Remembering A Day in War-Time Britain
by Jean Crook
I was a little girl about three or four years old in 1941 or 1942. We lived in Richmond Surrey, nine miles from the centre of London. We had two pear trees in our garden. The fruit was small and hard but everyone who had produce growing in their garden was required to harvest and share it by taking it to the local greengrocers’ shop. It was one of the many things we did to help the war effort.
The day was sunny and warm and my Dad went out into the garden to begin gathering the pears. I watched as he climbed the ladder. Up and down the ladder he went bringing down the pears in a bag for me to pack in boxes.
Suddenly the sound of an engine roared above. It was the unmistakable noise of a doodlebug. Hitler was sending these very dangerous unmanned bombs across the sea to Britain. When the fuel was spent the rocket would land and explode. The noise was scary. The silence, however, was worse because then the bomb would fall.
Dad was way up in the tree and yelled for me to go in the house and get into the bomb shelter1. I said, “I’ll wait for you, Daddy!”
My Mother was not home so he urgently said, “Go in the shelter, NOW!!”
Later, after the huge explosion, he came to find me in the house.
The bomb had dropped in the park nearby. The force blew out our windows and doors and some of our neighbours’, too. We put boards up over the broken windows until they could be repaired properly.
My Dad related his experience to my Mother and to others and I remember listening as he explained how he had clung to that tree with all his strength. He was amazed that he hadn’t been thrown to the ground and was very shaken by the narrow escape.
The remaining pears did not need picking. The explosion had thrown them to the ground. We saved the ones not too badly damaged, delivered a percentage of those pears to the local greengrocers’ shop, and I helped my Mother with the process of bottling our share of the prepared pears in jars, for later use.
Written by Andrea’s sister, Jean Crook,
edited by Andrea Kidd,
drawing by Russ Rodman
1The shelter was a Morrison shelter, made of iron sheeting with thick mesh on the sides. It was large enough to house a mattress to sleep on and we used to play table tennis on it sometimes.
