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A Child and the Blitz

© William Waller

In one of my lives, I was a teacher in a training college in Zambia. This was at a time when Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was getting more than a little irate with the country for giving unlimited shelter to the 'freedom' fighters who could always sneak into Rhodesia, murder a few what they would term Uncle Toms, and get back into Zambia before dawn. So Ian Smith's men started to make some raids of their own, the first of which was a bombing raid on a freedom fighter camp near Livingstone, at the Victoria Falls. The next day in class, one girl said she wished she had been there, it must have been so exciting!

I suddenly found myself giving her a proper scolding for talking such nonsense. After 40 years, a part of the trauma of living in the London area during the Blitz, had finally shown itself. The girl was pretty taken aback but I could see from her look that she just thought I was another crazy white man. Certainly the Africans talked a lot about it, but for us expatriates living in Lusaka, the capital, it was yet more unease in lives that were nightly interrupted by the sound of AK 47s being fired in ripping bursts all round the horizon.

My father was a London policeman, and he was posted to a more rural area early in 1940, to Woodford in Essex, about 7 or 8 miles from the City of London, and the London Docks. The house was a big detached Victorian house, in a tree-lined crescent, just a little way from the main road. It was a police house, so I do not know how a huge old oil painting came to be in the dining room, dark and dirty, making it impossible to see the picture. The other main feature that I remember was the large staircase leading upstairs which had, underneath it, an equally large cupboard. Even allowing for the fact that I was a small boy aged 6, this was truly a magic cave, normally used for hanging coats, and acting as a broom cupboard, which seemed to stretch back endlessly from the door and in which you could play many games.

In September that year, however, it became something more and is the memory that I can still visualize. In that month the Blitz started, and it lasted forever. Every one remembers how, as a child, time resolutely refuses to pass. Whether it is your birthday, or Christmas, or a promised outing at the end of next week, time crawls. I now know that the first great bombing campaign by the Germans, what we quickly called the Blitz, lasted from 7th September to 3rd November and on every one of the 57 nights during that time, the bombers came over in hundreds. And we sat there under the stairs and no matter what my mother or grandmother or aunt, whoever was staying with us at the time, tried to say or do to keep us, myself and my younger brother and sister, amused, all of us grew slowly more silent as the sound of exploding bombs got closer and closer. I can still see our faces, caught in the light of candles held on shelves, staring up as if to see through the ceiling and the roof at what was coming. Of heads cocked to one side as we all tried to assess from which direction the noise was coming and whether it was going to pass directly over us or go to one side or the other.