Is This War Mummy?                 

This is, as far as is possible, a true recollection of an incident in June 1940. Some small details have had to be presumed as “likely “after all this time, but they do not alter what happened during that hot summer’s day.    

Heroes come in all sorts of sizes and disguises, and this is a tale about a small group of good people who were never identified as heroes in the usual way, but whose kindly individual actions are a lesson for today when common sense and improvisation seem to be grossly undervalued.  

JUNE  16^th. 1940: My mother answered the front door that morning to find our usual friendly milkman standing on the doorstep looking very uncomfortable. He held in his hand a creased and grubby piece of paper on which was an urgent message from Lily Webb, a friend of my mother, asking her to go to Croydon immediately to fetch home my small brother who was staying with her. The Luftwaffe had chosen to attack the Croydon area of London for their first bombing attack on  London the day before and their sudden raid had had a devastating outcome.

Why a message via a milkman? In 1940 people generally did not have individual telephones in their homes, the public used public phones for sending messages to officialdom, but had no easy way to receive messages, however urgent; they had to improvise.

Lily Webb my mother’s friend, lived in an area of Surrey which was then very rural. She had few neighbours, her home stood in a hay meadow. The nearest public transport was a small local train station below her in the valley, reached by foot. From that small station the occasional trains set out to the bigger station at Purley and from there passengers could continue by train to Inner London. So, Lily gave her milkman the note for my mother and asked him to try and get the message to us in the London suburbs to tell us that that my brother was now in danger. The milkman, it transpired, passed the message to the station master at Purley railway station who in turn found a helpful traveller on his way to use the railway line that would eventually reach North Wembley. From there the booking clerk contacted the local Dairy company and another someone, who knew the area served by the Dairy, traced my mother.

That was how the all – important message came by way of the milkman and some other very kind strangers.

I can only imagine the fear that mother must have felt as she set out on her journey. She will have grabbed me and the ration book and her handbag and set off to rescue my brother in a state of terror not knowing what she might find and realising that this was the horrendous truth of war when it touched your home and family.

I do not remember how my mother managed to get us to Croydon. I do, however, clearly remember the final part of the outward journey; in truth I have never forgotten it. The evening was fading as we set out to walk the length of a very steep hill. On either side of the road, we could see through the dusk and smoke the shapes of houses and, of piles of rubble where a house had been. My mother knew what she was seeing, but what I remember was the fact that every standing building had lost its windows and appeared sightless.     

Maureen Fox   Feb 21^st 2024

The Croydon bombing was a carefully chosen attack by the Luftwaffe consisting of 1000 bombers over a 500-mile front. One result was that for the first time London families began seriously to plan to evacuate their children to the countryside. Cf ‘Britain 1940: the decisive war on the home front: by Anton Rippon’.