How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On Read Online Free PDF Page B

was a very stormy evening. The rain was really lashing down when the sirens went. My boyfriend and I rushed to the air-raid shelter, which was under a church. Women and
     children were wailing, screaming and crying – when we reached the steps leading down, there was a little Jewish air-raid warden with his torch showing the way down. His tin helmet settled
     on his ears and, with his long mac, he cut quite a comical figure. As people passed by, he kept repeating, over and over, in a heavy Eastern European accent and something of a lisp: ‘Thix
     theps down and mind you don’t trip!’ As each of us walked down those six steps, we repeated his little ‘catchphrase’ and within five minutes everyone, frightened
     children included, were laughing and joking. He was only a little man ‘doing his bit’ but he cheered us up no end.
    Mrs C. G. Atkins, Bourne, Buckinghamshire
    I was living temporarily in Streatham Hill, SW2, and was helping the local voluntary services. During one air raid, a block of flats close to Streatham Hill Station received a
heavy blast. I was helping an ambulance man assist a lady who was pregnant. Five small children surrounded her. All were, thankfully, unhurt, but since the windows etc. were gone, and all utilities
like gas and electricity were affected, we were taking them to temporary shelter. It was 1 a.m., so they were all in their nightclothes. The mother was a very cheerful cockney type. I was
endeavouring to fit a small boy of about six years old into some trousers, handed to me by his slightly older sister. The boy was shrieking and not cooperating. ‘I don’t want to put my
trousers on!’ Amid all the chaos, and with the AFS and the ARP all around, his heavily pregnant mother looked at her five children and said: ‘You see! He’s just like his dad. My
husband has always got his trousers off!’ I thought that it was commendable that a woman with so many little ones to take care of, not to mention another on the way, could still joke about
her predicament.
    Mrs A. Olins, Finchley

    I was in London throughout the Blitz. My mother and I would sit by the fire reading until about half past ten and then we went to bed. We had no air-raid shelter. The house
rocked sometimes as many bombs dropped very near – but we’d no wish to be out in the cold garden. In 1944, when the V1s were coming over, I was getting into bed when one just cleared
our house and burst about sixty yards away. All the windows came in on top of me, but by a miracle, I wasn’t badly cut.
    Earlier in the war, during the Battle of Britain, near us there was a big field in a built-up area, although it had never been used for anything. I was told that it was a burial place for
hundreds of plague victims. One Sunday morning we had a daylight raid and I saw, for the only time, German aircrew bail out. I knew some bombs had fallen nearby and when the all-clear sounded, I
went out and walked to this field and a bomb had dropped on it. An elderly woman came along with an armful of bones. I said: ‘Whatever have you got there?’ And she said: ‘Bones
– we’re supposed to keep them for salvage, aren’t we?’
    Stanley Norman, Brighton

    Although I was born and raised in South Yorkshire, I spent the Second World War in Eastbourne where I was partly responsible for checking damaged property. At one of the few
houses still occupied in a supposedly evacuated, leafy street, there lived three very typical ‘Old Lace and Frilly Ladies’. The area, which was close to the town hall, had been
repeatedly bombed, but it never seemed to worry these three. One afternoon I was making a hurried check after a daylight raid, and I knew some nearby houses should really have been knocked down. As
I got to the doorway of the house occupied by the three ladies, I found them busily brushing up plaster, dust and garden soil that had blown into the front hallway. They were not happy and told me
that had they not had to keep the