When I was a child, my grandmother Renee, who remained in London throughout the Blitz with her baby daughter, my mum, told a story that made me understand some of the sheer terror of life during the air raids.
An apartment block near their home was hit. Amid the rubble next day, she saw a bathtub, with a woman’s body still lying in it. The sheer lack of dignity for that victim, as well as the random ruthlessness of the bombing, shocked me in a way I’ve never forgotten.
Tales like that, once familiar to post-war generations, are now in danger of being lost. Children Of The Blitz collected a handful of deeply moving stories from survivors, now in their 90s or even older.
Sensibly, director Jack Warrender didn’t wait for another wartime anniversary. As 101-year-old Dorothea Barron said with a wry chuckle, ‘So few of us are left – we’re all popping our clogs quite frequently.’
One who has died since filming was the adorable Patsy Moneypenny, who proved she could still shake a leg at 90 by tap-dancing in her kitchen.
Patsy was rendered mute for years after a bomb came through the roof of her family home in Belfast. ‘Everything was on fire,’ she said.
‘It must have been horrific for my mum trying to get me out.’ Sent away belatedly to the country, Patsy developed a nervous habit of rubbing pieces of cloth together, to calm herself. To the end of her days, she couldn’t sleep without doing that. Such poignant details revealed the intensity of the lifelong trauma left by war.
Warrender avoided the Blitz cliches: we didn’t have to hear how St Paul’s escaped intact, or see the Queen Mum’s visits to the East End. Maps splattered with falling inkblots showed where the bombing was heaviest.
Children Of The Blitz collected a handful of deeply moving stories from survivors, now in their 90s or even older, writes Christopher Stevens
Some of the accounts were dramatic, such as 92-year-old Ted Bush’s story of returning from a trip to the cinema to see George Formby with his parents and discovering their house had been flattened, along with half the street.
A few were amusing: brother and sister John Cheetham and Cynthia Fowler from Hull bickered over memories of their Anderson air raid shelter, and whether it had corrugated iron around the door. It jolly well did, insisted John – he cut his ear on it.
But a thread of horror ran through every memory, most of all 92-year-old Jean Whitfield’s desperately sad story of how her mother died.
After a night of bombing, Jean was taken for a walk by a relative. Minutes later, her mum was hanging out washing in the communal yard when a time-bomb exploded.
Jean took us to the common grave where her mother and others were interred. ‘I think it’s so sad,’ she said, ‘that nobody cared enough to give her a proper grave.’
Surely it’s not too late for the country to put that right.
