The Day We Went to War (25 page)

11.17am, HMS
D
ELIGHT
,
I
NDIAN
O
CEAN

Radio operator Bernard Campion is coming to the end of his first ‘dog watch’. The sea is very rough, and in the cramped and stuffy radio compartment the lead-covered codebooks are being constantly flung about by the destroyer’s pitching and rolling. The seasick Campion is counting the minutes to the time he can turn over to his relief. He desperately wants to get back to his hammock. But a new signal arrives. Unusually, it is in plain language, not code. It is the Admiralty signal to commence hostilities. Campion admires its ‘Nelsonian simplicity’. He senses that he is turning over a page of history as he bawls the message up the voice-pipe to the bridge.

11.25am (12.25pm), B
ERLIN

Although Britain and Germany have been at war for the last half hour, from the British Embassy Sir Nevile Henderson sets out for the Foreign Ministry. He has just received a message from von Ribbentrop, requesting an interview. The pavement outside the embassy is completely deserted with just a single Berlin policeman pacing up and down. Sir Nevile is reminded that, on 4 August 1914, the embassy was besieged by a howling mob that smashed the windows and ‘hurled abuse at its inmates and at Great Britain’.

11.28am, L
ONDON

Backbench Tory MP Victor Cazalet, once an early protégé of Churchill’s, comes up to London to attend today’s midday sitting of the Commons. He arrives just as the sirens are sounding and people running to the shelters. At first, Cazalet and fellow MPs
joke about the warning, but then he experiences ‘a sort of sinking feeling’.

11.28am, C
ITY OF
L
ONDON

High Anglican Driberg has decided to stay on and attend morning service. Just as it is beginning, the sirens go. For Driberg it is a ‘blood-curdling, spine-shivering sound’. He last heard the sound of sirens in February this year during the last days of the Spanish Civil War. He recalls that then the sirens were followed ‘within five minutes or so by the drone of German bombers, by ear-shattering explosions, by crumbling houses and gutters streaming blood’. Now the young vicar quietly says, ‘People must do what they like – what they think best.’ No one leaves, but Driberg and a few others prudently move to a windowless aisle. The service continues with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

11.28am, 10 D
OWNING
S
TREET

As soon as Chamberlain finishes, some of his colleagues enter the Cabinet Room. R.A. Butler, Lord Halifax’s deputy at the Foreign Office and a leading appeaser, thinks the Prime Minister’s speech ‘pathetically moving, but scarcely a tocsin ringing to arms’. Just as the Prime Minister is asking his colleagues how they liked his speech, there is a terrible wailing sound. ‘That is an air-raid warning,’ Chamberlain tells them. He is quite calm, Butler notices. Somebody says, ‘It would be funny if it were,’ but Chamberlain keeps on repeating the phrase ‘That is an air-raid warning.’ He reminds Butler of a schoolmaster dinning a lesson into a class of late developers. Then Mrs Chamberlain appears in the doorway. She is carrying a large basket which contains books, thermos flasks and gas masks. Her appearance galvanises everybody into action, and there is a general move towards the underground cabinet war rooms through the basement of Number 10. Butler sees some people scurrying across Horse Guards to take shelter, but he decides to return to the Foreign Office and shelter in the basement
there. When he arrives there, Butler finds that he has to sit on the floor, as no furniture has been provided. An officious air-raid warden starts telling Butler and his fellow shelterers that he is not expecting the Germans to use poison gas immediately. Just as he doing so the ‘All Clear’ sounds, and Butler and the others return to their offices.

11.28am, S
NACK BAR
, C
LARENDON
R
OAD
, N
OTTING
H
ILL

As the sirens start, a customer leaves hurriedly to take shelter. ‘There’s my bacon and eggs gone wallop,’ he tells a passer-by. As the sirens wails, twenty-year-old Doris, the proprietor’s daughter confesses to a ‘funny feeling’ in her stomach, ‘as though it was all upside down’. Her hand is trembling as she offers a customer a cigarette. Doris’s mother looking out sees pedestrians hurrying to take shelter and says, ‘Look! There must be something wrong. They are running. It must be a raid. It’s awful, isn’t it?’ No one in the snack bar seems to have a very clear idea as to the meaning of the air-raid signals being given. But they do see a warden riding around on a bicycle with placards front and back with ‘Take Cover’ on them, just like during the German daylight raids back in 1917.

11.28am, R
OMFORD
, E
SSEX

Teenager Nina Masel is playing the piano in her parents’ semidetached house when her mother suddenly bursts in. ‘Stop that noise,’ Mrs Masel tells Nina as she flings open a window to let in the sound of the sirens. Nina’s father takes charge and tells the family. ‘All get your gas masks . . . Steady, no panicking! . . . Every man for himself . . . Keep in the passage.’ Nan’s eleven-year-old sister begins to sob. She keeps asking, ‘Will it be alright? Will it be alright?’ Nina’s own heart keeps beating hard but it soon calms down. As the Masels have not got an air-raid shelter, the family gather in the passage of the house and sit on the stairs. Then, as nothing seems to be happening, Nina, her father and brother, go out to the front gate. Nina hears some babies crying and sees air-raid wardens wearing
gas masks and steel helmets running up and down the road. Finally, to everyone’s immense relief, the ‘All Clear’ sounds.

11.28am, M
ORPETH
M
ANSIONS
, W
ESTMINSTER

Winston Churchill is at his Westminster flat as Chamberlain finishes and the sirens sound. With a nice touch of ironic humour, Mrs Churchill comments ‘favourably upon German promptitude and precision’. The Churchills then decide to go up to the flat top of the building to see what is going on. Churchill sees thirty or forty barrage balloons beginning to slowly rise and he gives his new colleagues a good mark for this ‘evident sign of preparation’. The Churchills leave the roof and make for their nearest shelter, a hundred yards down the street. They are ‘armed with a bottle of brandy and other appropriate medical comforts’. Arriving at the shelter, Churchill sees that everyone is cheerful and jocular, ‘as is the English manner when about to encounter the unknown’. Standing at the doorway, Churchill has an apocalyptic vision of ‘ruin and carnage and vast explosions shaking the ground; of buildings clattering down in dust and rubble, of fire brigades and ambulances scurrying through the smoke, beneath drone of hostile aeroplanes’. Instead, the ‘All Clear’ sounds, and an air-raid warden appears shouting the same message. The Churchills and their fellow shelterers disperse. Churchill sets out for the House of Commons.

11.28am, L
ONDON

Conservative MP Beverley Baxter starts making his way to the Houses of Parliament. Like Churchill, he looks up to the sky and sees, ‘high up, in the almost Mediterranean sky, the grotesque defence balloons . . . like distorted, silver boxing gloves’. As he does so, the sirens begin to wail. Like Clementine Churchill, Baxter admits a sneaking admiration for the Nazis’ promptitude: ‘Our ultimatum had expired at eleven o’ clock; now, barely half an hour later, 5,000 machines were bringing their answer . . . at any minute now, that which we had all foreseen would come to pass’.

11.28am, C
HELSEA
, L
ONDON

Bohemian teenager Joan Wyndham and her family have just heard Chamberlain. As they are sitting around, feeling rather sick, the air-raid warning goes. For a moment, Joan and the others cannot believe their ears. It has not really sunk in yet that Britain is now at war. But they soon recover, and go down to the cellar which they have prepared as a gasproof room. There, they start damping blankets with pails of water as a measure to keep poison gas out. That done, Joan goes and sits on the front doorstep to wait for the first sounds of gunfire. She looks up and sees the barrage balloons that are ‘too lovely in the sun against the blue skies, like iridescent silver fish swimming in blue water’.

11.28am, B
ALCOMBE
S
TREET
, M
ARYLEBONE

Robert Baynes-Powell and his wife Nancy hear the air-raid warning and make for the bathroom, their flat’s safest room in the event of an air raid. They sit there wearing their gas masks and feeling ‘very queasy’ until the ‘All Clear’ sounds.

11.28am, H
ARROW
, W
EST
L
ONDON

As the sirens sound, writer George Beardmore experiences a sensation of utter panic. He, like so many others, has seen the film
Things to Come
, and now remembers all ‘the dire prophecies of scientists, journalists and even politicians of the devastation and disease that would follow the first air raid’. He pictures the Houses of Parliament one heap of rubble and St Paul’s Cathedral in ruins.

11.28am, S
T
P
AUL’S
C
ATHEDRAL

The boys of the St Paul’s Choir School have already been evacuated to Truro. But even without them, this morning’s congregation is unusually large. They are singing:

‘O God of Love. O King of Peace
Make wars throughout the world to cease!’

Londoners taking cover as air-raid sirens sounded shortly after war was declared, 3 September 1939. Chamberlain had said earlier in the year, ‘If we should ever be involved in war we may well find that if we are not all in the firing line, we may all be in the line of fire.’

just as the air-raid warning is given. The Bishop of Willesden is taking this morning’s service. He calmly leads the worshippers down to the crypt to take shelter.

11.28am, G
RANADA
C
INEMA
, N
ORTH
C
HEAM
, S
URREY

The staff have just heard Chamberlain’s broadcast. They are now listening to cinema manager Watson as he gives them a pep talk. ‘And above all,’ Watson is telling them, ‘we must at all times keep calm,’ as the air-raid sirens sound the warning. Before Watson knows what is happening, he is swept aside as most of the staff fly down the stairs into the cinema’s foyer and out into the street. Two or three of the cleaners are on top of the circle steps, clinging to the hand-rails and screaming at the tops of their voices. Despite Watson’s entreaties they refuse to come down, and the manager ruefully reflects that it must be the effect of his speech.

11.28am, S
T
J
OHN’S
W
OOD
, L
ONDON

As the sirens begin to wail, Noël Coward is driving up to Woburn Abbey, the ‘Hush Hush’ headquarters of Britain’s secret propaganda organisation. He has already heard Chamberlain’s ‘lachrymose’ announcement, and is now on his way to hear confirmation of a propaganda liaison job with the French in Paris. As the warning sounds, Coward feels ‘a sudden coldness in the heart’ and an ‘automatic tensing of the muscles’. An air-raid warden appears and waves Coward to take cover immediately. He is ushered into a large apartment building and into the basement. Everybody is calm, except for one young woman carrying a baby, who is in tears. Coward wonders if this ‘is going to be the real knockout blow, a carefully prepared surprise attack by Hitler within the first hour of war being declared’. More and more people are arriving in the already crowded basement. Coward decides that if he is going to die, ‘I would rather die in the open and not suffocate slowly with a load of strangers at the bottom of a lift shaft.’ Thus resolved, Coward
makes his way up the stairs to the hall. There he runs into theatrical costumier Morris Angel. Angel is delighted to meet Coward and says, ‘I think this calls for a bottle of bubbly!’ They go up to the Angels’ flat on the third floor to find the electricity is turned off and the Sunday joint ruined. Nevertheless, a bottle of champagne is opened and they toast ‘the King, each other, and a speedy victory for the Allies’.

11.28am, L
ONDON

Virginia Cowles hears the sirens sound. Only two days ago she was in Germany, and on Friday evening had heard similar sirens during an air-raid drill in Berlin. Virginia soon learns that this too is a false alarm. She is told that Captain de Brantes, French assistant military attaché in London, has flown in on a private plane, and been mistaken for a German. She also gets an early example of war neurosis. A fellow journalist assures her that he has heard bomb explosions, and that his own building has even rocked – ‘ever so slightly’.

11.28am, C
ROYDON

As the sirens begin to wail, the Ward family all think they are about to die. But then the ‘All Clear’ sounds and they make tea, ‘that great English panacea’. Sheila and her brother are now really excited at the prospect of being evacuated. They have never been away from home before except for the family’s annual fortnight’s holiday at Broadstairs. But ‘this is going to be different, without our parents’. And now it is finally happening, Sheila finds ‘it is difficult not to enjoy it’.