A Child's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    And that was not all; the sight of Mum or Dad in their gas mask was enough to send some smaller children into floods of terrified tears. The BBC broadcast the following advice: ‘Are your little ones used to seeing you in your mask? Make a game of it, calling it “Mummy’s funny face” or something of that kind.’
    All masks were issued in a cardboard container, which could also be used, with the addition of a string handle, as a carrier. However, the boxes neither looked good nor wore well. Children typically found a thousand and one uses for them, such as goalposts, wickets in cricket, etc. Although the masks were issued free, you could be fined up to £5 if your mask was damaged or lost due to negligence, so many parents bought hard-wearing metal containers for their children’s masks.
    When the feared poison gas raids failed to materialise, people began increasingly to leave their gas masks at home as David George from South Ealing recalls: ‘I was born in June 1939, so my memories are only of the last years of the war. I don’t remember gas masks at all, I don’t think anybody used them by then.’
ID C ARDS
    On 1 September 1939, before war broke out, the National Registration Act was passed in Parliament, requiring all citizens of the country to register their details: name, address, age, etc. Registration duly took place on Friday 29 September 1939, when the war had begun, and over the next few days every person in Britain was issued with an identity card, green for adults and brown for children under 16 (cards were issued within a few weeks of a baby’s birth). This was partly due to fears of German spies and parachutists; ID cards had to be shown at checkpoints set up by policemen, Home Guards or the armed services. But the information was also later used to issue ration cards, and the ID card had to be produced and stamped in order to obtain a new ration book when the old one ran out. This made it valuable, and forgeries and thefts were common – this report in the Kentish Mercury of March 1942 gives one example:
    YOUTH WITH THREE IDENTITY CARDS
    Leonard Eldridge (17) . . . was charged at Woolwich . . . with being in unlawful possession of an identity card. Det. Sergt. Davis said [he] gave a name other than Eldridge, and produced an identity card in that name. Two other cards were found on Eldridge in the same name, and the youth said he had picked them up at ‘the Salvation Army place’. The Sergeant added that when they were alone Eldridge offered him £1 to let him go.
T HE B LACK-OUT
    At night cities can be seen from miles away by aircraft, due to the lighted buildings, street-lights, vehicle headlights, etc. In 1935 the government decided that, in the event of a war, lighting restrictions – or the black-out, as it soon came to be called – would be brought in to make life more difficult for enemy bombers.
    In 1938 plans for the black-out were made public. Houses had to mask doors and windows so that no light was visible from the outside; this was usually done by the use of heavy black-out curtains. Street-lights and shop lights had to be turned off. Cars, lorries, and even bicycles had to have special headlight covers. An extract from an evacuee’s letter home said: ‘I hope you can get rear lights for bicycles in London. I could not send any money for it as the front light cost me 3/8 d and 6 d for a black-out for it’. Even a pocket torch had to give out only a small amount of light; this could be achieved by wrapping tissue paper over the front. A house showing a light would soon be visited by the police or air-raid wardens – ‘Put that light out!’ was one of the more famous cries of the Second World War – and repeated offences would land the culprit in court.
    The black-out measures were very successful, but they had unexpected drawbacks; in November 1939 road deaths were up over 50 per cent on the previous November, even though over half a million cars had been taken off