Blitz Kids Read Free Page B

what the sound meant. There was no Sunday lunch that day. Her mother was too occupied putting sticky tape across the windows, to prevent the shattering when bombs dropped, to bother about cooking.
    In London’s Bethnal Green, nine-year-old Alf Morris found the coming conflict confusing. No one he knew wanted a war; instead, everyone just wanted to get on with their lives. Men wanted to work to provide for their families, not go off to war to fight an enemy that had been defeated just twenty years before: ‘I had no understanding of what it meant. Everyone said it would be over in a few weeks. The men who’d been in the First War said nothing would happen.’
    Some older children were excited by the announcements. Young men were either concerned about how war might affect them or fired by a desire to do their duty. Older men, veterans of the earlier world war, felt their hearts sink, knowing the impact it would have on the younger generations. Women feared for their husbands and sons, whilst optimists thought it would all be over quickly and wasn’t worth concerning themselves with. On the other hand the pessimists expected to die as soon as Chamberlain finished speaking. Fourteen-year-old Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as the politician Tony Benn was originally named) was immediately struck by the implications of the declaration of war: ‘It was very frightening when the war began. I sat there with my two brothers – one who was going into the air force and I knew might be killed. He was.’
    In Portugal, where he was on holiday from Winchester public school, sixteen-year-old Patrick Delaforce was struck by the tone with which Chamberlain spoke: ‘I can remember very clearly the sad, dejected, defeated voice of Neville Chamberlain. I certainly thought, “This man is not a leader.” I wanted to return to Winchester.’ In north London, fourteen-year-old errand boy Stanley Scott was listening to the radio with his bus-driver father, a veteran of the Great War:
    We were listening to old dreary pants bloody Chamberlain. He said, ‘This country is now at war with Germany.’ I shot across the road because the family didn’t have a radio. I banged on the door, the wife opened it: ‘What’s the matter, Stanley?’ I went in and told old Joe – who’d lost his leg in the first war. His reaction was ‘Gawd help us.’
    But Stan Scott was enthused by the idea of war and had long dreamed of being a soldier. With his father having been a regular soldier, and his uncles all being veterans of the Great War, this seemed an ideal time to be living. As a child he had played with spurs brought home from the Army by his father, a former artilleryman, pretending the family’s sofa was a horse. War, it seemed, was a time of opportunity for the military-minded. Though just fifteen, he was already determined to do his duty.
    Others had a less optimistic view of war. In Huddersfield, thirteen-year-old orphan Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes had some idea of what the conflict might mean:
    I was vaguely familiar with the events in Europe leading up to this moment, but I must admit that those words filled me more with a feeling of excitement, than a realization of the horrors that the world was about to witness. Due to my youthful optimism, or my lack of a realistic approach to the seriousness of the situation, I failed to recognize that in a matter of a few years I myself would be very much involved in a personal fight to survive the rigours of war.
    Bill later recalled feeling exhilarated by the prospect of war. In many ways, this was a strange emotion. His own father had met a premature death brought on by wounds sustained in the Great War. Before he died, Sykes senior had taken his son to the cinema to see All Quiet on the Western Front : ‘I think my father’s objective was to show that war is not full of heroics like John Wayne dashing up a hill to plant a flag. War is bloodshed and killing.’ Despite their differing experiences and outlook, both