Bombs, shelters and Dad’s army
I was only 3 years old when the war started, and I was 8 years old when it finished, so to me it was an accepted situation, with little in-depth worry.
I lived in a new house, semi-detached, in a cul de sac in Croxley Green. The best houses were ‘down the bend’. One side of the road backed onto a Junior School playing field, and our side of the road backed onto another field, this time a field of allotments. On the other side of the field were public woodlands. It was a lovely place to be brought up in. We could easily play in the road; very few households had a car, and we could also play ‘over the woods’.
The Infant School was only just across the junction of our road with the main road. The Junior School had a drive entrance in the middle of our road. There were air-raid shelters here, but I cannot remember any occasion when there was any air-raid during a time we were at school. We did explore them though, taking a torch, to find our way from one end to the other.
The Church was a short distance along the main road, as were the shops and the bus stops. What was the effect of the war on me then, in my early life? Very little. My father was in Dad’s Army and had a secure job with ‘Dickenson’s Paper Mill’. It was astonishing, looking back on it, that only a very few fathers were in the Armed Forces.
The air-raid siren was very local. My father and grandfather built a concrete underground shelter at the back of our house. This was almost unique in our road. Sometimes we slept ‘under the stairs’, and then later down the shelter itself. It is amazing that I never saw another one like it until I lived in Mortimer Hill, Tring. There was one over the fence at the back of our garden.
At intervals in the road, were placed large bins for discarded food. These were called ‘pig bins’. The one in the bend was a useful cricket wicket. I remember standing outside the grocers, wondering what it would look like if the Congregational Church was not there. Incredibly, a bomb flattened it a short time later. Also, our Church was severely damaged, and the organ had to be replaced at the west end. Another bomb, a ‘land mine’ fell in the woods and some of our windows were broken by the blast.
It was in the middle of the war when I first went to Infant School. Most of the pupils went to lunch at the nearby Methodist Church. I went home as this was so close. I came back one summer afternoon and sat on a bench in the sun and went to sleep. No one noticed I was missing until 3 o’clock!
One day our art class was set to paint what we might see at night-time. One boy next to me had covered his paper in black. ‘What’s that?’ said the teacher. The answer from Ian Brodie was ‘Darkness’.
In my last year, when I was 8 years old, I wrote a letter to the teacher saying, ‘Can you let David go at 3.20 as he has an appointment with the dentist?’. This was signed with my mother’s name. To my surprise, the teacher complied, and I rushed for the bus, to then catch a train to Amersham and then to Marylebone. There was no dentist appointment, of course. I just loved travelling on trains!
Shared by David Gittins
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