When I was a bit of a boy, we lived on the edge of a fisherman’s town in the county of Kent in the country of England and there was a war on.
Didn’t matter to us. My sister and I were used to war. We were used to bombs and sirens and searchlights and anti-aircraft fire just the way we were used to cherry trees and thunder showers and the salt breezes off the sea. We gave no more thought to one than we did to the other.
We lived with our mum in a bungalow our dad and granddad had built before Dad went off to join the Royal Air Force. Since then he’d come home every few months ― just about the time we’d forgotten all about him ― show up unexpectedly in the middle of the night, kiss our mum, give us presents, stay a day and then, as suddenly and unexpectedly, be gone. That, too, was natural.
Before he went away, he’d dug a hole in the garden near the goldfish pond, roofed it all with sods and told us it was an air raid shelter. Our mum refused to use it. Mushrooms and toadstools and strangely coloured fungi grew on the walls. Small and sudden creatures lived in the dark corners and our mum made us crawl under the iron table, instead, whenever there was a raid.
That huge iron table had heavy wire screens that could be fastened between the legs all around and the family was supposed to huddle inside when the bombs went off. Then, if the house collapsed on top of you, you were safe. Just buried alive.
Our mum didn’t care much for that table, either, and the iron corners did more damage to the skulls of lively boys and girls than Jerry ever dreamed of.
Jerry had already overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. The British army had escaped from Dunkirk only by a miracle and England was next. On August 8, 1940, Herman Goring’s Luftwaffe began softening up all resistance in preparation for the invasion. He boasted he’d lead Hitler in triumph through London before Christmas Day.
Our bungalow seemed to be in the path of Herman’s bombers. Day after day and night after night, flights of German planes came over to attack London’s docks or Kentish airfields, and found their way either by following the coastline or the “Coastal Road.” We lived between the two. If Jerry met determined resistance from London’s defences and couldn’t reach his target, he’d drop his bombs on us rather than carry them home. If he reached his target but was chased away before he’d finished unloading, we could count on the extras.
And when Hitler eventually sent his infantry, he’d land them first on Kent. Our beaches were therefore barricaded with iron spikes and barbed-wire entanglements. Our streets were blocked with massive concrete “tank traps” and only narrow twisting paths between for civilian traffic. The “Coastal Road” was prevented from becoming a landing strip by heavy steel cables strung across it at intervals between the tops of telegraph poles. Between the “Coastal Road” and the harbour ― and particularly in the woods and fields behind our bungalow ― the Home Guard dug trenches, strung wire and practiced shooting their rifles. My sister and I would often play in those trenches, gather the empty shell cases and wriggle through the barbed wire entanglements. We were always tearing our clothes.
Despite all these precautions, the Germans did land. Our mum heard them. One cold clear night, as she was locking up, she heard voices on the “Coastal Road” and realized with a shock that these voices were speaking German. She was sure of it. Our mum didn’t understand German herself, but she knew enough to recognize the sound of it.
Our mum was little more than five feet tall and weighed barely 90 pounds even after a good dinner ― and good dinners were scarce during the war ― but she squared her shoulders and smoothed her apron and went looking for a weapon with which to defend her family. She found in the shed a little hatchet we used to split old boards into kindling wood for the fire. She took this up and planted herself on the steps, squarely in the doorway, and waited to take on the entire Third Reich with her little hatchet.
She was still there in the dawn when Uncle Joe Sandy came riding by on his bicycle ― a bucket of slops for his hens dangling from each handle bar. He saw our mum and stopped. She told him her tale and he laughed. They were a regiment of Scotsmen, he said, and they were speaking the Gaelic.
Uncle Joe Sandy wasn’t really our uncle. In fact, he was no relation at all, but simply a friend of our dad’s who’d promised to keep an eye on us while he was away at war. Uncle Joe Sandy was too old to go to war himself ― although he’d served as groom and ostler in the first one ― and so became an Air Raid Warden and one of the Home Guard that practised in the field behind our house.
He kept his chickens in a run at the top of the field beside the woods. He kept rabbits in hutches there, too, and sometimes he’d perch me on the saddle of his bike and push me up to see them. I’d help him feed them potato peels and fish heads and tea leaves and odds of stems and stalks from the greengrocers. He and his wife had no children of their own and they gave us all their sweet coupons. They also had a small, brown, pointy-nosed dog named Toby. I was very fond of Toby.
We’d play in the field and in those woods. One day we made a little hut out of limbs and leaves. The next day we went out to play in it again, and found a bomb-crater where our hut had been. Didn’t matter to us. Bomb craters were fun to play in, too.
And we gathered up silver paper (tinfoil, on this side of the sea) from the field and woods, and posted it in a box in front of the library to do our part in the war effort. The enemy would drop clouds of this silver paper to confuse our radar, and we’d find strips of it all over the trees and hedges.
But they stopped us doing that. The Germans began dropping fountain pens and flashlights along with their silver paper. When children picked up these treasures, they exploded and blew their hands off.
That, too, was natural. We knew the wail of air raid sirens and where the shelters were and the words to all the songs we had to sing until the “All Clear” sounded. We knew the sound of airplane engines and could tell “one of ours” from “one of theirs” without seeing it. We knew the sound a bomb made when it was coming down and the sound it made when it hit. We knew what the streets looked like after a raid when the rubble spilled over the pavements and grandfathers in tin hats dug in the ruins for survivors and dead people, and put barricades up around the craters in them. We knew what houses looked like when they’d been bombed, so you could see right into a lady’s upstairs bedroom and see her chamber pot under the bed and her pictures askew on the walls and her underthings hanging out of the chest-of-drawers if she was a messy housekeeper.
John and Marion came to live with us when their house was bombed. They were the same ages as my sister and me. Their father had joined the navy when war was declared and was captured three weeks later when his ship was sunk. They said he was in a P.O.W. camp somewhere.
Their mother had a job and came home late at night after we’d all been put to bed, and was usually gone again in the morning before we got up. We almost never saw her. Didn’t matter to us. We four could run and shout and wrestle in the garden, fall in the goldfish pond, crawl through the barbed wire, play cowboy and indians in the trenches.
We were playing like that one day when a lone German bomber sneaked under the radar and came unannounced over the “Coastal Road” heading for the harbour. Our mum heard it, ran to the door, flung herself flat on the carpet and screamed get down, get down, get down.
The girls ― nasty sensible creatures ― did exactly and immediately as they were told, but John and I looked up to discover the cause of this remarkable behaviour. Straight above our heads was the German bomber. The bomb bays were open and the bombs came tumbling out one after another and you could see the fins and the bellies of them. Right over our heads. John and I decided to get the hell out of the way and bolted for the house.
Those bombs, of course, fell in a curve according to the speed and direction of the aircraft, and so struck the ground no closer than half a mile away. We had more damage done us by our mum for our stupidity in not immediately falling flat. We had drills in falling flat for a long time after.
Sometimes when the siren shrieked, our mum would shove us all four into a kitchen corner, back an overstuffed chair against us and keep us all in this triangular prison while she perched on an arm and read to us from “Tarzan of the Apes.” Tarzan sent Cheetah to fetch the elephants while a bomb made a hole in the High Street. Tarzan placed one foot on the body of his foe and raised his voice in the victory cry of the Great Bull Ape while a Spitfire crashed into the sea in flames.
Christmas was coming. Thanks to the Spitfires, Goring had to postpone leading Hitler through London and we went gathering chestnuts in the woods, dragging our feet through the brown and crumbly leaves in search of the spiney hulls. We found a holly bush ― holly was scattered oddly through our woods ― and carefully broke off a few branches. We always looked for limbs with red berries on, but these were very rare. Rarer still were the white berries of mistletoe. We never did find these, although there were more oak trees in Kent than chestnuts.
One afternoon, our mum heard from a neighbour that the greengrocer was getting some oranges in the next morning. An orange in the toe of the Christmas stocking ― along with a few nuts ― was essential, so our mum got up before daylight and went down to the greengrocers to stand in line until they opened.
It was a very long line. Those oranges probably came from the Mediterranean which Mussolini claimed was his private pond, and merchant seamen may well have lost their lives to bring those Christmas oranges. It was a very long line indeed. By the time our mum got up to the counter, there were just three oranges left. Three oranges. Four kids.
Didn’t matter to us. We made paste out of flour and water, cut coloured paper into strips and pasted the ends together to make links and chains. We hung the paper chains from the corners to the centre of the room. We stuck the holly over the mantelpiece and pinned up over the door a sprig of mistletoe that Uncle Joe Sandy had brought us from somewhere. We didn’t have a tree, but who needed a tree? And our dad was away in the R.A.F. but that was better than being in a prison camp like John and Marion’s dad. We’d have a merry Christmas anyway.
A strange noise woke me up that night. I listened for a while and then got out of bed and padded off to track it down.
Our mum was sitting by the cold fireplace under the Christmas stockings and the paper chains, with her face all ugly and tears running down her cheeks. Her shoulders were shaking and she was snuffling and blubbering and making strange noises in her throat. In her aproned lap she held those three oranges. Two of them had gone bad.
A couple of spoiled oranges didn’t matter to us and I told her so, but our mum ― the little woman who’d guarded us against all the awesome might of the Third Reich with a hatchet ― just couldn’t stop sobbing.
I’d never seen her cry before.
I never saw her cry again.
(First published in the Townships Sun of Christmas 1979; re-published with permission of Jennifer Epps, 2024. Drawing by Stephanie Wells, also originally published in the Christmas 1979 Townships Sun. For more by Bernard Epps, visit the SHOP page on this website.)