Open Writing

The night started quietly enough, but there was the portent of a raid when old Sandy went under the sideboard to his 'action station', as we called it. Somehow he always knew; maybe, with his better hearing, he picked up the drone of the bombers' engines before us, or maybe he heard the sirens further away start up before ours did, but he gave us our first warning sign.

Sure enough, the radio then became a little distorted and soon the sirens started up, a chilling sound that gave everybody a feeling of apprehension in the stomach. Once they stopped their warning, Sandy came out and rejoined us.

Dad had finished his evening surgery and over supper he was telling us about the German airman who bailed out high above Victoria Station. He drifted across the Thames and landed in Harleyford Road, alongside the Oval Cricket Ground which was filled with coils of barbed wire.

The cockney women, some of them Dad's patients, rushed out of the shelters arming themselves with broomsticks, frying pans, rolling pins, dustbin lids, hat pins, and knitting needles and any other weapon they could lay their hands on, and went into battle against the German airman.

Bessie Lipsham was in the vanguard, not that she could run faster than any of the others, but because once she started moving, her momentum was such that she would have trampled to death anyone who was in front of her. The airman was just getting to his knees when Bessie arrived and clobbered him with a carrier bag filled with black market potatoes, that sent him sprawling.

Then the others were at him. The girls were yelling and screaming and hitting and poking and kicking, while knitting needles, frying pans and dustbin lids vied with each other to bash him, to such an extent that, although he was not a hospital case when he landed, it was debateable whether he should have been taken to the hospital or the morgue after the girls got at him.

Three policemen rescued him from the irate womenfolk, which took some doing too, and not before two of them had their helmets knocked off for interfering.

Bessie Lipsham could have killed him all on her own; all she had to do was to sit on him, but that would have left no satisfaction to the rest of the team. So after her softening-up assault to start the battle, Bessie very sportingly stepped back to give the girls a turn, yelling advice as she did so. It was a team effort, worthy to rank with other team performances within the precincts of the Oval Cricket Ground.

After supper we relaxed for a while until we heard the drone of German bombers in the distance coming nearer. Mother was knitting, her right eye half closed against the wisp of smoke, which curled lazily upwards from her cigarette. Dad was reading The Times, and I a book, but in reality we were all listening and pretending not to, as the sound of the bombers became louder and nearer.

CRACK...BAAANG!...CRACK...BAAANG!...CRACK...BAAANG!...The noise of the anti-aircraft shells bursting directly overhead, drowned for a moment the sound of the droning engines above us. The staccato 'CRACK' of the exploding anti-aircraft shells, hard on the eardrums and making us flinch, was followed by the loud, echoing, thunder-like BAAANG, which rolled across the South London rooftops, shaking the windows. The clatter of the falling showers of shrapnel signified an interlude in the percussive symphony until the next salvo, which followed quickly.

For a moment Mother rested her knitting needles. "Oh, I do hope they won't call you out tonight, Dad, it's so heavy."

"Well," Dad replied, "You know that we doctors are on rota and...." He paused. We all listened to the whistle of a falling bomb and the 'crump' of the explosion. It was followed immediately by another, this time a longer whistle. We relaxed; we did not mind the sound of the whistling as the bomb fell; the longer the whistle then the further away it was.

"That one sounded as though it landed in the Fentiman Road area," Dad observed, "but then it's hard to judge the...." — and then it came. It was a frighteningly loud noise, something between that of an express train roaring through a station and a swishing sound of immense power. At the same time atmospheric shock waves hit us, setting off a heavy percussive vibration of the air and atmosphere from the sheer velocity.

Yet it only lasted, perhaps, for two seconds, then there was the deep rumble of a huge explosion. The whole house shuddered, rocked and swayed; the lights went out, came on again, went out, flickered then recovered.

The whole Dugout was filled with a thick dust haze, which we could taste and breathe, dust that had been shaken out of every nook and crevice, both known and unknown. Then, almost simultaneously, there came the sound of shattered glass crashing outside the Dugout, another of our few surviving windows blown out.

Dad jumped up. "My God! That was close. I'd better go up to the front door and have a look."

"Thank the good Lord we are all OK," Mother rejoiced. "Do be careful, Dad." At that moment the front door bell rang urgently. Dad picked up his emergency medical bag and his helmet, white with 'Doctor' printed in large letters on the front.

"That will be the ARP (Air Raid Precaution) Warden. I'd better be off. I'll be back later, don't worry."

It was nowhere nearly all over. It was only a few minutes later, with more gunfire opening up again, when there came the short, quick blasts from the ARP Wardens' whistles, the signal that incendiary bombs were falling in our area.

We had worked out a drill; on every landing and in every room were buckets of water and a stirrup pump. The latter you placed in the bucket of water, holding it in place with a foot pedal, while you pumped with both hands. Another person directed the stream of water from the hose at the fire. We also had buckets of sand handy everywhere.

My duty was to check the house. I dashed up the stairs, two at a time, looking in every room as I went and finally the attic. The attic window jutted out from the sloping roof and had a small flat roof above it. I climbed onto this and inched my way up the roof to the ridge to look down on the sloping front roof. Thank God, all clear and the neighbours too.

I reported back to Mother that ail was well and added, "But there are incendiaries everywhere on the Clapham Road mostly just burning themselves out. There is rubble all over the place. It looks as though that near miss hit just outside the Oval Station. All those houses on the left as you come out of the station, have been hit. There's a lot of activity there with the ARP workers. Behind the houses opposite, it looks as though the Green Line Coach Station is on fire. I'm going to run across to see if I can help."