the phone to a neighbor and there was no answer. Just then a lorry pulled in and the driver said: “Don’t worry, Mate. I hear it was smack on the Three Fiddlers.” That’s the local pub —a good 300 yards away from my place.

I was just idling off when a fellow on a bike buzzed up. “I want you,” he said. “Your place has copped it.” He lent me the bike—decent bloke he was—and I burned up the main road toward home. Soon as I got near I could see it was close —crowds and the most awful bloody wreckage all over the lot, police lines streets away. … I took a quick look. Our house was standing—well, more or less standing. But it was blitzed to bloody hell—the roof clean off, the windows and doors gone, the walls sagging.

Somebody standing about said she thought Kit was in the back garden so I slipped and slithered through the rubble to the back and there she was, with the kids, all alive. That was one good moment. It was bloody lucky you know.

Kit was wandering around the garden with a cloth to her mouth. She was bleeding in the gums and all her teeth loosened . . . and she was partly hysterical. And all the chickens were up in the trees flapping their wings which sort of added to the unreality. Paula, (10), was quiet and subdued. Young Andrew, (3), had a mouthful of dirt from the blast and was crying miserably. Funny about Andrew—he wouldn’t go through the house to the street and for three days he howled if you took him near a house at all.

Off to Grandmother’s. I told young Paula to pack up whatever of her clothes she could find among the wreckage and push off to her grandmother’s place at Puddleston by herself and I told Kit to take the nipper to my mother’s at Ashmont. She did and I pitched in on the job of cleaning up the wreckage . . . some of the lads from the shop came to give a hand.

The big point was to get the junk off what furniture wasn’t smashed and patch the roof quick against rain. . . . The blast had pushed the back and front walls some eight inches from the sidewalks so we couldn’t risk ladders. We had to climb the inner sidewall and snake a tarpaulin through, weight it and throw it over the front and back walls since you couldn’t stand on them. And you never knew when the floors would go. Yes it was a bit sticky, that.

Kit came back that night. She was all right but later in the Anderson, when They started coming over again she fell completely apart. She recovered enough in the morning to replace lost rations and then go to the Town Hall to get her glasses replaced. But two hours later the local warden came to the factory looking for me to say Kit’s in a house up the road all collapsed again. Sort of delayed shock, I suppose you might call it. So I packed Andrew up and took them both down to Puddleston.

The Dispossessed. It was a bit of a tight fit at Mother’s. By the time we arrived another sister was there, just bombed out. And two days later another sister landed, bombed out too. They all had kids so you can imagine what it was like in a three-room bungalow. Well, anyway, in a couple of days Kit was right enough again to have the usual wrangle with the usual nasty billeting officer and finally got a billet with, somebody. But next day that person’s mother and family, also bombed out, arrived, so the billet was out. I took my week’s holiday and I moved them all down to some relations at Quagmarsh. There they seemed to be all right.

Well, after I’d got all this sorted out I came back to see about living in our old place myself. Every time there was a new bomb, and they were thick on our district, we had to shoot away from the walls, since any heavy concussion would have brought them down. So I talked it over with the blokes next door and we began to wonder about the houses across the road—they still had roofs and the floors weren’t sagging. The tenants had buggered off somewhere when the flying bombs started coming down. We went, not very hopefully, to the local council.

When we stated our suggestion they just wrote out house requisition chits quick. So in we moved our two households of bits and pieces to put with the bits and pieces that were left, and we lived sort of communally. The main improvement was that you hadn’t any fear of the whole place falling in on you, but that was about all. No light or gas.

“Tireder & Tireder.” And so it went on. We were all tireder and tireder. And the bloody Things kept snorting over and smashing down all over the lot—some far, some near. The closest I saw wasn’t at the house. I was up at a housing estate one night much farther away. I was standing where the air-raid shelters are in the middle of the green among the houses, chatting to a bloke, and one come in. We watched it and it looked like it was going to pass about 400 yards to our right, and it suddenly wings over and dives smack at us.

What’s it feel like that close? Well, let me think. First there’s a row—a steadily increasing row that seems to fill up everything. And you’re trying to dig into the ground and you wait and wait, thinking, “This is my lot.” Then the explosion. Well, it’s so loud that first you sort of feel it rather than hear it.

And then you hear it. And that’s wonderful, because you feel a great wave of relief. You realize that if you’ve heard the explosion you’re more or less all right. Everything happens very slow like, but that’s no news to anyone who has been in any disaster. What did I do? Well, the first thing I did was to look into the air, and I noticed it was full of bits of tiles and glass and bricks so I dived again. There was dirt everywhere and a horrible smell like soot—maybe it was the explosive, but it smelled like rotten soot. And then, a long time later, the clatter of falling things.

Night on the Green. Immediately things stopped landing, we loped across to see what we could do. It was about 8 p.m. and the women were bringing nippers and bedding to the shelters. They were hysterical so we did what we could, shepherding them down. . . .

Not much of a life, no. Neither at the factory nor at home. Take that bad morning at the factory, we had umpteen imminent-danger warnings between half past seven and twelve o’clock. All that bloody morning down and up, start the machines, switch on, start to take a cut, and then the warning goes and you dive again. . . .

But when you’re at work you feel fairly all right because you’ve got a fair shelter and a good roof spotter elected by the men so he’s trustworthy. And once you’re asleep in your own Anderson it’s not too bad because you’re so tired you don’t give a damn anyway. The bad time is the in-between time. From the moment you knock off you are on edge. Christ, it’s all very well, Churchill’s talking about well-earned repose after work, but there are things a bloke has to do in the meantime. And even at home—lumme, I like that word for the way I live—there are letters to write and socks to wash or darn, and you can’t do anything really, what with cocking your ear and being ready to streak for the Anderson.

Don’t think you quite understand it if you live in a big steel and concrete building that would stand up to the blast. Where most Londoners live, in these miserable little brick houses which fall to dust and rubble a dozen at a time, when a bomb falls in the road it’s different. But really what gets me down most is living alone—no love, no kids, no decent food.

Everyone’s sticking it? … And just what the bloody hell else do you think anyone can do? You’d think that we had some bloody choice in the matter!