During an
occasional restless night, as insomnia prowls about my
bed and I wait for my brain to finally spin down and
sleep to envelop me in its soft wings; my mind drifts
back to my beginnings in England. Faint images and
experiences I had long forgotten, start to swim out of
distant corners of my memory, some just shadowy wisps
others as clear to me as yesterday's happenings.
At these times, the period of my life that I most
often reflect on is the tumultuous era of the late 1930's
and early 1940's- the days of my childhood. Perhaps at
this point I should digress from my own memories of that
time and briefly discuss the political storm which was
then brewing in Europe.
This was the moment when the leaders of Germany's
Third Reich decided to right the wrongs that they felt
that the victors of World War I, principally France,
Britain, The United States, and Italy had committed
against them after Germany had signed the armistice that
had ended the "Great War" in 1918. This is how it
began.
At four o'clock on the morning of September 1,
1939, the Wehrmacht of Adolph Hitler's immoral regime of
gangsters and thugs, without warning, provocation,
ultimatum or declaration of war, attacked their neighbor
Poland. German airplanes machine-gunned and slaughtered
fleeing civilian refugees, as well as soldiers.
Simultaneously the Nazi's seized the disputed Danzig
corridor.
Reluctantly, the British government under the
ineffective leadership of its pacifist Prime minister,
Neville Chamberlain, issued an ultimatum to Hitler:
Completely remove your forces from Poland by Sept. 3, or
a state of war will exist between us. The Nazi dictator
of Germany had always been able to get his way before by
using a succession of lies, deceit and bluff. No doubt
"Der Fuhrer" thought he could stare down the Allies
again, and continue to extend his occupation of the rest
of Europe in his quest for Lebensraum for the "Master
Race."
This time however, Hitler had completely misread
Chamberlain's temper. At last the British government's
previous policy of appeasement had ended. So when the
Nazi War Lord ignored Mr. Chamberlain's ultimatum, the
British, whose patience was completely exhausted,
declared war on Germany at eleven A.M. on September 3.
Although their Armed Forces were not fully prepared for
combat against the mighty German war machine.
Fifteen minutes later, at eleven fifteen A.M.,
apprehensive citizens of the United Kingdom with their
ears glued to their radios, heard the following statement
read slowly and solemnly by their Prime Minister on the
B.B.C.:
"I am speaking to you from the cabinet room at
number ten Downing Street. This morning the British
Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final
note, stating that unless the British government heard
from them by eleven o'clock that they were prepared at
once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war
would exist between us. I have to tell you now, that no
such undertaking has been received, and consequently this
country is at war with Germany. The situation in which no
word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted, and no
people or country could feel itself safe, has become
intolerable. Now we have resolved to finish it. May God
bless you all. May he defend the right, for it is evil
things that we shall be fighting against, brute force,
bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution; and
against them I am certain that right will prevail."
The French government reluctantly followed
Britain's lead, and their Prime Minister, Eduard
Daladier, declared war against Germany at five P.M. the
same day.
W.W.II had begun, it was to last for almost six
terribly violent and bitter years. The civilized world
plunged over a precipice into a new dark age, during
which time untold millions of innocents perished.
Minutes after the Prime Minister had finished his
broadcast, the banshee wailing of air raid sirens were
heard in London. Thousands of Londoners filled with fear
and consternation, ran to take cover, but fortunately, it
was a false alarm. Before long the "All Clear" sounded a
long, continuous note. With many sighs of relief London's
residents emerged from basements and shelters into the
daylight.
The final blow against the Poles fell on September
17, 1939 when the USSR, which had made a clandestine non
aggression pact with Hitler, swept in from the East, its
Red Army conquering all before them. Germany and Russia
rapidly divided up the corpse of the vanquished Polish
nation between them. The Soviet Armies were to stay in
Poland until the dissolution of the USSR in
1992.
Because war fever had been in the air all summer,
the British Government had decided that if the
unthinkable should take place and war break out, all
school aged children living in the major cities would be
evacuated out of harm's way, and leave their homes to
seek refuge in safer areas in the countryside.
As a consequence of geopolitical intrigues and
Machiavellian schemes entirely beyond my understanding, I
found myself, at the tender age of five and a half years,
at my school on the morning of Sept 1, together with all
of my fellow students and our teachers. We were assembled
in our auditorium at the Jews Infants School in
Commercial Street, Stepney. The school had been founded
back in 1841 by a Jewish philanthropist, a Mr. Walter
Josephs when he learned that The London Society for the
Promotion of Christianity Among the Jews was planning to
open an infant's school in the vicinity.
I was accompanied by my mother and my brother
Norman, who was then a slender, mischievous thirteen year
old lad. Totally bewildered and confused by all the
noise, excitement and activity going on around me, I
clung to my mother's coat, never letting go except for an
occasional visit to the boy's bath room. None of us
children had the slightest idea of why we were all there,
or what momentous events in world history were taking
place around us.
Miss Silverman, my favorite teacher, approached my
Mother and handed her a tag and a safety pin. "Write his
name and address on this!" she said, "And pin it to his
coat." Before long, all of my schoolmates & I had
tags dangling from our coats as though we were two legged
packages waiting to be mailed.
After a seemingly endless wait, we formed a line
two by two and we left the school playground through the
wrought iron gates, led by our Headmistress Mrs.
Davidoff. We hurried through the narrow working-class
streets of the east end of London. We turned right onto
Wentworth Street and a few minutes later as we turned
left into Brune Street, I took one last look up at our
apartment in the familiar, soot stained block of flats
where my family had lived since 1933, the year before my
birth. Then we crossed Bell Lane, walked through the
medieval Artillery Lane, and on through Frying Pan alley.
We crossed the bustling wide Bishopsgate Street as the
City of London bobbies held up the traffic for us, with
our parents walking alongside us. Many mothers and
fathers held their child or children by the hand. Some
mothers, who perhaps had nowhere to leave their youngest
child, pushed their infant children in baby carriages.
People in the crowded streets turned around to stare at
us as we hastened past. Some women no doubt understanding
what was happening to us, dabbed at their eyes. Finally,
perhaps fifteen minutes later we arrived at our
destination the cavernous, dingy Liverpool Street
Station, the terminus of the London and North Eastern
Railway.
The walls and ceiling of the old Gothic-styled
building were coated with thick layers of grime and soot,
the residue of smoke from countless coal fired
locomotives-deposited there over the preceding seventy
odd years. The sulfurous stink from the engines hung in
the air like a brown miasma. The vast station vibrated
and rang with a deafening cacophony of sounds. Departure
and arrival announcements constantly boomed from the
public address system. With a hiss and roar, clouds of
steam issued from the huge engine's brake cylinders. The
wheels of the many baggage carts, loaded high with
passenger's luggage, squealed in protest as harried
porters pushed and tugged them around the crowded
platforms. The hullabaloo and tumult from the hordes of
confused children and parents scurrying hither and yon
all blended together. Truly, the building was a veritable
bedlam.
This scene was to be repeated that day and the
next several days in all of the nation's large,
vulnerable cities. Between three and four million people,
consisting mainly of mothers and their children, but also
including elderly people and invalids, participating in
what was the nation's largest mass evacuation ever
attempted, left their homes to seek safety in the next
few days. Those people who had the means, simply left the
large towns and cities at their own expense and rented
accommodations in whatever rural community they could
find that had temporary quarters available for
them.
After a seemingly interminable wait on the
crowded, dirty platform, we kids scrambled aboard the
sooty, third class carriages of the specially supplied
train of the L.N.E.R. Each class was accompanied by its
often frazzled home-room teacher. Shortly thereafter, the
guard garbed in his blue uniform and peaked cap, blew his
whistle and waved his green flag to give the go ahead to
the engineer. We kissed our tearful parents goodbye, and
the train chuffed and chugged its way out of the station,
slowly picking up speed, belching black smoke and white
steam, taking us to-we knew not where. The smell of the
smoke, the click-clack of the train's wheels, the cinders
in my eye were all new experiences for me; it was my very
first train ride.
Although Norman and I had attended different
schools, our parents had decided to send him along with
my school to keep an eye on me rather than let him go
away with his own schoolmates from The Jews Free School,
which I know he really would have preferred.
We hung out of the train's windows, watching the
unfamiliar countryside slide past, pointing them out to
each other whenever we glimpsed unfamiliar sights like
cows, horses, sheep and other exotic creatures. We
wondering out loud whither we were bound and what our
fate would be. After traveling for about an hour or so,
we arrived at our destination, the small town of
Newmarket in the county of Suffolk.
Located some sixty-five miles north east of
London, Newmarket is famous all over Britain as the home
of one of the nation's best grass race tracks and some of
the best-known horse-breeding stables in the country
including the National Stud. In fact, racing has been the
town's principle business and obsession since the reign
of King James I over three hundred years ago.
A few minutes after the train had come to a
grinding halt, our teacher told us that we had reached
our destination. Gathering up our few belongings, we
disembarked from the overcrowded train and assembled in
groups on the station platform. After a short wait, a
green uniformed lady of the. W.V.S. (Woman's Volunteer
Service) pushing a cart loaded to the gunwales, appeared
and handed each of us a package containing a couple of
sandwiches, a bun, and a small bottle of milk. After
wolfing down this brief lunch, we boarded the special
double decker busses that had been rented for this
occasion by the local municipal authorities. They soon
distributed small groups of us to different sections of
the small town. Led by our teachers and a Billeting
Officer, we walked through the unfamiliar streets, each
child holding hands with a classmate in the formation
known in England as a "crocodile." We all carried a small
bag or shouldered a backpack containing our personal
belongings. Many a child was clutching a favorite doll, a
beat up Teddy Bear or a Golliwog for comfort.
Slung over every child's shoulder by a piece of
cord, was a brown cardboard box containing the red rubber
gas mask, shaped like the face of Mickey Mouse, with big
round glass eye pieces and a long nose like appendage. We
had each been issued the gas masks before we left our
school. The string on my gas mask box must have been too
long because the box was constantly banging against my
legs at every step I took. We had been given these masks
since many people feared that the Germans would drop
poison gas bombs on us after the start of hostilities as
the Italians had done during their conquest of Ethiopia.
Indeed, deadly phosgene and mustard gas, as well as other
poison gases had been used extensively with horrific
results, by all sides during W.W.I.
My mother had been injured during a German air
raid on London in 1917, by Zeppelin dirigibles and Gotha
bombers. During this raid that the enemy dropped
explosive and mustard gas bombs on the civilian
population. Mum told me many times that it was whilst she
was recovering from these injuries, she and my father had
gotten married later that year.
The authorities required everyone to carry their
gas mask with them wherever they went. Since we evacuees
were sent to what was considered to be a safe area, we
very seldom complied with that regulation. However many
people living in the cities, as well as members of the
Armed Forces, the police and firemen did carry their gas
masks around with them everywhere they went whilst they
were both on and off duty.
Our particular group was dropped off at a street
called Exning Road, near the outskirts of the town. The
small children, one or two at a time, were marched up
garden paths to disappear from the view of the rest of us
and into the unfamiliar homes of their new foster
parents.
Eventually our turn came Norman and I were led
across the Exning Rd. by an anonymous local official to
number 32 L------ Terrace. I particularly remember the
house number since it happened to be the same number as
that of our London apartment, 32 Brune House. We
nervously ascended the steep flight of concrete steps to
the front door of the house, and were introduced by the
Billeting Officer to our hosts, Mr. and Mrs. B. and their
son Terry, who was about four years old. Both Mr. and
Mrs. B. appeared to be in their late 30s or early 40s.
She and Terry were blonde and blue eyed. Her husband had
a rather tweedy appearance, with a cigarette permanently
glued to his lower lip. Shortly after that, Mrs. B. took
our coats and bags, and showed us to what was to be to
our bedroom. It was their guest room, upstairs at the
rear of the house.
After tea, which consisted of several slices of
bread and jam and tea, Mrs. B. wrote her address on the
post cards that our teachers had distributed to us before
we left our school, so that we could let our parents know
where we were now living. We mailed them home that
evening from the mail box at the next corner.
I have very few clear memories of the three or
four months I stayed with this family, but three things
definitely stick in my mind. The first was that I was
horribly homesick for my parents and the familiar
surroundings of home. The second was that Mr. B. was a
"Turf accountant," or bookmaker by trade, and worked
during the racing season at the Newmarket race course.
The last was that this "Gentleman" made the first of the
many anti-Semitic remarks I was to hear during my almost
five years experience as an evacuee, and during my two
years of involuntary servitude in the Royal Army
Ordinance Corps later in my life. But that's another
tale!
It happened in this fashion. The date was a few
days before Christmas 1939. One evening, several
neighborhood youngsters came to our front door and began
singing Christmas carols. At the conclusion of their
performance, Mr. B. said to me, "Well, aren't you going
to give them some money?" "I don't have any," I answered.
He shot back, "Well, you wouldn't give them any if you
had it, would you? You're a Jew boy."
Early in 1940, much to my delight, my parents took
me back home to London. But for reasons still unknown to
me, Norman stayed behind in Newmarket with the B. clan.
Sometime later that spring, all the teachers and students
of my school were relocated about five miles to the
northwest to the small village of Fordham in the flat fen
country of the adjoining county of Cambridgeshire. Once
again they all had to get used to living with unfamiliar,
new families. This small rural community had a peacetime
population numbering perhaps fifteen hundred souls. Some
of the kids found good homes with kind well-meaning
folks, but many did not, and soon returned to their
families in London.
On September 7,1940, the Germans began their
Blitzkrieg on London. Night after night after night the
enemies' bombers and fighters swarmed over London and
other major cities in their hundreds. They were based
just across the narrow English channel in defeated and
humiliated France. Many intruders were shot down by our
anti aircraft guns, and the Spitfires and Hurricanes of
the R.A.F. But our radar, which had been secretly
developed during the 1930's, and which was capable of
detecting the enemy planes as far away as one hundred and
twenty miles at altitudes up to thirty thousand feet, is
really what made the strategic difference to our
defenses. Without the aid of this new defensive
technology our Air Force would have been crushed by the
superior numbers of the German war planes, and our
islands swiftly overrun and plundered by the Nazi hordes,
just as they had most of the rest of the Continent of
Europe.
I vividly recall standing on the balcony of our
apartments on the night the "Blitz" began in earnest. I
stood transfixed with disbelief as I watched with my
parents and our neighbors as the skies to the east of us
turned crimson. We heard the savage crump, crump, crump
of bursting bombs. Our eyes stung from the clouds of
acrid smoke drifting over us as most of the vast complex
of the London docks, from Rotherhithe in the east to
Tower Bridge in the City, went up in a raging holocaust
of flames.
Prewar, these docks had been a part of one of the
largest dock complexes in Europe. They were targets
impossible for the Luftwaffe to miss, and they didn't.
Wave after wave of enemy planes rained down their bomb
loads upon the East End of London. The raids continued on
and on for more than eight hours. Attacking planes needed
no help to find the capital city that night. The raging
dockland fires were all the beacons they needed. The
docks and surrounding areas burned constantly for days
afterwards. Our exhausted firefighters struggled manfully
against insurmountable odds, but they were rendered
virtually impotent due to the enormous scale of the havoc
wreaked upon that quarter of the city. Most of the water
mains were shattered, and the low water pressure added
immeasurably to the problems of the men of The National
Fire Service.
As the war progressed, German cities, in their
turn, felt these same horrors of war meted out to them,
Bremen, Hamburg, Frankfort, Dresden, Berlin, Cologne,
Lubeck, and most other large cities were laid waste by
the constant night and day raids of the British and
American air forces.
During what became known as the Battle of Britain,
London was pounded continuously for fifty-seven nights by
an average force of one hundred and sixty enemy bombers.
During this period, the overworked flyers and ground
staff of the Royal Air Force destroyed 1733 German
aircraft, while losing 915 British planes. The Battle of
Britain is deemed by British historians to have begun on
July 10, 1940 and to have ended on Oct. 31,
1940.
Britain was and still is essentially a
manufacturing country with a population quite high in
proportion to its land area so that the bulk of its food
supply, as well as raw materials, and all of its oil and
gasoline had to be imported from overseas. The German U
Boats were constantly sinking the ships that were
bringing in much needed food, and supplies for industry.
According to Winston Churchill, in his book The Gathering
Storm, during the first eight months of the war, they
sank one hundred and seventy-two British and merchant
ships, and by 1942, they were sending over 700,000 tons
of US and British shipping to the bottom every month. The
Allies were losing ships faster than their shipyards
could replace them.
Practically every kind of foodstuff, other than
fresh vegetables, milk, and bread was strictly rationed.
In October 1939, the Ministry of Food issued every
civilian with a ration book, and long queues for food
became the order of the day. Queuing became a standard
way of life, and "jumping the queue" was done at one's
peril. The custom of "queuing up" continues to the
present day, and "Brits" still wait patiently in line for
busses, trains, movies, theaters, etc.
Everyone had to carry a powder blue National
Registration Identity Card with them. This card contained
one's name, address, and identity number. Your number
soon became as familiar as your own name since it had to
be noted on any form, or government document one filled
out. I can still recall fifty years later that my number
was TYEI-209-5. Your I.D. card always had to be carried
on your person, or you risked being fined two shillings,
(not a small sum in those days) if you were stopped by a
policeman, or a soldier on duty, and you didn't have it
with you.
The food rationing system seemed to work
reasonably well, albeit with much griping and complaining
by the public, although the allotment of food per person
was small. Each person was allowed to buy one pound of
butter, one pound of ham or bacon, one pound of cheese,
forty-eight ounces of sugar per month (but this was soon
reduced), thirty-six ounces of fresh meat, a small amount
of canned goods, and only eight ounces of tea a month.
The ration of only a half a pound of tea a month was a
particular onerous burden in tea-loving Britain; in our
family, we used our tea leaves for a second, and
sometimes a third time, in order to stretch our meager
ration. This tea-drinking habit is widespread in all
strata of British society from Royalty to the common man.
The nation's favorite hot beverage is enjoyed by most of
its inhabitants anywhere from one to eight times each
day. It's drunk to heat one up in winter and to cool one
down in summer. It's drunk as a morning "waker-upper" and
an evening's refreshment. It's drunk to counteract shock
and to celebrate happy times. It's drunk to pick up one's
spirits on sorrowful occasions, to be neighborly, or
simply because it's four o-clock. , and that, as everyone
knows, is tea time.
An ordinary can of Spam became a much sought-after
item, and ah, a tin of red Salmon-that was a rare prize
indeed hoarded by the housewife for a really special
occasion. We didn't see bananas again until 1945. In
fact, children who were born after the commencement of
the war, had to be introduced to bananas, when the yellow
fruit became available again after the war's end. At one
particularly bad period during the war, the egg ration
was reduced to one egg per person per month. Dried eggs
(when they could be found) were reconstituted and used in
place of the real thing. Many recipes were devised by
newspaper cookery columnists, to prepare the yellow
powder in more appetizing ways, but we could always
detect the difference in taste between these ersatz eggs
and the real McCoy.
Poultry and rabbits were unrationed, but they soon
became almost unavailable in city butcher's shops, and
were sold at vastly inflated prices when they could be
found. Fresh fish, which had been abundant prewar and had
been a staple food in our island nation, became scarce
because many fishermen were now serving in the Navy. The
Royal Navy used many wooden hulled fishing boats for mine
sweeping duties, thereby reducing the size of the fishing
fleet still further. Toward the end of the war, whale
meat, and a mysterious South African fish called Snoeck
(pronounced Snook) were offered for sale, but both
quickly became the butt of comedians' jokes, and never
became popular with British housewives.
However, those people who had money to spend could
usually find some extras, and a black market in scarce
items rapidly arose. Although fines were severe for
anyone caught being involved in black marketeering, this
illegal activity still went on covertly all over the
country.
Minor criminals known as "Spivs," or "Wide Boys,"
some of whom were military deserters, who usually dressed
in loud suits, whose jackets had padded shoulders, and
who sported wide colorful ties, two tone shoes and pencil
thin mustaches, made a handsome living by supplying
stolen food or other hard-to-get items to those who would
buy without asking too many questions about its source. A
thriving trade in stolen or forged ration books also
quickly arose. Petrol was very tightly rationed and was
practically unavailable for civilian use. There was only
one type being sold, and this was known as "Pool."
Petrol for commercial use was tinted red, so that
it could be readily detected if used illegally in private
cars, but the "Wide Boys" quickly found out that if they
poured the commercial petrol through the filter of a gas
mask, the red coloring could be eliminated. Another
technique that these sleazy individuals used to remove
the dye was to add a small amount of bleach to each
gallon of petrol. I have also heard urban legends of
petrol being filtered through loaves of bread, but I
can't confirm that it actually was done.
As far as we kids were concerned, the rationing of
candy was one of the toughest burdens we had to bear,
with a quota of just three quarters of a pound of candy
per person per month. Now, in normal times, the average
person might not eat that much candy in several months,
but human nature being what it is, if one couldn't get
something one coveted it even more. In my case, with my
sweet tooth, that ration was consumed long before the end
of the month arrived. One of my favorite kinds of candy
was Rowntrees Fruit Gums. These were rubbery, fruit
flavored jellies; shaped like fruits; and were sold in
either four ounce boxes, or in tubes. The candies in the
tubes were round and flat, and were approximately the
size and shape of a solid LifeSaver This variety of Fruit
Gums was
called Pastilles. I really enjoyed these candies,
and would gobble down a whole box of them while watching
the Saturday afternoon movies
All street lights and electric signs were shut off
for the duration of the war, all automobile headlights
had to be masked so that just a narrow strip of the
headlight was exposed, and every household had to install
blackout curtains over all of their windows at night to
make it harder for the Nazi planes to find their targets.
With the establishment of the "Blackout," every one
carried his own torch (flashlight) around with them at
night, and batteries and bulbs were sometimes hard to
find. To coax the last scintilla of life out of a dying
battery, people would sometimes warm them for a short
time in the oven before they ventured out after
nightfall.
Street curbs and the bases of lampposts were
painted white, but this didn't prevent some unlucky souls
from tripping off the sidewalk at night and twisting
their ankles.
To avoid having to install blackout curtains on
our bedroom windows, and to eliminate the chore of
putting them up, and taking them down twice daily, my
father painted the window glass with black paint. This
meant that either we had to keep the windows open during
daylight hours, or keep the lights on during cold or wet
weather. In response to official instructions, Dad
applied brown gummed paper tape in an X shaped pattern
from corner to corner to every pane in all of our
windows. The rationale for doing this, was to reduce the
risk of our being cut by shards of flying glass if a bomb
should explode nearby. Some time later when my
resourceful brother Norman, returned home from Fordham,
he daubed blobs of luminous paint along the length of the
bedroom wall so that he could find his way to the
bathroom at night without having to grope for the light
switch which was inconveniently located at the opposite
end of the bedroom.
After it became evident to my folks that the war
had finally reached us in earnest, my Mother packed a
couple of bags, and the next thing that I knew she and I
were passengers on the two o'clock train to Cambridge,
where after a long wait, and several cups of tea later we
boarded the Fordham bound train.
Meanwhile, in Fordham, my big brother had found a
home with the P. family. Mr. P. drove a lorry for a local
trucking company. His wife, a rather thin, chain-smoking
woman worked in an office in the village, and drove one
of the very few civilian cars still being used in
Fordham. They had a young daughter, Vera, and a black and
white ill-tempered mutt named Bonzo. The P's lived at the
end of the row, in a small, white council house which had
pebble dashed (stucco) walls, and a green tiled roof.
Their house on Eldith Avenue, which they rented from the
local municipal council, was identical to every other
house in the housing estate which was located at the
periphery of the village.
Mr. Howlett, the village Billeting Officer and
member of the Fordham Parish Council, found me
accommodation at the house next door to Norman with the
family of Mr., and Mrs. H., and their son and daughter.
The lad was about my age and size, perhaps a little
younger, and their daughter was at that time a petulant,
spoiled teenager, with shoulder length black hair. Since
neither the P., nor H. family had any room for my mother
to sleep, she lodged for a few days in a small room above
the saloon bar at a nearby Public House
Since my mother had to look after Dad, my eighteen
year old brother, Toby, and my twenty-one year old sister
Hetty, she had to leave Norman and me after a few days to
return to her domestic duties back home in London.
Mug
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