‘It’s lovely, Mummy,’ I told her. ‘It’s like we’re on an adventure.’
The war was all a big game to me but I could tell that Mum was scared. She was very nervous and on edge, I could sense it.
By the time the air-raid siren went off we’d already been in the shelter for hours.
‘Here we go again,’ she said, cuddling up to me.
I soon learned to recognise the different sounds of war, and lying there listening I’d hear the familiar drone of German bombers dropping their loads on London as they followed the path of the Thames. The bombs made their own distinctive noise when they fell – a sort of whistling, whooshing sound, and then there would be an ominous second of silence before impact.
Tonight the planes sounded very close and Mum jumped every time a bomb came down. The ground shook and we heard fragments of metal hitting the roofs of nearby houses as the bombs exploded.
‘Shall I have a little peep outside to see what’s going on?’ I asked.
But Mum looked horrified.
‘No, you will not, Rene,’ she told me. ‘You’re staying safely in here.’
I was disappointed, as I’d imagined the sky glowing orange and red from all the fires.
‘I hope Raymond’s all right,’ said Mum.
Instead of coming home, he often spent the night sleeping in one of the Tube stations so he could get up and go straight to work the next day. Hundreds of others did this too, and by 6 p.m. people started setting up for the night, reserving their spot. You’d see them clutching blankets and pillows, and women sat there on the platforms in curlers, putting cold cream on their faces.
It didn’t take long before I was out like a light, lulled to sleep by the sound of the gunfire and the bombs falling all around us. When we woke up in the morning it was freezing as we crawled out of the shelter and back into the house. Mum had to get breakfast for Miss Higgins, and I had to get ready to go to school.
Our area of south London had been quite badly bombed and as I walked to school I saw that one of the houses in a nearby street had been hit. There were soldiers helping to clear up the debris, and the people who lived there were sorting through the rubble, desperately trying to salvage some of their possessions.
During the war years this became a normal sight. The roads were littered with bits of barrage balloon and shrapnel – pieces of bombs and bullets. I stopped to pick up a few nice silvery bits that I knew would get some admiring glances from the other children at school.
Every child was issued with a gas mask that we had to carry around at all times. Well-to-do children kept theirs in leather or plastic boxes, but mine was in a cardboard box with a string handle so I could carry it over my shoulder. It was all a big game to us. Sometimes the air raids would be during the daytime so we’d have practice runs at school. One morning the siren went off and we all trooped down to the cellar. We sat there having an arithmetic lesson with our gas masks on. They were made of rubber, and had goggles and something that was a bit like a coffee filter at the end of the nose – I found them ever so claustrophobic. So to stop me from feeling frightened and take my mind off wearing one, I decided to make it into a bit of a joke.
‘Look, you can make rude noises,’ I said, blowing a raspberry into my mask.
Everyone laughed and thought it was hilarious, and soon every pupil in my class was doing the same thing. Unfortunately the teachers weren’t amused as we didn’t get much work done.
I can’t ever remember anyone being upset or frightened during the air raids at school. It became part of our daily lives and we just accepted that that’s what happened.
A lot of children were evacuated to the countryside, but Mum refused point blank to let me go.
‘You’re staying here with me,’ she said.
I was so grateful for that. She was all I had in the world, and while the bombs didn’t scare me, being away from her would have terrified me.
Thankfully none of our family were injured or killed, although Mum’s brother, my Uncle Harry, had a bit of a close shave. We received a letter from him one morning telling us how an incendiary bomb had landed on his doorstep, and he hadn’t realised and opened the door.
‘Poor Uncle Harry,’ she said. ‘The bomb went off straight in his face.’
‘Is he all right, Mum?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It gave him a bit of a fright and singed all his eyebrows off, but apart from that he’s fine.’
Even though it was mean, we couldn’t help but have a bit of a chuckle about it.
The war also brought me a new playmate. I became best friends with a pretty little blonde girl called Diana Baracnik, whose family moved into our street after fleeing from Czechoslovakia. We’d climb trees or go to dance classes together, and after school I’d go round to her house and play dollies. I loved my dolls and I had about six of them. Some of them were china and some were papier mâché.
One person who felt very strongly about the war was my brother Raymond. He’d always been a socialist like my father and he shared his strong views.
‘Wars and violence don’t solve anything, Rene,’ he told me. ‘Nobody wins in war.’
He didn’t want any part of it and he was one of those known as conscientious objectors – people who for social or religious reasons refused to go to war.
During the First World War conscientious objectors were seen as criminals and sent to prison. Women would wander round and hand any man who was the right age and not wearing a military uniform a white chicken feather, which was a symbol of cowardice, to shame them into enlisting. Several conscientious objectors killed themselves because they couldn’t cope with the stigma. During the Second World War the punishment wasn’t as severe, but you could still be arrested for refusing to do National Service and you had to appear in front of a tribunal to explain your reasons why. Despite the risks, Mum respected Raymond’s opinion as she shared similar beliefs.
‘Your father would have been so proud of Raymond,’ she told me. ‘I know he would have done exactly the same if he was here now.’
Mum had told me many times that my father was strongly anti-war. Because of his bad asthma he wasn’t called up during the First World War, but his older brother Raymond had been.
‘Raymond was a tail gunner, and the first time he went up he was shot and killed instantly,’ said Mum. ‘Your father was heartbroken. He said his poor brother was just cannon fodder and that only reinforced his anti-war stance.’
It seemed apt that my brother had been named after our late Uncle Raymond.
One morning we were all having our breakfast when there was a loud rap on the front door.
‘Open up,’ shouted a gruff voice. ‘It’s the police.’
Mum looked at Raymond in a panic. I didn’t have a clue what was going on.
‘What shall I do?’ she whispered to him.
‘You’d better go and let them in,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’
Mum went and opened the door, and two officers came marching up the stairs and into our dining room.
‘Raymond Bott?’ one of them said to my brother.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘Young man, I’m afraid we’re going to have to arrest you for failing to register for National Service,’ he said, pulling him up from his chair. ‘Come with us, please.’
‘I’m a conscientious objector,’ he told them. ‘I don’t believe in war.’
‘Well, you will have to appear in front