A child in Dulwich during the blitz and Kendal during the Buzz bombs
I was four years old when Hitler began to bomb London. I slept in a cellar under 30 Underhill Road and was dispatched there whenever the sirens sounded a warning. I was close to High Wood Barracks where the sound of anti aircraft fire kept me awake during the blitz.
A barrage balloon hung over our garden and after the night raids I would search for shrapnel in the garden. The houses below ours in Melford Road were nearly all damaged by bombs. I was evacuated for short periods to Reigate, Northwood and Halton beside an RAF airdrome.
My father worked in a reserve occupation as an architect at Scotland Yard. He had to keep watch at night and one night was stuck in the lift in the building on the embankment when a mouse ran up his trouser leg. He was released in the morning. An incendiary bomb landed on our front doorstep but bounced harmlessly into the road.
After the blitz there was a quieter patch until the Germans sent over the doodle bugs, the V1s and later the V2s. I was again taken to the cellar but the number of flying bombs falling around us made my parents decide to evacuate me to Kendal in Westmoreland to stay at 8 Castle Crescent with my grandmother and mother. One flying bomb over Dulwich had cut out over our house during the day when I was playing cricket in the garden, I ran for cover and it fell two streets away and killed the occupants of the house it fell on. The headmaster of my prep school, St Dunstan's prep, a Mr Booty, lost his house over a weekend when he fortunately was away. The window beside my desk was blown out by a V2 one morning while I was sitting there. Fortunately the window had no glass but only material after an earlier bomb.
There were a lot of evacuees from London in Kendal when I arrived and they were not popular with the local people who had them billeted on them. In my case it had been arranged by agreement with a Mrs Steel who lived there.
I attended the local school at the age of 8. There was a certain amount of ill feeling towards the London evacuees and one afternoon after school I had stones thrown at me by a group of boys near Castle Crescent. Next term the headmistress was replaced by a younger woman from Ealing who was having nothing of this and cracked down on the local element who caused ill feeling.
My acceptance and the whole change to my life in the lake district came one day when I was playing on my own by the Beck, an open stream in those days, now a culvert, between the church and the Crescent. A mother whose baby boy was in his pram was left on his own near the Beck and she went indoors but forgot to put the brake on. The pram slowly gathered pace and ran at speed into the railings above the Beck tossing the boy over them into the water. Fortunately the Beck was low at this time. I saw this happen but could not reach down to rescue the baby whose name was Michael Stainton but I saw and told the greengrocer nearby who ran over and got him out. His mother came and was full of praise for me and introduced me to her daughter, Adrian who was close to my age. This girl knew the area around Kendal like the back of her hand and she introduced me to all the beauty and wild life of the lake district. We became close friends for the time I was there. When it was time to go back to London a few months later I lost touch with her and often wondered what became of her. The Mayor of Kendal, a Mr Doby, was shown a poem I wrote about Kendal through the eyes of an evacuee and sent it to the local paper who printed it.
