Growing up in Lee-on-the-Solent Read online

  Less than a month after the breaching of Lee Pier, on Friday 16 August 1940 in the afternoon, there was a real air-raid. It was the middle of the school summer holiday; Pat and I were at home and fortunately we were playing not far from the house. When we heard the fear-inducing undulating wail of the siren, we quickly ran indoors. Mum grabbed us and took us to the Anderson air-raid shelter of a neighbour who lived just across the road in Brickland Terrace. Mrs P, in the spirit of the times, allowed any neighbours who did not have a shelter, to share hers. We all crammed in: Mrs P with her two young children, Mrs Cottrill, Brian, Mum, Pat and I plus two other women with a couple of very young children. It was a tight squeeze. It wasn’t long before an aerial dogfight started above Elmore - it was very loud and sounded as if it was taking place directly above the shelter.

  We soon discovered that there was a sailor in Mrs P’s house (not her husband) who was ‘staying over’, and who had decided not to go down into the air-raid shelter when the siren sounded, because he preferred not to show his face to the inquisitive ladies of the neighbourhood. After the dogfight started Jolly Jack must have had a change of heart, and at the very last minute he decided to make dash for safety. The dogfight at that moment became rather intense and very noisy, and the women in the shelter pulled their children close in protective hugs. As the sailor dived into the shelter, he hit his back on the corrugated iron top of the doorway and fell onto the concrete floor. There was panic and shock when suddenly something - which turned out to be someone - was dumped into the shelter. The sailor was obviously in some pain and he thought that he had been hit by the gunfire.

  I was too young at the time to appreciate the rest of the story, but it was explained to me later. Apparently, because he believed that he was dying, he made what he thought was a dying confession. It involved seeking forgiveness from his wife in Plymouth for the extramarital activities in which he had indulged with Mrs P in Brickland Terrace. This juicy bit of gossip became well repeated and worn around the edges, when accounts of the raid were exchanged during the following days.

  This day of the dogfight was the day when 20 German Stuka dive-bombers attacked the airbase at Daedalus. They caused serious bomb damage, destroyed three hangers and 42 aircraft and killed 14 people including five civilians. Dad was on the base at Daedalus during this raid, and, although he would have been well aware of the devastation that had occurred, he never mentioned it: he knew what a worrier Mum was.

  I Make a Wish

  After the raid on Daedalus, the air-raids in the area became more frequent and Gosport began to suffer badly, so Dad decided to evacuate Mum, Pat and me to the home of Aunt Doris, Uncle Bill and Cousin Joan. They lived in Kilnhurst, near Sheffield. I expect that he realised that there would be more raids on Portsmouth and Gosport - and more there certainly were. We stayed at Kilnhurst until February 1941.

  Dad was by trade a fitter rigger (or airframe mechanic) and he had a team that carried out maintenance and repair on the structure of aircraft. One can speculate that it was considered prudent to carry out this work out of the range of German bombers, following the devastation caused by the bombing raids on bases on the south coast. Whether this was the reason or not, Dad and his team were posted to Arbroath in Scotland where eventually he managed to get lodgings for Mum, Pat and me. So, at the end of February, we left Kilnhurst to follow him to Arbroath. We were to stay there for just a short time - a little over a month - and Pat and I went to the local school for about a week.

  It is no exaggeration to say that I absolutely hated Arbroath. In the accommodation where we stayed, we had to share a combined bathroom and toilet with the family that lived there. The family were part of the local fishing community, and - well I don’t know whether it was their diet or not, but I do know that whatever it was, a visit to the toilet after any of the family had used it was quite an ordeal. There is only so long that you can hold your breath. Mum and Dad didn’t talk about this, but they were very surprised and concerned that the children of the house, who were about Pat’s age, stayed up until the small hours of the morning, and as Pat had to share a room with the little girl of the family, she was not getting her proper sleep.

  One late afternoon after school I walked the whole length of the promenade to a wishing well, threw in a coin and wished to go home. The next evening, Dad returned to the lodgings and said that he had been posted to Somerset and we were going home! ... so if you have aspirations to win the Lotto, then the wishing well in Arbroath might be worth considering.

  On the long train journey home, although we were at war, there were still three classes of carriage. We, of course, travelled third class as we were ‘NCO and other ranks with family’. The carriages were crowded, with the exception of first class, and Dad had difficulty in finding us space, but Dad - being Dad - did. There was what we later would consider to be an amusing incident on this tiring and dreary long journey, which was only bearable because we were going home. We stopped at Crewe, and Dad, always ready for a challenge, jumped off the train as it stopped and ran to the station buffet. He bought some mugs of tea and managed to get back on board, complete with the full mugs, hardly spilling a drop, as the train was just moving off. Mum was ‘having kittens’ - she was a worrier at the best of times, and these were not the best of times. As we travelled across London to Waterloo station there was an overpowering smell of smoke. Possibly the local population had become accustomed to it, because it didn’t seem to bother them. We had breakfast in a makeshift café-cum-restaurant which I believe was run by the Women’s Voluntary Service, just outside the station. The people all appeared to be tired and withdrawn, though many were helpful. On the platform as we were making our way to the Portsmouth train, Dad was carrying Pat’s life-size baby doll, and he had it slung over his shoulder, with luggage in his other hand. A middle- aged woman came up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and said to him in a quite aggressive voice: ‘that’s not the way to carry a baby.’ She didn’t even see the funny side of it when he showed her that it was only a doll.

  Back to the Home Front

  When we arrived at Portsmouth there were a lot of bombed buildings and in some cases whole streets had virtually disappeared. Possibly some of the debris had been removed, because it seemed as if there was just not enough debris for the houses that had once been there. All that was left were the holes that once had been the cellars, and a few small mounds of bricks here and there. I was told later that aerial land-mines had caused the horrendous damage. Apparently these mines were similar to normal sea-mines, but they were dropped by parachute and they exploded at the tops of the buildings, instead of lower down. I don’t know for sure that it was aerial mines that caused all the devastation, but major devastation there most certainly was. On 10 January 1941, which was two months prior to our return, Portsmouth had suffered its worst raid, and many landmarks were wiped out or seriously damaged, including the Guildhall. Even the Pompey chimes were silenced.

  We had missed some of the air-raids, but a few days after we returned, on 10 March 1941, more than a dozen people at a number of different addresses in Gosport were killed during a bombing raid. Despite this, Dad could not persuade Mum to go back to Kilnhurst, so we stayed in Lee-on-the-Solent.

  It was during this spring, when Dad managed to get some leave, that he, together with the help of other men from the neighbourhood, dug a deep hole into which they built our Anderson shelter. It had a concrete floor with small interior concrete walls about two feet high, and when the arch-shaped pieces of corrugated iron had been bolted together, the whole structure was covered with about six inches of soil.

  Later in the year, the Cottrills had a Morrison shelter built in their back garden. This type of shelter was an above-ground, strong, brick, windowless structure with a separate blast wall in front of the doorway. Before their shelter was built it was our turn to share our shelter with them. Sleeping in the shelters, even though there were bunks, was c
old, miserable, damp and uncomfortable, and, as it was outside, it felt less secure than being indoors. ‘What time did the all clear go?’ was the question everyone would ask the following morning, after a miserable night in the shelter. But because the sound of the ‘All Clear’ did not have the same impact as the alert siren, and possibly because we just too tired to be bothered, no-one seemed to know the answer to that question. It is quite surprising that even today the undulating sound of an alert siren evokes a sense of apprehension which is quite impossible to put into words. I am sure that all of those who lived through the war will know exactly what I mean, as will those who now live in war zones.

  The raids continued for some while after we returned from Scotland, but life went on. In the morning after a raid, I would go out, like all of my contemporaries, to collect shrapnel. These irregular shards of metal, which were anything from an inch to six inches long, were mainly the remains of anti-aircraft shells, and although they were nice and shiny to start with, they very quickly became rusty.

  After a while, nights in the shelter became something that we dreaded so much that we, like many of our neighbours, took to staying indoors. Mum, Pat and I used to sleep downstairs on a mattress under a kitchen table. It was at this time that I had developed a rather nasty abscess on my right shin, and it was so painful that I had been unable to sleep for quite a few nights. Mum had been told by the chemist that the best treatment for the abscess was to place a kaolin poultice on it. This involved making a sandwich of the kaolin (a kind of clay) between small pieces of linen and then heating it up by placing it in boiling water, and then putting it on the abscess whilst still warm. Mum did it all correctly except for the last part: she interpreted ‘whilst still warm’ as straight out of the boiling water and onto my leg. I expect that they heard my yell next door, but it did the trick and I enjoyed the first good night’s sleep that I had had for many nights. In fact I slept right through that night’s air-raid. Nevertheless, I still have the scar.

  It is only in recent years that I have become aware of how much Mum’s care for the welfare of me and Pat had been influenced by advertising. Looking at advertisements appearing in local newspapers of that time, constipation was responsible for just about everything that a young person could be prone to, from irritability to not doing well at school, lethargy, or in fact just about everything which nowadays we put down to being a teenager. So every Friday evening Pat and I were given a dose of Californian Syrup of Figs to cure our ills, both real and imaginary. Following this train of thought, it is worth mentioning that both during the war and after, toilet paper was not of the variety advertised today by cute little puppies. It was more akin to thin, shiny, greaseproof paper. And it was often not available at all: the main source of paper for use in the toilet, for most households, was newspaper torn into sheets which were then threaded into bundles on a piece of string and hung in the lavatory.

  Running Wild

  Once our exile was over and we were home again, Pat and I returned to our ‘private education’. At a council meeting at that time one of the councillors stated that there were 3,000 children of school age in Gosport and Lee who had not been evacuated or who had returned and ‘were running wild and uneducated, because there are no schools open’. That was not true for me - well in part it was not true - because I was enjoying the benefits of Mrs Good’s teaching skills, and I was only running wild part-time. I suppose that, if I’m honest, I have to admit we did get up to quite a bit of mischief. On the seafront opposite Beach Road near to the promenade where the old railway line had once run, there was a derelict house which was boarded up to keep out people, for their own safety. Of course, to a group of us lads, this was a tempting invitation. We managed to ‘find’ some boards which, with a little persuasion, became loose, and on several occasions we went inside exploring. Usually we would scramble to the upper floor on a very rickety staircase, and peer out through the gaps in the boards that had been placed over the holes where there once had been windows. One day when we went into the ramshackle building we discovered that the whole staircase had completely collapsed. Fortunately for us, we had not been playing on the upper floor or on the staircase when it disintegrated. After this we tired of playing in the derelict house and turned our attention to some abandoned beach-huts near the remains of the old railway halt at Elmore. These huts became more and more derelict, possibly a result of us playing in them, and eventually they were removed.

  A short stretch of road alongside Brickland Terrace, more or less a stubby extension of Anglesea Road, led to a track that went across the fields to Court Barn and then on to Cherque Farm. From the Elmore end of Lee-on-the-Solent this track was the main route for getting to Peel Common, and to the golf links. As youngsters we would go to the golf links, not to play golf but just to mess around and get up to mischief, playing in the bunkers and climbing some of the many silver birch trees that grew there and possibly (although not intentionally) damaging them.

  This was a time of environmental unawareness and many of the activities in which we indulged, without much thought, would nowadays be seen as totally unacceptable. We would go ‘bird nesting’, which involved finding a bird’s nest, and removing an egg: it would then have a pinprick hole made at each end, and the contents blown out. The objective of this activity was to build up a collection of as many different types of eggs as possible. One day when I was on one of these ‘nature activities’ with an older group of lads, one of the gang, the eldest son of the local newsagent, had climbed to the top of a tree and collected a pigeon’s egg. He carefully made his way down with the egg safely in his mouth. When he got to the bottom branch of the tree, he hung there for a moment and then dropped the last three feet to the ground. Mistake! He never said what it tasted like but what came out of his mouth didn’t look too appetising. We would also go foraging in the streams and ponds near the golf links, carrying nets and jam jars to collect sticklebacks and crested newts. Usually we would put them back where we had caught them, but occasionally we would take them home to show others - unfortunately not many of our finds survived that ordeal.

  Court Barn, alongside the track across the field, was a good place to have fun. One day several of us were playing on the hay stored in the barn and the farmer caught us. As it was a ‘fair cop’, I politely and respectfully apologised and gave my real name and address. That evening a policeman called at our house and informed my parents that because I had been polite and apologised, the farmer would take no further action. Nevertheless it took several weeks before the shame of having a policeman call at the house wore off. Many years later, I became aware of how lucky I had been, when I read about what had happened to a couple of 14-year-old lads caught by the same farmer later that year. They ended up in front of the Beak (as the Magistrate was known). They had taken some hay from a field (for their rabbits) and the owner, Colonel House, had caught them and they had been charged with theft. Colonel House said that he had brought the action against them because he had suffered so much damage to hay and straw ricks and fodder. The case was considered proved but was dismissed, with the two boys paying costs of seven shillings and sixpence each.

  The episode at Court Barn was not my only run-in with the constabulary during this what I have sometimes referred to as the rebellious phase of my life. I was with Ronnie from Raynes Road and we were playing in an empty, bomb-damaged, derelict shop in Marine Parade opposite Lee Tower. The windows had all been blown out as well as the door, and the inside of the shop was completely empty except for an old orange box. On one wall there was a block of brown Bakelite light-switches, some of which had not been damaged. For some reason which I have never been able to fathom, we decided to remove them. We didn’t see it as stealing or worse, the looting which it really was. We hadn’t planned this ‘light-switch removal’, although you may find that hard to believe when I tell you that - unbeknown to Dad - I had one of his screwdrivers with me.

  We had removed the
three or four undamaged ones when I happened to look out through the hole where the windows should have been. I saw a policeman pull up over the road on his bicycle; it was still daylight and this must have been part of his regular beat. After he had parked his bike alongside a telephone booth, he looked over in our direction and strolled over, almost with a John Wayne swagger. Before he reached the shop we quickly threw the switches, together with the screwdriver, into the storage space under the window. When he came in, he asked for our names and addresses. After we told him, he asked us what we were doing in the remains of the shop. ‘We’re just messing about sir,’ we replied. ‘Well you’re not supposed to be in here,’ he said. ‘Off you go.’ We didn’t need twice bidding; we left pretty promptly, headed east (towards Elmore), did a left turn, ran round the corner into Pier Street, then after a few yards turned left through the entrance to the flats which also led to waste ground behind the buildings. We ran diagonally across this waste ground and then through another of the flats’ entrance passageways, so that we were now back in Marine Parade facing the Tower, but we were to the west of the shop where we had been caught, and the policeman had seen us leave briskly going east. Peering out, we saw the policeman come out of the bomb-damaged shop, get on his bike and quickly cycle off in the direction that we had taken. No sooner was he out of sight than we were back at the scene of the crime. I was hoping to reclaim Dad’s screwdriver, but there was no sign of it. We saw the switches had been retrieved and placed on the ‘orange box’, so we gathered them up, nipped over the road to the beach and committed them to a watery grave. Then slowly, very slowly and nervously, we made our way home.