One of the first things Mrs Roke spelled out was that no cooking or eating was to go on under her roof. A sitting-room and a bedroom she would provide, available to us between the hours of six in the evening and eight in the morning. For the rest of the time, she implied, we could go to the devil for all she cared. She showed us first into the vast front room with its chilly marble fireplace and hard slippery chairs. Then she led us up a gloomy staircase covered with worn matting to see the bedroom. This was also at the front of the house, along a cold corridor with closed doors on either side … It contained a lumpy double bed, a huge wardrobe and a horsehair couch on castors. The couch, Mrs Roke indicated, would do for me, and she pulled some moth-eaten blankets and a stained pillow out of the wardrobe for me to use. On the floor, marooned on the pale green linoleum, were several peculiar fur rugs, the pelts of strange, rough-haired animals, and I knew I would never dare to tread on them. Framed bible texts hung round the walls and I read these while my mother, Aunt Madge and the old woman discussed terms and rules. 'Wait upon the Lord' - no laundry provided - 'Thou, God Seest Me' - no food in either of the rooms. 'Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord' - no pets, no wireless, no noise of any kind …
'You'll be back at six, then?' Mrs Roke concluded briskly. 'Pay now, shall you? Never know these days,' she added with gloomy relish as money changed hands.
We settled in and crept about the stairs and corridors, talking in whispers and walking on tiptoe. We got round the 'no food' rule with flasks of tea and sandwiches, packets of biscuits and pre-cooked sausages toasted at the gas fire, brushing the crumbs through a crack in the floorboards. Our laundry - bed-linen and sheets - we had to carry home a few at a time to wash in Shelley Street, and though the horse-hair sofa was uncomfortable, I stopped slipping off it every night once I turned it round so that the back-rail prevented me from falling on to the floor. It was a bizarre, makeshift sort of life, but we made the best of it.
Before long, life in the ruined city settled down to what in wartime passed for normal, and soon we were travelling in by train each morning, my mother to keep house and get the rations in for my father, while my aunt along with Doreen headed for the box factory and I caught the school bus. At the end of the day we all met up again to return on the train to our bleak refuge at Mrs Roke's.
Air-Raid Precautions
Chuck had joined the army as a boy soldier … On one of his early leaves he had helped my father to build the Anderson shelter at the end of our garden, ready to share with the Peakes when air-raids started. Mr Peake, elderly and lame, couldn't be expected to do the heavy digging that was required, but Chuck and my father soon got the deep hole dug in the sticky clay soil in time for the delivery of the corrugated iron for the shelter itself. This was supplied free by the Government, the sheets bent ready to shape, to be sunk into the hole and bolted together to form a small underground room, with a hillock of earth piled on top and sandbags stacked up to protect the entrance … When the air-raids began we had coped well enough, huddling together on makeshift benches as the planes droned overhead and the bombs fell. Only an occasional bright beam flashed through a chink in the doorway as searchlights swept the sky, showing Mr Peake snoring with his mouth open, Mrs Peake taking a nip from her bottle of brandy and Josie curled up in the corner. When the 'All Clear' wailed, we scrambled out, thankful to go back to our beds for an hour or two before morning.
We also had air-raid practice at school, in case of day-time raids, though most of the bombing happened at night. Glad of a break from lessons, we filed with our gas masks into the dimly-lit passages dug below a piece of waste ground behind the school building. Once down, the registers were called and we all filed out again, please to be back in the fresh air.
Judgement Day
It was a nightmare journey.
The 'All Clear' sounded just after six o'clock and we set out almost straight away, my mother finally being convinced it was time for us to go. The raid had gone on all night, starting so early we had no time to get to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden which we shared with our neighbours, the Peakes. Instead, we huddled in the cupboard under the stairs as the planes passed over and the bombs rained down. While my mother and Aunt Madge whispered together - 'That sounds like the BTH got hit!' 'No, it was further away,' - I read my 'William' book by the light of my torch. I liked being under the stairs better than in the shelter. The Peakes wouldn't let me use my torch, for fear I gave away our hiding-place to the German planes, so we sat in the pitch darkness, listening to old Mr Peake snoring and Mrs Peake whimpering with fear every time a bomb fell near us. In the cupboard, though, we were on our own and could please ourselves, drinking tea from a flask and nibbling biscuits. When the steady tones of the 'All Clear' rang out at last, we came out into the kitchen, brushing off crumbs and the flakes of whitewash dislodged by the jarring of the explosions. The raid, I realised, had lasted for eleven hours.
'Doreen,' said Aunt Madge. 'We'll go to Doreen. She'll have a room, perhaps, and if she hasn't she's sure to know somebody who has. The sooner we get off, the better, or they'll all be full up after this.'
I can remember now the smell of burning as we locked the front door behind us, the smuts of ash and the rubble under our feet. We passed several houses on fire, for many families were already 'sleeping out', as we said, travelling each night to lodgings in the countryside to escape the raids, and no-one was home to tackle the incendiary bombs before the fire caught hold. We took a roundabout way, avoiding the city centre, and there was no chance of transport - the railway station was out of action, the tramlines buckled up, half the buses destroyed and the rest requisitioned by the emergency services - but at last we came to the Kenilworth Road. There we joined a procession of families trudging into the darkness, the sky red behind us from the light of the fires. Most of the crowd carried bundles, but some had suitcases neatly packed - like going to the seaside, I thought. For the most part they were quiet and orderly, except when a child wailed and was coaxed into silence. I remembered newsreels I'd seen at the cinema of refugees in Europe. Now we were refugees, too, I supposed, in a way. I had my satchel slung over my shoulder, full of school books, and a brown paper carrier bag in my hand, with our spare shoes. My aunt had wrapped her few treasures up in newspaper - her father's gold watch-chain, two old five-shilling pieces and a silver locket - and poked them down into the toes of the shoes before she put them inside the carrier. Sneak-thieves would hardly suspect me of being given anything valuable to look after …
My mother's face was grim. We had left my father behind in the ruined city, on duty with the Police War Reserve. In uniform, he was in his element, ordering civilians about and arresting looters. She hardly gave him a second thought, but what she hated was the idea of going among strangers. All their lives, she and Aunt Madge had 'kept themselves to themselves', as they said, and now she feared the worst. The raids had been going on for days, until this final night of devastation, and we were all worn out from lack of sleep. Aunt Madge stumbled along with the heaviest bag, her eyes red-rimmed and wide with alarm. Doreen Phelps, a workmate in the box factory, lived in Kenilworth, five miles away. Like my mother, my aunt prided herself on never asking favours, but now there was no choice. It was time to leave, and we were all still alive.
The November night was clear and cold, with hoar-frost covering the woods where the summer before we had picnicked among the bluebells. My legs ached, and we seemed to have been walking for hours. At last relief workers met us on the outskirts of the town, with a mobile canteen set up at the side of the road, handing out tea and buns. To my disappointment, my mother gave a faint smile and shook her head, so we plodded on. Before long we met up with air-raid wardens handing out maps to show where the rest centres were, Scout huts and church halls hastily prepared to cope with the new influx of evacuees. My mother ignored them, too, but Aunt Madge took a map and peered at it anxiously in the dim light outside the ARP post.
'Annie,' she said wearily, 'we've got to tidy ourselves up a bit before we go to Doreen's. We can't turn up there like this. Anyway, Patty needs a rest - we all do. Come on, we'll go to the reception centre at the library. That'll be all right.'
Luckily, the library was in the part of town where Doreen lived with her widowed mother. Its windows were shrouded in blackout curtains and criss-crossed with wide sticky tape, but there was a chink of light from the doorway as we made our way over the frosty grass. Inside, camp beds lined the walls, and I sat bolt upright on one of them between my mother and my aunt, who had no intention of lying down in a strange place. There were plenty of blankets piled up on tables at the end of the room, and I looked at them longingly, but my mother shook her head.
'Fleas!' she hissed, and that, I knew, was that. Again, she refused even a cup of tea till Aunt Madge insisted, giving me a few sips as well, once the rim had been carefully wiped with her handkerchief.
Around us, most of our companions slept in sheer exhaustion, some whimpering, as if they were dreaming of the relentless rain of bombs. Others, like us, were tense and wakeful, checking their bags and bundles to make sure nothing had got lost or stolen on the trek from the city. A few with blisters after the long walk were patched up by the Red Cross, while others, weeping and shaking, were given a sedative and eventually lulled off to sleep. By now it was getting light outside and Aunt Madge led the way to the cloakroom. I flinched as she scrubbed at my face with the icy cold water, but it woke me up and I felt better afterwards. My mother tidied her hair and straightened her hat in the mirror. Outside, we rubbed our shoes on the grass to get rid of the dust, and set off down the quiet suburban street.
Extracts from 'Yesterday's Child'
(A Coventry Childhood in Peace and War)
by Pat Watson
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