Three
It’s dull in our town since my playmates left,
I can’t forget that I’m bereft
Of all the pleasant sights they see,
Which the piper also promised me.
Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Even as ploughshares bit into virgin turf, people everywhere were bracing themselves for war. On Saturday, 2 September thunderstorms rumbled and crashed over the south of England; but Sunday, 3 September was gloriously fine and warm. Hardly had the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, made his fateful wireless broadcast at 11.15 a.m., declaring that the country was at war with Germany, when air-raid sirens wailed out, rising and falling over London. Worshippers in St Paul’s Cathedral were ushered down into the crypt, and everywhere in the city householders hastened, as instructed, to stick crosses of brown paper on their windows, to minimize the risk from flying glass. Others hung wet blankets over doorways as a precaution against gas attack, which was many people’s worst fear.
On a blustery morning in Banff, far off on Scotland’s north-east coast, young David Clark saw his father, the minister, running up and down the streets in search of a wireless powerful enough to broadcast the news in St Mary’s Church – and when Chamberlain came on: ‘Tommy, my wee brother, and I immediately looked to the skies. Not for heavenly persuasions of any sort, but simply because we thought that German Stukas would immediately appear.’ At Four Elms, a village in Kent, a boy rushed into the church during the service and handed the vicar a message, saying the war had begun – whereupon the congregation stood and sang the National Anthem. On their way home people collected wood from a spinney, assuming that coal would soon be unavailable.
Out in the country farmers covered hay and corn stacks with tarpaulins, to prevent gas sprayed by low-flying German aircraft, or dropped in bombs, from contaminating the precious stored crops. Over cities and large industrial sites barrage balloons floated in the clear sky like silver whales tethered by steel cables.
The threat of air attack seemed so real that on Friday, 1 September the Air Ministry had ordered a countrywide blackout, in the hope that the suppression of all lights on the ground would make identification of targets harder for the German air force, the Luftwaffe. The new regulations laid down that after dark all windows and doors must be covered by heavy material, cardboard or paint. The rules were strictly enforced by Air Raid Precaution wardens (ARPs) – easily identified by the white W painted on the front of their steel helmets – who adopted an aggressive approach during their rounds, and if they spotted a chink of light would come hammering on the door. Persistent defaulters could be reported to the police and heavily fined.
Anyone showing a light was liable to be besieged by neighbours, angry that one selfish or idle person was endangering everyone else. Total darkness was considered so essential that one night Sergeant D. M. Hughes of the Caernarvon police felt obliged to put out a light left on in an office building by shooting it with a .22 rifle. Outside, street lights had to be switched off, or screened so that they shone downwards. Traffic lights were fitted with slitted covers which filtered signals towards the ground. Car headlamps at first had to be blacked out entirely, but so many accidents occurred that restrictions were soon relaxed, and shielded headlights were allowed.
The blackout was exceedingly tiresome, indoors and out. Unless householders were prepared to live in permanently darkened caves, they had to take down the window covers in the morning and fix them up again in the evening – a time-consuming chore, especially in large houses with multiple windows. Outside, the restrictions put pedestrians in danger, not only of tripping over drain covers and pavement edges, but of being run down by vehicles feeling their way through the streets. White lines were painted along the middle of roads, but even to walk along them was dangerous, when drivers could hardly see ahead of them.
Townspeople were terrified by the threat of air raids. Householders hastened to fill sandbags to protect their properties from blast, or put finishing touches to the Anderson air-raid shelters in their gardens. More than a million and a half of these sturdy little huts, each of which could hold six people, had already been distributed across the country, free to those with an annual income of less than £250, £7 to others. Made of corrugated steel sheets bolted together in hoops, and covered with a fifteen-inch layer of soil, they could withstand the impact of shrapnel, but not a direct hit from a high-explosive bomb. Indoors, Morrison shelters – in effect reinforced steel tables – gave protection against falling masonry.
Country people were less alarmed by the idea of bombs, which they imagined would fall mostly on industrial centres. For farmers, a worse scenario was that of invasion. They could hardly believe that Germans would take over their land or slaughter their livestock. Nevertheless, some of them took precautions – like one man in Dorset who said to a friend: ‘Bloody old ’itler’s coming. I’m going to start saving money. I’ve got one churn buried, full of half-crowns and two-shilling pieces, and I’ve started to fill up another one.’
Five years earlier Winston Churchill had predicted that, in the event of war, three or four million people would be driven out into the open country around London. The exodus of 1939 was not as drastic as that: nevertheless, it was a huge movement, planned with skill and care, which drained the cities and deluged the countryside with a flood of urban children.
‘The scheme is entirely a voluntary one,’ the Government’s Public Information Leaflet No. 3 had announced, ‘but clearly the children will be much safer and happier away from the big cities where the dangers will be greatest.’ The leaflet struggled to reassure everyone that the scheme would be for the best:
The purpose of evacuation is to remove from the crowded and vulnerable centres, if an emergency should arise, those, more particularly the children, whose presence cannot be of assistance. Everyone will realise that there can be no question of wholesale clearance. We are not going to win a war by running away.
Safer – yes. But happier? That was wishful thinking. The diaspora began on the morning of Friday, 1 September, the day Germany invaded Poland. Children streamed out of London – and not only from the capital, but from other cities that were potential targets for the Luftwaffe – Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield. From Manchester alone 66,000 unaccompanied children dispersed to farms, villages and towns in the surrounding country.
On the morning, in London, outside schools all over the city pupils lined up with an escort of teachers and marched off to the nearest bus stop or Underground station. Each child had a brown identity label pinned to its jacket and carried a case containing a change of clothes, as well as a cardboard box holding a black rubber gas mask. For security reasons – and to prevent them following – the parents had not been told where their children were going: they would not know until a message came back to say that the travellers had arrived. Mothers, in tears, waved from behind iron railings, and most of the evacuees were sunk in misery – torn from home, and mourning their cats, dogs, mice, guinea pigs, canaries and parrots, which had either been exterminated or, on Government orders, left behind.
Some of the children from Central Park School in the East End of London were elated, but most were frightened