Were you, or someone you know, living in London during WWII?

[lozengeoflove]

I’m really interested in what experiences women had of living in London during WWII. I’ve read so much about the male experience of fighting but I’d like to hear how women found the domestic life in London during this time.

Currently re-reading Sarah Waters ‘The Night Watch’ and would really love to hear about first hand experiences.

So not London but my DGM was attempting to raise her family (DM born 1944) in Copenhagen during nazi occupation. She really hardly spoke about it but I got her talking a bit in her final years.

She says the Nazis took everything- food; coal etc and they had some of the coldest winters for years in the mid 1940s - she had to go foraging with the kids for wood to burn and they also ended up burning furniture to heat one room.

She said she was so scared of the soldiers- she didn't speak German but she remembers walking to work one morning and a soldier shouting at her in German and cocking his rifle but she turned and ran down the street.

By the end of the war, she said Denmark was full of soldiers who were barely teens - 13/14 year old boys in massive oversized German uniform. She remembers that eventually they all deserted and walked back to Germany but she said the boys she saw had stuffed valuables into their uniforms and tried to carry stuff home and the roads ended up littered with bits like silver candlesticks etc. She felt sorry for those boys - they looked lost and scared. Although she hated hearing the German language the rest of her life.

My aunt was good friends as an adult with a girl who survived the accidental British bombing of a school. The bombers were aiming for the gestapo headquarters but one mistook the school or crashed into it. Her friend was dragged out from the rubble. She would have been 12 or so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstitutJeannee_d%27Arc

Sorry one more thing to add.

My mother came to the UK as an au pair in the 60s. She said everyone used to ask each other 'and what did your parents do during the war?' She couldn't understand why people were asking or bothered as no one in Denmark spoke about it. It was/is such a large part of the British physche perhaps so much more so than other nationalities.

-having tonsilitis aged 3 and being on a medical ward. Seeing lots of soldiers there with serious wounds. No-one believes her now, as why would a small girl have ended up on men's medical, but she must have seen something while in hospital, as she remembers it very well.

I can totally understand this. When I was 10 (late 1970s) and had my appendix out I was moved with another girl on to a female surgical ward as they needed beds on paeds and we were the oldest. We loved it there were lots of gory stories about gynae issues and all the ladies gave us sweets / chocolates etc.

A children's ward could easily be closed due to one of the diseases we have vaccines for now. My mum spent 6 weeks in hospital with diphtheria (probably 1945 ish), they were not allowed visitors and any toys they had on the ward had to be left on the ward or burned.

I can easily see a situation where a ward closes and a child is temporarily moved, probably with a nurse eg they close a peads ward and only retain staff for the ward and send the other nurses and the student nurses to other wards and one takes the 3 year old with them.

I think a 3 year old may also be a boost to moral for the men with injuries.

It may also have been as simple as an air raid so she was safer in a hospital of any kind and then could be transferred later.

I worked at one hospital that when I started was part of a group, the old fever hospital was still used for clinics and all the wards were separate and you had to go outside to walk to another ward, you would not have been able to do that in an air raid.

Sorry off topic musings.

My Gran worked in London in WW2. She’d had a miserable childhood and been forced to leave school at 14 and work. She’d joined the army, marched thousands of miles to London and was assigned yo civil service war work and got promoted. She loved it, doing a good job hadn’t been a possibility before, and the London social life.

Her view was that ‘blitz spirit’ wasn’t accurate and people were as they always were/are, with bad housing, looting, unfriendliness, selfishness etc. In general she was a ‘glass half empty’ type

A few years ago think the national archives published papers from the end of WW2 when the decision was taken by government to fire the women civil servants and give men the jobs.

With the loss of her good job and job options being far fewer with the men back my gran hastily got married, then had a lot of DC, which didn’t work out at well, sadly. She only ever did low paid, ad-hoc type work.

Think she might’ve been better in modern times with education and work opportunities and having far fewer DC and divorcing.

My Nan was a small child in the East End during WW2. She has very vivid memories of emerging from an air raid shelter to see their house had turned into rubble.

Not read the whole thread, so this might have already been mentioned, but Lucy Worsley did a good programme on this called ‘The Real Blitz Spirit’. It should still be on iPlayer.

@lozengeoflove

Yes, I can imagine *@Tickledtrout*. Thank you for sharing. I was reading about an awful school bombing in Catford. It must have been hard for parents of children not evacuated out of London to continue to send them to school.

My MIL was a pupil at that school as was her brother and cousin. They had been bombed out of their previous home.

She had gone home at lunchtime because she had forgotten her dinner money. Hers was the classroom where most of the children were killed. Her dad was the local policeman and didn't know she'd gone home so he thought she'd died until she came back to school not knowing what had happened.

A chilling PS to the story is that the German pilot flew so low he actually waved at the kids before unleashing his bomb and afterwards he came back and strafed them as they were trying to run away.

Her brother developed a lifelong stammer that day and her cousin suffered shrapnel injuries which affected him for the rest of his life.

They had been evacuated at the beginning if the war but her pregnant mother was so distraught their dad brought them. Didn't even send them away again after that day.

My mum was older and joined the WRNS. She wasn't in London but she had a marvellous time mostly due to having been able to leave a strict home at 18.

My dad was born in 1934, in Hull, which was very badly bombed as a major port.

He used to tell a tale of being sent to collect his dad’s collars from the cleaners’ on his trike, when the air raid siren sounded. He tried to ride home as fast as he could, but a policeman dragged him off his trike by the scruff of the neck and took him into the shelter. My gran must have been frantic - he was about 6.

Later he was evacuated to Berkshire. His aunt was Head Cook and Housekeeper for a stately home, and dad and one of his sisters were sent there to live below stairs. He had a whale of a time, didn’t really go to school for two years, got pocket money every week and went delivering milk on the horse-drawn milk float - Highclere Castle (Downton Abbey) was on his round!

My mother spent the war working in the West End and living in a semi in Cricklewood. My favourite war story was about an incendiary bomb (designed to burst into flames on contact) landing on the doormat outside a neighbour's house a few houses down. The proud, and furious, housewife opened the door, picked up the mat with bomb and ran across to the tennis courts opposite where she hurled it yelling 'you can have this one back Jerry'. Adrenalin. Must have been faulty bomb but blimey.

OP I've just seen your link to the Catford school bombing - I wonder if that's MIL's policeman dad in the picture? I'll show her and ask.

(And dining room makes more sense than classroom)

My DPs were married in May 1940. They hadn't known each other very long, but my DF had already been called up into the RAMC and they believed that, if my DM was a married woman, she would not be called up into the forces. My DF came back from his unit on the Friday, they married on the Saturday, they spent their wedding night at my DGM's house and he returned to his unit on the Sunday afternoon. They did not live together until 1946, when he was finally demobbed, by which time they were both very different people. Divorce was unthinkable, so they lived together very unhappily for 53 years!

DM then had the advantages of being married, both financially and socially. My DGPs evacuated themselves to Llandudno, but left my DM in their house, in an area that, in the end, had only one big bombing raid. To hear my DM talk, the social life was fantastic, especially when the Americans arrived and, although she did war work, it was in an office. They had a big fire in the winter and used to take potatoes into work to bake in the fire for lunch.

Meanwhile, my DF was dealing with battle casualties day after day ...

Oddly, i know exactly where my DMIL was on the day my DPs got married. DMIL was in Holland watching Nazi paratroopers land in her village and watching the neighbours cheering. Her education ended at the age of nine as the family was moved around and kept away from the coast so they couldn't escape. Her DF was interned in Poland until 1944 nd his health never recovered. Her experiences have been recorded in print and on video and she relived them day after day when she developed dementia.

@MarieVanGoethem started reading the diary. It’s very well written. Thank you for the link.

@Spudlet I really loved Ethel and Ernest. It’s so touching!

@HavfrueDenizKisi very interesting to read about the question of what parents did during the war! It’s definitely a huge part of the British psyche.

These stories we are all sharing really show such a broad range of war time experience. I did laugh at the appearance of silky bloomers @LionLily

Terrific thread.

My MIL was a single woman in her early 20s when the war started. She worked for the Post Office Savings Bank (now NS&I) in West Kensington, which would have been a protected occupation, as they were raising government funds to pay for the war effort, so she was never conscripted. She lived with her parents in Northolt. There's a longstanding RAF airbase there, so the area must have been a target for bombers.

I never thought to ask her about the war when I had the chance, and sadly she died nearly 30 years ago now, and had dementia for several years before that.

I do know that her twin brother served in the Navy during the war, but sadly fell ill and had to be invalided out. My memory is that he contracted a tropical disease while in West Africa, but my husband thinks he developed MS. Whichever of us is right, he ended up in a hospital somewhere near London where he sadly died not long after the war. He had married, but had no children, and my MIL commented bitterly that his wife never bothered to visit him. They didn't stay in touch after he died.

There must have been lots of marriages that came to grief during/after the war. Long separations, all sorts of other stresses. Many people struggled to re-adjust to civilian life after the excitement/responsibility/companionship of their wartime work. Plenty of PTSD around too, of course.

My FIL's first marriage was another casualty. We don't know when he married, whether it was before or during the war, but he was divorced not long after it ended. No children, so probably quite a short-lived marriage.

Before the war, he worked for his father in SE London. GFIL ran a small business making good quality ready-to-wear garments for sale in clothing shops. When the war began, he was offered a contract making garments for the military, but turned it down as the prices offered were so low he'd have made far less profit than he was used to. This was a very bad move. If he'd taken the contract his workers, including both his sons, would have been classed as doing essential war work and wouldn't have been conscripted. As it was, all his workers were classed as doing non-essential work, so they were mostly conscripted, or joined up, and because of rationing, he struggled to get materials and would only have been able to produce garments to utility standards anyway, probably also at a very low profit. End result, he closed the business, and both his sons got conscripted.

My FIL went into the RAF and trained as a mechanic working on repairing engines and the fabric of planes. At one point he was transferred to work in a munitions works instead. He ended up in France after D-Day and spent months in Belgium until the war ended. He was fortunate not to be injured as far as I know. Hard work, but nothing like as bad a war as many others.

Morning, everyone. We've had several nominations for this thread to go into Classics so we'll move it there now.

My son came home from school with a worksheet for his history homework; he had to ask his grandparents about their experiences during wartime, specifically rationing. My grandfather was a forester on Lord Egerton's estate, Tatton Park in Cheshire. Lord Egerton looked after his staff; my mum wrote on the worksheet that she was absolutely sick to death of eating venison all the time. This piece of information never made it to the class project book...

You’re very welcome @lozengeoflove - the Provincial Lady books are fantastic for cultural history: the one where she visits Russia is incredible...

I do sometimes wonder if the stuff about what people[‘s parents] did during the war would have caught hold in quite the same way if British society hadn’t been so dramatically reshaped in the postwar period with the end of Empire & the influx of migrants from across the Empire & then the Commonwealth. The question could be angled both to unify & to divide when it came to immigrants - but it didn’t have the same kind of risk as it did in formerly occupied countries.

@Knittedfairies

My son came home from school with a worksheet for his history homework; he had to ask his grandparents about their experiences during wartime, specifically rationing. My grandfather was a forester on Lord Egerton's estate, Tatton Park in Cheshire. Lord Egerton looked after his staff; my mum wrote on the worksheet that she was absolutely sick to death of eating venison all the time. This piece of information never made it to the class project book...

Must have been a marked contrast to the kids fed up with Woolton pie or tinned snoek!

Glad to see this is now in Classics. Deservedly so.

My mum was 6 when the war started. Her dad was called up in the early 1940s and served as a fireman on Clydeside. He had been a gardener, working for a wealthy family and living in a tied cottage, which of course the family lost, so they had to move into lodgings near his place of work. He must have had some torrid times, but he never talked about them, and I never thought to ask about that part of his life. My mum remembers vividly walking to school with her younger sister. They were instructed that if the air raid siren went off on the way, they had to decide whether they were nearer the school or home, and run to whichever was nearest. What a responsibility for a young child.

My father grew up in rural Yorkshire, but had vivid memories of waves of German bombers with accompanying fighters crossing overhead to bomb the foundries of Sheffield. His brother who was older used to hang his head out on the windowsill to watch them. My father used to hide his head under the pillow and remembered the distinctive engine sound all his life. He loved the sound of the Spitfires and can remember the relief of hearing them and his brother would tell him they were driving the Germans back.

My DM remembered the American troops arriving at the nearby army bases later in the war, as she was only a baby when it broke out, they gave out chocolate bars to the children.

Thank you @HebesMumsnet

I mentioned my grandad's letters earlier.

Letters were censored and one thing they could not say was where they were.

One of the letters says, "I'm not allowed to tell you where I am, but this is the view from my tent" he then drew a couple of pyramids.

I've no idea how the army splits people into groups but in whatever 'group' he was in was a rather posh gentleman, who somehow had not been made an officer. He was forever forgetting kit or not cleaning it properly and as a result the group had some sort of sanction.

So before a parade one day, the group took a piece of kit / pair of boots / other part of uniform each and cleaned it properly. The posh soldier was then dressed by the group and carried to the parade ground so e couldn't mess up his uniform.

Just catching up on this fascinating thread. @lozengeoflove I highly recommend another Furrowed Middlebrow book - Chelsea Concerto, by Frances Faviell. She was an artist who lived in a flat in Chelsea during the war which was right in the middle of the bombing, and eventually suffered a direct hit to her house (while inside asleep - and pregnant), but until then she was a first-aider and also acted as interpreter and general go-between for a group of Flemish refugees who'd been evacuated locally.

Her memories are incredibly vivid and paint a fantastically realistic picture of wartime life in what was then a very socially-mixed area. She's one of the people mentioned in the Lucy Worsley documentary and tbh I was irritated that the researchers had clearly decided to put Frances Faviell in the 'posh' box and depicted her with drawling accent and champagne glass in hand. In fact her book doesn't spare the details of the raids, injuries and loss of life and she clearly had strong bonds with all her neighbours and worked alongside them through the aftermath of many terrible raids - not to mention using her nursing skills. A careless and rather unfair categorisation of a remarkable woman, I feel.

(Just to add - she didn't come from London but my dear mum, who died last year in her late 90s, joined the WAAFs (very much against her parents' wishes) and served as a Morse Code Operator at Bomber Command in Lincolnshire. She absolutely loved her time in the forces and was one of the people who actually had a positive war experience because it allowed her to get away from a dull job she didn't like, meet many new people and do fulfilling and exciting work. I think the sheer adventure of that outweighed any of the privations for a young woman from quite a sheltered background)

@Terpsichore It’s fiction of course, but there’s a bit in the Rosamund Pilcher book Coming Home where the main character muses on the effect the war has had, and how for some people it was the chance to escape dead-end jobs that they hated and get away from the circumstances they were born into. Massive upheaval all round obviously, but for some people not an entirely bad thing.

It's true, @Spudlet - not that she didn't experience the rationing, the shortages, the fear of air-raids, losing loved ones, etc etc - but she was in her very early 20s and suddenly having a completely different kind of life from the one that had been mapped out for her. Her parents were loving but protective to the point of running her life, and she didn't get much, if any, say in her own destiny. She came from a very small town where she knew just about everybody. All at once she was meeting dozens of people from all over the country, having a hectic social life and lots of boyfriends without having to get her parents' approval.

My father was also eventually in the RAF (they didn't meet at the time despite being posted to the same area) but came from a much poorer background and in his large industrial town had experienced a lot more trauma from heavy bombing etc. He remembered seeing a neighbour's house bombed and a dead body being brought out and laid on the pavement. He'd have been in his teens and another neighbour handed him a cigarette to steady his nerves - that's how he started smoking.

@Terpsichore
My grandad started smoking during the war too - I’m not sure exactly when, possibly when a bit too close for comfort to Vesuvius erupting...

My grandparents met in London during the war - my grandad was from a wealthy London family, grandma from a very poor Lancashire family but posted to London with the Wrens. My grandad was a bomber pilot and trained mostly overseas in a base that was occasionally visited by Winston Churchill - he was assigned as his ‘guard’ and recalled he barely slept, drank a lot and smoked a lot He would never speak again about his bombing experience - he was too traumatised - however, he did tell my dad that he learnt to use the stars as a guide to return home after a night raid.

My nan had a fun war - she loved being a wren and made the most of all the dances! I did a project on WW2 years ago for school when she was still alive - her most vivid memory was the lack of stockings and make up!