Another infamous product was dried egg.  This was simply dehydrated egg in powder form and most people complained about it but it was OK for cooking, as in cakes, etc, and I really liked it reconstituted with water and fried in a frying pan.  It tasted great and was rather like a flat, non-fluffy omelet.  We also had dried milk and children were issued with concentrated orange juice and bottles of cod-liver oil.  Most kids hated the cod liver oil but I liked it.  The bread we had was a sort of grayish colour.  I don‘t know why this was but I think it was because they left in a lot of the fiber and didn’t use a bleaching agent.  Personally, I always found it palatable but I don’t suppose my tastes were very sophisticated, especially as I remember enjoying a lot of bread spread with fish-paste usually Salmon & shrimp or bloater.  Jam was still available and I remember the jars were labelled Full Fruit Standard so presumably there was a government laid-down standard for the fruit content but I don’t suppose anyone knew what it was.  Soft drinks soon all carried the same brand labels “SDI” which I believe stood for Soft Drinks Industry.

Some strange rumors grew up about jam and orange and lemon squash.  Rumor had it that raspberry jam contained artificial pips made from wood and that the squashes contained shredded carrot or turnip.  I think that there might well have been something in the latter rumor bearing in mind the shortage of citrus fruits but what on earth would have been gained by having people waste their time manufacturing wooden raspberry pips I just can t imagine.  The Walls Ice Cream tricycles (Stop me and buy one) disappeared from the streets, as did Mr. Lucibells ices sold from a two-wheeled cart drawn by a horse.  I suppose Mr. Lucibell, who was an archetypal Italian, complete with luxuriant moustache and straw hat, was interned for the duration.  Another van to disappear was that of Mr. Sparks, or Sparksy as we called him.  I can remember buying a farthings worth of sweets from him pre-war but I suppose the advent of rationing finished him.  Unlike Mr. Lucibell, he did not return after the war.

It was not only soft drinks that were sold under one name.  All petrol was sold as Pool petrol and I remember seeing the grey tankers marked simply with the word Pool in white block-lettering going about on the streets.  Petrol was rationed and this meant a decrease in the number of cars on the streets.  Not that there were many of them anyway.  Only the upper and upper middle classes had cars and that meant that the only vehicles parked on our estate were vans that drivers had brought home from their work and they were few and far between.  All the cars that were about had shields fitted over their headlamps, which only allowed three small strips of light to penetrate the total blackness before them.  Odd that a Luftwaffe pilot could, allegedly see the glow of a cigarette from 10,000 feet but couldn’t apparently, detect the admittedly small amount of light emitted by a cars shielded headlamps! All the men who were not suitable for call-up to the armed services had to do some sort of Civil Defense duties.  Mr. Thomas was a head warden (after a brief spell in the army).  Dad was in the Decontamination Squad, which was formed to decontaminate following gas attacks, but most of the men in our street were on fire-watching duties.  As it turned out, Dad had the best CD job, as there were no gas attacks and the Decontamination Squads were the only ones never called on to perform their designated task.
The members of the Auxiliary Fire Service came in for a lot of stick in the early days of the war because they were regarded by many as draft-dodgers who were on a cushy number.  Of course, when the Blitz started, they were quite rightly- regarded as heroes.  Although the local authority fire brigades were nationalised in 1941, at the start of the Blitz we were still served by the London Fire Brigade.  Their traditional Fire-engine red appliances were painted grey and they discarded their shiny brass helmets for the military style steel helmet.  After nationalisation, they lost their traditional sailor hats and went over to peaked caps.

Other quaint things happened in those early days of the war. All the iron railings were cut down with oxy-acetylene torches and taken away for salvage to make tanks and guns, we were told.  Road signs also disappeared, the idea being that this would confuse the invading enemy.  Presumably Germans didn’t have maps and compasses!  Appeals were also made for old aluminum saucepans to be used to make Spitfires.  They didn’t collect wood to make Hurricanes, Mosquitoes and Wellingtons as far as I know!  Stories abounded of children getting into trouble for handing in their parents brand new saucepans.  I think this was another early urban myth as I not only heard several true versions at the time but I have since read the same story in at least two books about the war.
Salvage (what we now call recycling) was a big thing.  I remember the schools ran a scheme whereby children were asked to bring in old newspapers and magazines and, depending on the quantities they brought in they would be given a small cardboard disc to wear as a badge designating them as private, corporal or sergeant.  I remember that I took in enough to become a sergeant and badgered my mother to let me take in some magazines she didn’t want to part with.  Finally she acquiesced and I took them in only to be told, when I asked about my sergeant’s badge, that the scheme was no longer in operation.  I seethed with a deep sense of injustice for a long time and they kept the magazines!
Eventually, the bombing inevitably started.  I remember that first day vividly.  We were out on the routine Saturday afternoon shopping with our Mother when the sirens sounded.  We were unused to serious raids so we stopped and watched for a while and I saw a large number of planes, high in the sky, glinting silver in the sun, surrounded by puffs of smoke which was the flak from the anti-aircraft guns.  As things began to look a bit dodgy, Mum took us into the shelter a public shelter which was some sort of cellar in buildings in the grounds of Charlton House.  I recall that the place was packed and there was a young woman breast-feeding her baby.  I don’t know how long we stayed in that shelter it seemed like hours to me, with guns banging and the whistle of falling bombs and the resultant explosions.  Oddly enough, I don’t remember being frightened this time.  Fear was obviously in the anticipation rather than the experience.  When finally the all-clear sounded and we crawled out of the shelter we looked out across the river from the top of Church Lane and saw a gigantic pall of black smoke rising from the docks.  We made our way home and, as darkness fell, the sky glowed red from the fires which were still raging in London s dockland.  Dad said, they’ll be back tonight - and they were.

We slept in the shelter that night and it was the first of many nights that we did so.  Again it was a cacophony of bangs, crashes, and whistles with the incessant drone of the German bombers above.  It was accepted that you could distinguish between ours and theirs and it certainly seemed to be true.  The German planes seemed to have an eccentric beat which clearly differentiated them from the British planes.  I sneaked a look out of the shelter one night behind Dad s back and was fascinated by the searchlights sweeping the sky and the sight of the flak.  The Blitz seemed to me, as a child, to go on for ages because we slept in the shelter but as time went on the daylight raids became fewer though the night onslaught continued.  The Blitz had largely finished after the end of May 1941 until 1944.  We got quite used to the noise of the guns, planes and bombs, although it was pretty considerable mainly because there was a heavy AA Regiment at Shrapnel Barracks which was only a mile or so away.  When these guns fired, it shook our shelter, and the candles and the lamp flames used to jump at each bang.  Despite this we took comfort in their presence.  Mum used to call the loudest of these Big Bertha after the 1st World War gun, although our Big Bertha was several guns!  We thought that they were shooting down lots of German bombers but I believe post-war assessments showed that they were largely ineffective except in forcing the bombers to operate at a greater height than they would have liked.

A great talking point at the time was the so-called landmines.   These were not strictly speaking landmines at all.  They were dropped by parachute and seemed to have a delayed fuse.  They were certainly powerful.  One landed in Charlton Park Lane and destroyed all the houses in that road in the immediate vicinity and also those in Kenya Road, which backed on to it.  One of the houses, which went in this incident, was No 9 Park Lane, the house of the Moys where I had gone for my lessons earlier on.  We became accustomed to seeing gaps appearing in the housing.  What was once someones house had become a pile of rubble.  Sometimes, there were bizarre sights like a bed still in position on an upper floor although the rest of the house had been destroyed.  Eventually, the rubble would be cleared and the bomb-site would be utilised by the kids as places to play.  Even better were the blast-damaged houses which lay derelict, shattered and abandoned.  These were very good for playing the war games which obsessed us all.  It wasn’t very politically correct (we didn’t even know the phrase let alone its meaning) but every boy seemed to have a gun of some sort   usually cut from a large piece of wood of which there were plenty in the bombed houses.  We used to play in the trenches which had been dug in the park.  We also played in the old pavilion which we called the Old Hut.  We used to indulge in brick raids in there.  One squad of kids would defend the hut against another, the weapons being stones, pieces of bricks   even pieces of rock-hard dried clay.  How nobody ever got seriously hurt I shall never know.

Another favorite pastime was collecting shrapnel.  Every boy had a tin or other receptacle containing jagged pieces of metal which had once been shells or even bombs.  The larger the lump of shrapnel, the greater the prestige of its owner.  The richest prize of all was to get your hands on the nose-cone of a shell.  These were few and far between and were consequently much sought after.  The Germans, later in the war, exploited this inclination of people to pick up strange objects by dropping anti-personnel bombs called butterfly bombs.  I never saw one but I remember the posters showing what they looked like.  Although I never picked up a butterfly bomb we did get up to all sorts of things, which would have caused our parents to have heart attacks, had they known what we were up to.  I recall that in Victoria Way there were some old Victorian or Edwardian houses of some three or four storeys which were bomb-damaged and derelict.  On the way home from school one day we got into them, went to the top floor and leapt from roof to roof.  This wasn’t difficult as the gap was only about 2 feet but it needed only one slip for a nasty accident to occur.  Derelict buildings were, as I say, always favorite places and I can still vividly recall the smell of stale damp plaster which seemed to pervade all bombed buildings. The occasional unexploded bomb caused excitement and sometimes you would see barriers across the end of a street and witness the arrival of the bomb-disposal squad in their vehicles which had the mudguards painted red.  We always tried to hang around to see what was going on but the police always moved us on. At school, our shelter consisted of one of the classrooms whose ceiling was supported by steel girders.  The windows had been bricked up on the outside to a thickness of several bricks to absorb any blast.  Just how effective it would have been in the event of a bomb landing anywhere close is a matter for conjecture but we felt fairly safe whenever we had to go there during air raids.

On the streets, there were surface shelters brick buildings with a thick roof of reinforced concrete.  There was a rumor that these shelters could be more of a hazard than a protection if a bomb landed nearby.  The story was that the brick walls could be blown away allowing the roof to fall on the occupants in one large, deadly lump.  Another thing which began to appear on the streets was the static water tank.  These were usually of brick-built construction and they held over a thousand gallons of water for fire-fighting purposes.  Fire appliances in those days were also many and varied.  There were the pre-war pumps, pump-escapes, turntable ladders and hose-laying lorries but these were supplemented by personnel-carrying vans and even taxis, all towing trailer-pumps.  You would also see other vehicles about   those carrying the ARP rescue services and, of course, the Army and RAF lorries.  Very occasionally you would see tanks and bren-gun carriers in transit.

Wardens posts were another building which suddenly appeared.  Outwardly they were very plain concrete structures rather like a military bunker.  There the air-raid wardens gathered in emergencies and did whatever it was that air-raid wardens did.  Our belief as kids was that they did nothing other than shout Put that light out!   I m sure they did sterling work in marshalling all the ARP services but we knew nothing of that.

During the War Chapter 1

During the War Chapter 3

During the War Chapter 4

Submitted by Leslie Edwards
Location South East London