Betty Peachy was just four years old on the day that German bombers came to her hometown of Filton, on the outskirts of Bristol. It was a Wednesday in September, 1940, and she was upstairs playing with her dolls when the air raid siren sounded. Her mother, who had been making lunch, rushed Betty and her two brothers down to the garden and into their Anderson shelter – the government-issue, corrugated steel hut that was supposed to protect families from bomb blasts.
“I can remember it just as if it was yesterday,” recalls Betty, now 89. “The next thing we knew there was a bomb falling in the garden and the whole of the shelter was lit up blood red by the explosion. Mum was thrown right across the shelter and landed on top of us.”
The terrified children watched the curved metal roof shake and judder as it was pelted with falling masonry. Only their mother realised what was happening: the family’s own house was collapsing on top of them.“The rubble and bricks completely buried us,” Betty explains.
“We tried to get out of the shelter, but we couldn’t. It was sheer panic. We were all crying, huddled together, frightened to death. I don’t know how long we were in there, but it seemed like hours.”
As Betty and her family sat entombed in their Anderson shelter, wondering how long the air inside would last, word of the Filton bombing reached her father at work in Bristol city centre. He ran the five miles home, convinced he would find his wife and three children gone. When he reached their road, it seemed his worst fears had come true.
The whole row of houses had been flattened and the neighbours on both sides lay dead. But Betty’s father refused to give up.
He began digging through the rubble, pulling away bricks, tiles and dirt until his fingers bled, all the time calling out the names of his family. Finally, he heard a reply.
“Dad dug us out himself, with his bare hands,” says Betty. “If it wasn’t for him, nobody would have known we were there under the rubble. When we came out, the house was all gone. The stairs were the only thing left. I stood there crying my eyes out because I wanted to go up and get my dolls and I couldn’t understand why Dad wouldn’t let me up the stairs.”
Betty adds quietly: “It was a scary time. A time that I shall never forget.”
Betty’s experience is a far cry from the enduring image of British children in the Second World War: the little evacuee, gas mask slung over their shoulder, boarding a train to the safety of the countryside. Yet interviewing child survivors of the war for my new book Blitz Kids, I was struck by how many had in fact stayed behind andwitnessed the bombing close-up in cities around the UK – not just, famously, in London, but in Liverpool, Bristol, Coventry, Birmingham, Belfast and elsewhere.
Some were evacuated but came back, while others were too young to go, or their families decided it was best to stay together and take their chances. This was a generation of children who spent their nights in cold, cramped air raid shelters, listening to the roar of enemy planes overhead and the crump of bombs falling.
A generation whose young minds had somehow to make sense of the death and destruction all around them. And whose parents had little hope of shielding them from the brutal reality of war, or its dangers: almost 8,000 children lost their lives as a result of enemy action in Britain. Others lost not only homes but school friends, siblings, parents or grandparents.
Young John Le Page was living in Halifax when his father volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service, determined to do his bit for the war effort. After spending a week fighting fires during the May Blitz in Liverpool in 1941, he returned home a shadow of his former self, three stone lighter and struggling to breathe. An ambulance was called, but before it even arrived, he was dead – killed by bronchial pneumonia brought on by the smoke he had inhaled.
“When he died, I was nine,” recalls John, now 92. “I used to be very sad at night, saying, ‘Why did it happen? Oh, why did it happen?’ I was very, very miserable for a long time.”
John’s mother suffered a breakdown after her husband’s death and was taken to hospital herself. She was gone for several months, and when she returned her brown hair had turned completely white. But that wasn’t the only change.
“I was suddenly expected to be the head of the family, the one who got things done,” explains John. “It put an awful lot of strain on me. If he hadn’t died, life would have been very different.”
Like others of his generation, after the loss of his father, John was expected to just “get on with it”. There was no talking therapy to help bereaved or traumatised children, no time off from school, no allowances made.
The prevailing wisdom was that talking about distressing events only caused more distress, and was therefore best avoided. Many older people I spoke to feel bitter about the large numbers of children and young people being treated for mental health issues today, regarding it as “mollycoddling”. They believe their Blitz experiences, while difficult, ultimately served to strengthen them, giving them a grit and determination that helped get them through whatever life later threw at them – from divorce to cancer. As one put it: “We survived the Blitz – we can survive anything.”
Others emphasise the positives of having grown up in wartime. With petrol rationed, there were few cars around, and kids ruled the streets. Bomb sites became adventure playgrounds and girls made Wendy houses with fallen bricks.
“It was exciting,” says Brian Ingram, 87, whose roof was blown off during the Birmingham Blitz. “I was only little, and there was lots to do. We’d go into the bombed houses. The floorboards were mainly all gone, so we’d be walking on the beams. We’d be smashing windows. We loved it.
“We collected shrapnel in the roads, and empty firebomb cases, and I had them all in a shoe box. Crawling under some bushes, I found a machine gun. It was out of an aeroplane, I believe. Mum just shouted and said, ‘I told you not to bring anything home, didn’t I!’”
Brian wasn’t old enough to remember a time before the war, and when peace came, it was a disappointment.
“I was sorry the war ended,” he admits. “I just thought it was always like this. I didn’t know any different.”
Despite his happy childhood memories, decades later Brian was surprised by his strong reaction to a museum exhibition marking 50 years since the end of the war. “When they started playing an air raid siren, I just had to get out,” he recalls. “It seemed to scare me or something, probably in my subconscious mind. I had to leave – I just couldn’t stay.”
His response is not unusual. Numerous former Blitz kids describe having experiences that we would now recognise as PTSD, which didn’t surface until years after the war’s end. Doreen McBride, 91, survived the Belfast Blitz sheltering in a cubby hole under the stairs with her mother. As an adult, she moved to a house under a flight path and was surprised to find herself having panic attacks, shaking in the night at the sound of the planes flying overhead. It took her a year to be able to sleep soundly in her new home.
As a six-year-old, Doreen had spent the night of November 14, 1940, sheltering in a cramped pub cellar during the apocalyptic raid on Coventry. But it wasn’t until years later, when she found herself trapped in a lift in a department store, that the claustrophobia of that early experience came back to her.
“We were in there for about a quarter of an hour, and I was hyperventilating,” she says. ‘I thought, ‘I’m going to faint in a minute. I can’t keep going any longer.’
“And then the door was opened. Our generation can be a bit gung-ho, but there are certain times when you can’t be like that.”
For many, seeing footage from modern-day war zones not only brings back difficult memories, but serves as a reminder that, around the world, children are still experiencing the same horrors of growing up under bombardment.
“It makes me feel ill, seeing the bombs in Gaza and Ukraine,” adds Doreen. “Because I remember being under the stairs with my mother, and being absolutely terrified.”
The fires of the relentless Blitz bombings may have long fizzled out but the trauma of children caught in conflict remains – whatever age they may reach.
