Mention the war

These shoes have been around for as long as I can remember. They have moved from the bottom of one wardrobe to another but they are still with me, a relic of World War Two. Along with a copy of “Make Do and Mend” they are some of the ordinary things I own that are left over from an extraordinary period in Britain’s history.

Recently there has been considerable and deserved mention of the deeds of the RAF during the Battle of Britain. For those who now live in London’s suburbs it is hard to understand the degree of fear and danger experienced by the ordinary people who lived in those houses before we did. Here and there you will find structures, both overgrown and reused, that were built as part of the plan to defend the UK. There are of course memorials to those in uniform but very little remains to remind us of the impact on everyday life.



When I visited Medway Drive in Perivale I could see nothing to indicate that six people were killed and thirty others injured in this quiet street near the A40. I was looking for a gap in the terrace filled by a post war building. Mindful that a surprising number of that generation still live in the houses they were born in I looked for someone in the right age group and struck gold. I was introduced to someone who had lived in the area since 1935 and remembered the incident very clearly. A parachute mine came down here on the night of 25th September 1940 and King George and Queen Elizabeth came to inspect the damage. Photographs taken at the time show them striding up the street in the company of the mayor and local officials. I was amazed to learn that the damage was repaired straight away and found that one of those I was speaking to, a child at the time, had been paid a penny a day to brush clean the salvaged bricks for reuse. The houses in this street were then no more than three years old and I suppose restrictions on the use of building materials were yet to be imposed. It is now impossible to tell that anything so devastating happened here.

Within minutes we were talking about the difference between an Anderson shelter and a Morrison shelter, what it was like to hear a Doodlebug (apparently it was when the whistle stopped that people began to run in all directions) and how one milkman coped during an air raid. They remembered the spivs at the dog track and the people who did not survive. They mentioned the policeman who was not provided with a free shelter (he earned too much) and sent his daughters into the neighbour’s for safety. There were memories of particular raids and of a woman who turned up to work at Sainsbury’s in Greenford with bandaged hands, still trying to work out how they got burned as she rode along on her bicycle.



It was a frightening time. Huge craters were the reminders of near misses. One of my new acquaintances described how he was on a paper round when the warning went out. He rushed under cover only to feel a great weight suddenly crushing him. He thought he had been hurt but in fact a woman had seen him head for shelter and leapt in after him. His friend told me that on hearing a blast and unsure as to what to do he had stood rigid with fear while his sister dived to one side. He had every right to be terrified. Five days after Medway Drive suffered casualties six enemy aircraft dropped bombs in the vicinity of Mornington Road in Greenford, though they were in fact trying to hit RAF Northolt, their gunners taking the opportunity to strafe the ground. A six year old boy called Keith Peters was shot, one of thirty-seven people killed or fatally injured in the daylight attack. His home was damaged beyond repair and then targeted by looters. What must it have been like for his mother who after the war lived in the rebuilt house until her death? It is unlikely that the present occupant of this address is aware of its sad history. On a quiet day in suburbia, almost seventy years after the event, it is difficult to imagine the sudden terror that descended upon the people here.



I used to wonder what these mounds in Hanger Hill Park were all about. Apart from the lumps and bumps there is a concrete block at the end of one and a scattering of concrete squares that seal off the entrances to an air raid shelter. Again there is nothing to tell you that this was the site of several deaths in 1940. It seems that even for those who managed to reach a shelter there was no guarantee that they would make it through a raid. One of the people who died here was known to my friend in Medway Drive, a man who had thrown himself on top of his wife and succeeded in protecting her.

There was a matter of factness and absence of anger in these recollections from two men who would have had every right to feel bitterness towards the enemy. When I hear John Cleese mutter “Don’t mention the war!" and harangue his German guests in an episode of “Fawlty Towers” first broadcast thirty years after the end of the war I still hold my breath, aghast. It was meant to shock and was not aired in Germany when the series was originally shown there but I wonder how it would have gone down in the Britain of the 1940s?



Take a look at the archives of photographs from this period and you will see nothing but smiling faces. Land girls digging up potatoes in Greenford, in fields that have long since been built on. The mayor’s wife collecting clothes for the children of factory workers. A man sitting in the ruins of his house but beaming at the camera as if it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. Perhaps he was in shock or just glad to be alive, who knows? It is possible, even probable, that the less positive images were quite deliberately erased from some memories as well as from archives. Like shoes pushed to the back of a wardrobe the bad times were put to one side.

They kept calm and carried on, railwaymen, nurses and doctors, firemen, the WVS, shop workers who swept up the broken glass time after time, the makers of endless cups of tea and strangers who held a hand until the final moment came. Air raid wardens who must have seen things that gave them nightmares, bodies blown to pieces including those of people they knew. This former ARP hut which is at one end of Ealing Village now shelters bicycles.



In 1940 these people had no idea how many weary hungry years of war lay ahead of them. When it was finally over the world had been turned upside down and many saw this as an opportunity to put new ideas into practice. I wonder if we would have had the NHS if it were not for World War II? I hope that in years to come as much will be said about the valiant efforts of those who kept the home fires burning as has been said of those in uniform. It is up to us, the generations who gained from what they did, to recall and applaud their bravery and sacrifice.

For Violet, who drove ambulances during the war and was particularly fond of Marlene Dietrich. Thank you for the shoes.



I am indebted to my long suffering partner, who not only acted as chauffeur and advisor on military stuff but provided me with the excellent “Ealing, Acton and Southall at War” by Dennis Upton (The History Press), in which I found the information about the attack on Mornington Road.

Be nice to your fireman this Christmas

For the last two years I’ve worked in the evening on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve and as a gesture of solidarity I’ve dropped off a bag of goodies at the fire station opposite.

The first time I did it I wasn’t prepared for the reaction I got. The man who answered my tap on the door seemed absolutely stunned that I had done this. He said “thank you” so often I started to get embarrassed and walked away feeling a bit tearful. The same thing happened the following year.

What amazes and saddens me about this is that the fire station in question is not stranded on a suburban roundabout. It is right next to homes and offices on a busy street. I can understand that those working in the office buildings aren’t around during the evenings and weekends but they must, as I do, see the engines rush off to a call. The flashing lights, sirens and bells are hard to miss. As for those who live right on the doorstep - if you’re reading this, I hope you’re ashamed of yourselves.

I know that when I spend an evening at work the worst thing that could probably happen to me is that I might trip over the vacuum cleaner cable or get splashed by something unspeakable. The chances of my dying from smoke inhalation are pretty slim (as long as certain people avoid using fire extinguishers as doorstops), as is that of being maimed for life in the course of my shift. However that could happen if it wasn’t for the speedy response of the folks across the road. They take that risk to stop it from happening to me.

Over recent years the emergency services have become the targets of, well, what do I call them? Thugs? Yobs? Uncontrolled, uncontrollable children and teenagers who take pleasure in assaulting the people who go the extra mile to keep us safe. There are places in the UK where starting a fire and calling the fire brigade so that they can lob things at them is entertainment. The same risks are faced by ambulance crews. While the police might to some extent regard this kind of behaviour as going with the territory it is almost beyond belief that anyone should want to target a fireman or a paramedic in this way.

That aside, I think the fact that we do not value those working for the emergency services speaks volumes about the sense of entitlement that has developed in our society. It has taken campaigns and images of amputees and coffins to awaken our respect for the armed services. Perhaps that’s the problem. If firemen, nurses and policemen were dropping like flies on a daily basis the majority might begin to notice their contribution.

Another obstacle to their being looked up to by the community that they serve is that, unless it is a very small one, they do not usually live where they work. In the case of the one that I am familiar with they probably can’t afford to live there. There is a sense of separation and the living breathing humans who do this work are just uniforms rather than recognisable members of the community. I don’t know that we can change that. The development of Safer Communities Teams have certainly helped to give our local police recognisable faces. This Christmas it even meant a home baked cake from me. When I was a child we knew our beat officer so well that when he retired he gave me the metal flower from the top of his helmet as a souvenir. I still have it somewhere. It’s interesting that in the idealised realms of childhood, for example Trumpton, it is taken for granted that there is a local fire brigade and we all know their names.

It isn’t about the food because, let’s be honest, many of us are already sick of mince pies by Christmas Day. It is the gesture that counts and the thought that someone, even if it’s just the eccentric cleaner from the building opposite, has noticed the effort you make when the rest of the world is tucked up safe in bed.

Fixing the fixers

On Tuesday and Friday evenings I clean an office after my regular job which means that I’m still in the building after 9pm. The office overlooks a busy main road and there are the usual sounds of sirens and traffic. Last night, at around 9.15 I heard what sounded like a large amount of scrap metal being dropped onto the ground.

Almost. It always take a while for my brain to work out what I can see before me in these situations. It seems that a small black car had pulled out from the car park of the neighbouring building when another, almost identical small black car had swerved to avoid it and had run into a lamp post on my side of the road. By the time I got to the window the first car was in the middle of the road pointing in the opposite direction to the other.

There is a fire station a few yards from where this happened and several firemen were on the scene within seconds. Within minutes two fire engines were blocking the traffic off in one lane while police from a station that is also close by directed it around the damaged cars. The driver of the second car was injured badly enough for it to take half an hour for him to be removed from the vehicle to the waiting ambulance.

This was all dealt with and cleared up within an hour. The two damaged cars were deposited, for the time being, in the car park next door. Sand was spread across the oil spill by the lamppost. Broken bits of car were swept up. What struck me was that I had seen all three emergency services acting in a calm and coordinated manner, comforting uninjured passengers, shepherding pedestrians out of the way, making things safe.

From the fifth floor I had a clear view and felt rather detached after the initial shock, as if I was watching a play. For those directly involved, who had to see and hear the shock and pain close up it must have been very different. It is easy to forget that these men and women often attend situations like this daily, even hourly, and are expected to take it in their stride. The rest of us can walk away and forget about it but it does not surprise me that some in the police, fire and ambulance services crack under the strain or behave in a way that doesn‘t meet our expectations.

Hours before the traffic accident I had watched a video recorded in Nottingham of police officers trying to handcuff a man. A cab driver had begun recording the event because one of the officers had repeatedly tazered the individual even though he was already on the ground and vulnerable. He was simply trying to avoid having his hands cuffed. He was also punched in the head a number of times. This went on in front of a crowd of people who were clearly angry about what was happening but the police concerned carried on regardless of their comments. I suspect that they were unaware of the fact that this was being recorded (which seems a bit naïve these days) and would have stopped it if they had known.

It has raised questions about the use of tazers which were regarded as a non lethal option for subduing potentially dangerous suspects, better than guns. I am more interested in why someone is prepared to obviously and repeatedly inflict pain in a way that seems unnecessary to most of us. Have those involved become so hardened by what they have seen and experienced that they do this sort of thing without thinking twice about it? Did any of them question for a moment what their colleagues were doing and consider stopping them? Was it just the end of a long and difficult shift?

Personally I feel that we expect rather too much of our emergency services. We are not there when a drunk vomits in the van that is carrying him to the police station, we aren’t the ones who have to clean it out. Ambulance personnel increasingly face attacks when they attend a situation and firemen go home to their families and act as if nothing has happened, having seen the consequences of a fire. For the police in particular there are no second chances if they get it wrong.

I am not excusing the behaviour of the police in that video and I have concerns about the way some have dealt with demonstrators over the years. It worries me that they are being deliberately wound up to be more aggressive ahead of these events by some of those responsible for managing them. However I believe that we should become as understanding and respectful towards them as we are now expected to be towards military personnel. It is clear that there is a link between the stress of serving in a war zone and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We are often shielded from the war zones that some places in our country have become and I think that once the dust of this most recent example of police brutality has settled, we need to look at how we are dealing with the people who clean up the mess so that we don’t have to.