Childhood memories of the Exeter Blitz
Fore Street
Courtesy of Express & Echo
Rationing in Exeter
Courtesy of Express & Echo
Bombs, rationing and after the War
By Ron and Janet James, as told to David Heathfield
Ron and Janet James remember being children in St Thomas during and after WW2.
The Exeter Blitz
My brother and I lived at 29 Locarno Road on the Buddle Lane estate, St Thomas.
At 2.30 in the morning of 4 May 1942, the night of the Exeter blitz, our father woke my brother and myself to see the results of the bombing. From our back garden we could see the city skyline at the top of Fore Street and the whole of it was burning. In front of the flames we could see tiny silhouettes of what must have been the firemen and air raid wardens moving about.
About three days after the raid my brother and I (my brother was five years old and I was seven then) decided to go and see our granny who lived opposite the old Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital front entrance beside the old city wall to see if she was OK. Our dad gave us a penny (old money) to pay our fare to cross the river Exe at the Quay which was a halfpenny each way. The ferry was pulled across by the wire as it is now. On the other side there was no damage, but when we went up the hill to go up through James Street everything was flat, not a house standing.
A warden stopped us to ask what we wanted, and we told him we were going up to see our gran. We had to go up the next street, which still had a bit of a path through it. Gran was well, and we returned home happy.
Cocoa tins and ticking watches
A few nights after the blitz, we were at home then, there was another air raid warning. When the all clear came, the family including the lodger, who may have been a refugee, went outside to see if anything had happened. We were all stood in a line along the garden path near a pit that our father kept lime in for the garden.
Someone said "What is that ticking noise?"
Then someone pointed out a cylinder in the bottom of the white lime pit. The same person said it must be a time bomb, whereby we all quickly evacuated the garden to a neighbour's house across the road, well away.
It was reported to the authorities, and I can see in my mind our granddad's tin hat bobbing up and down as he crept behind the hedge for safety, and ran along. The next day the garden was visited again, and the cylinder turned out to be an empty cocoa tin.
The ticking, we found out later, was the lodgers watch which had a loud tick. I don't think many people had watches in those days. Lots of funny things happened during the war.
The Stars at Night
During the war the clocks were put forward two hours two hours - double summer time, and it didn't get dark until gone eleven o'clock. When things were at their worst, in the evenings a lot of people left their homes, and walked out of the city to the country for safety. I know that we used to walk to Nadderwater, which was a long way, especially for a seven year old. Nobody on council estates had cars then, we had to walk or catch a bus.
It was well after the war before there was a car in Locarno road, it was a 1939 Morris 8 Series E. Looking back I can't remember seeing a car in any other road on the estate.
There is one thing that we always talk about, and that is the stars at night. The milky way was beautiful, and the stars were so bright. With all of the light pollution we got today, nobody gets to see it as we did.
Remembering the Bombs
There was another incident that occurred one morning. Our father worked in the brass foundry at Willeys the gas engineers in Willeys Avenue. A German plane was being chased by a Spitfire, and as it flew over the gas works it let a bomb go. The plane was quite low, and the bomb hit the top of one of the gasometers. The fin broke off and the bomb which then bounced over the foundry where our dad was working. There was a hole in the roof and he saw the bomb spinning over and over to land on a house up the road in Willeys Avenue where it killed a chap who had just left work from nightshift and gone home to have his breakfast.
At a house in the Heavitree area, a bomb struck a house, where it went down the chimney and landed in the fireplace, but luckily it didn't explode.
Another day a bomb exploded near my wife's home, and a picture hanging on the picture rail and slid down the wall, hit the floor but didn't break the glass. However, the window did shatter and her dressing table and bed were covered in splinters of glass. She was glad that she was elsewhere at the time.
Fun for Children
In 1943 when the Americans were here we were attending John Stocker Junior School, and when a convoy of Americans went past the school up Dunsford Hill, they would often throw handfuls of sweets onto the road for us to scramble for.
One thing we children used to do, was if we were playing in the field behind the Buddle Lane Welfare Centre, when the air raid siren, which was situated on top of the welfare building sounded, instead of running home or to an air raid shelter as we should have done, we would run down as near as we could to the siren and shout at each other to find out if we could hear each other. Of course we couldn't, and really it was a silly thing to do as with afterthought we could have all been strafed by an enemy plane and killed. Just like today kids don't see fear like we older persons.
After the War
When the war was over, on that night, and I don't know what time of night it was, our father woke us up, said that the war was over, and we got out of bed and went around our estate shouting to tell everyone. I remember one man opening his window to ask us what it was all about, and when we told him he went back to bed. A bonfire was lit in the middle of the Locarno Road and Oak Road junction as in many other places.
A few weeks after that nearly every street in the city had a street party for everyone to attend, with a great row of tables and chairs from all of the houses set out down the middle of the road. People were dancing in the streets. This was during the days of rationing.
We had to wait a long time before we saw a banana in the shops, and we were only allowed two ounces of sweets a week.
And when ice cream came into Albony Freins sweetshop at the top end of Cowick Street, there were so many people after it and the shop doorway was too narrow for two persons to pass, so he had to let them in the front door and out of the back door.
You can imagine his stock was sold very quickly.
We can't remember a lot about rationing, we had a large garden so dad grew a lot of vegetables, and he kept chickens. So he surrendered some items which included eggs, to enable him to get feed for chickens instead. I think as kids we were only allowed 1 ¼oz of sweets a week. Sometimes we would ask for a ½ penny's worth of waste, which were the chips that had broken off the unwrapped boiled sweets and fallen to the bottom of the sweet jar. This was only available if you were lucky enough to be there when the jar was virtually empty.
Ron & Janet James of Frome, Somerset.
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