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This story has been submitted by Alison Tebbutt, Derby CSV Action Desk, on behalf of Brenda Neve. The author has given her permission and understands the site's terms and conditions.

Brenda and Ray Neve wrote their stories in response to a letter from their Granddaughter, Vennessa.

Dear Nana and Grandpa,

For my English project on the Second World War I would be grateful if you would both answer the following questions.

1. Early on in the war did you ever think we would win?
2. Did you ever think you would die before the end of the war?
3. Was it difficult to survive on rations?
4. What was it like in the air raid shelters if you had one? If not where did you go?
5. What job did you have?
6. Were you evacuated?
7. What was you reaction to the Germans?
8. What did you do on VE Day?
9. What did VE Day feel like?

Any information would be very useful.

Lots of love,

Vanessa.

When war broke out in September 1939 we were both children. I was eleven and Nana was ten. We both lived in Norwich and both lived on the north side of the city but in some way apart. We went to different schools so we did not know each other.

What you may not have realised was that we did not have television. Our only means of getting the news was by radio (Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú only), daily newspapers and the newsreels at the cinemas, but even then it was very limited and censored and therefore we really only knew about the war as it was affecting us locally.

We were issued was gas masks in little cardboard boxes which we had to carry around with us everywhere and at school we had practice at putting them out. Shelters were provided by the government-where people had a small garden they were issued with Anderson shelters which were made up of curved sheets of corrugated steel which were erected partly below ground with the earth, which had been dug out (hence the term some people called them ‘dug-outs’) piled on top of the shelter to give more protection from blasts and shrapnel. If you hadn’t the room for an Anderson it was possible to have a Morrison shelter which was like a large table, about the size of a double bed, with supports, mesh sides, and about the height of a normal table. The householders could get under to get protection if the house collapsed. They also built some brick shelters in the street for those who could not have their own Andersons or Morrisons. All the schools had shelters, some brick above ground but where they had playing fields they were built below ground. As soon as the siren went we had to file out, no running, and go down into the shelters where we carried on with class work. Sometimes we were down a long time and the class work ran out so we sang or played battleships, noughts and crosses etc.

Norwich was not a heavy industrialised city and so had no protection in the way of anti aircraft guns or balloons. In the early days we had a few raids but mainly we would get the warnings when the German planes crossed the coast heading for the Midlands and Manchester/Liverpool etc. Occasionally if the weather was bad and they didn’t find their target we got the bombs on the way back!

I don’t think we ever discussed whether we were going to win or loose the war or whether we would be killed-my father had been a soldier in the First World War and was for a time in the trenches in France so he knew what was really about-he was too old to be called into the armed forces but he was in the Civil Defence Corps as a District Fire Guard Co-ordinator (this was voluntary) and he took turns during the week to stay up all night when his turn came despite having been at work all day. Of course when the siren went he woke us up and got us in a shelter and then went off to the Wardens Post which was a brick-built, concrete roof building about 20 feet square. They had a telephone and were linked to an Area Control Centre where they could report if their area had any damage and what action they had taken. Later when I was older I became a messenger boy (on bikes of course) where I had to take messages if the telephone lines were down.

All of what I have been telling you about happened mostly at night in the pitch black darkness except when the moon shone, and that was generally when Jerry (what we called the Germans) came over-you see they could navigate by using the rivers because the moon reflected off the water. Cars and bikes had little lamps with shields on and hardly gave any light at all-anyone shining a torch or a gap in the curtains at home was soon told to put the ruddy light out!!
In March 1942 the RAF made a heavy bombing raid on Lubeck which was not regarded as a heavy industrial city and so Hitler decided to have reprisal raids on certain cities with an historical background with cathedrals. He chose Bath, Canterbury, Exeter, Norwich, and York and in April each city was given a week long battering with wave after wave of bombers who didn’t have to worry about any defences for there were none. They used high explosive bombs which caused a lot of damage and loss of life. Just one bomb would clear all the houses in an area. They started their raids with HE bombs but later nights they came with thousands of incendiary bombs —these were about the size of a small hand held fire extinguisher and they dropped either onto roofs, into the valleys between roofs where it was difficult to get at them, or they came through the roofs and set the buildings on fire. These raids were called the Baedeker raids and as they progressed the German pilots even came low enough to machine gun the streets and the fireman fighting the fires. It was very frightening particularly for the elderly-most normal nights we managed to get to sleep on the wooden bunks my dad had made for us in the shelter.

I left the Grammar School in 1944 and then went to work at the County Council where I spent some of my time in the County Air Raid Precautions Controllers Office logging reports to be sent to London, keeping records of raids etc, and so I did learn a bit more about what was going on but of course by then we knew that we were in France and doing quite well on the way to winning the war.

Even then the Germans were still sending over the V.1 bombers which we called the doodle-bugs which were small rockets self-propelled which were launched from Holland and France and they came over like small airplanes but when their engine stopped they flew into the ground and exploded like a big bomb. We also had experience of the V.2 which were large rockets. They were very frightening because you heard very little until they hit the ground with a huge explosion.

No, I wasn’t evacuated, but in the early part of the war they sent many children from London to Norfolk and I was in the Boy Scouts and we were used to marshal the children as they came off the train to get them in the buses which were to take them to the villages in the country. I managed to catch scarlet fever from them and spent almost two months in an Isolation Hospital. All I could see on the two afternoons each week which was visiting was my mother and younger brother through the window trying to make each other understand with lip reading and hand signs!

VE Day was unbelievable-you have heard the expression ‘walking on a cloud’ well, that is what it was like. You just went around talking to everyone and shaking everyone’s hand. In the evening we built a huge bonfire on the site of my old junior school which had a direct hit by several bombs and was completely destroyed. We made toast and baked some potatoes and my dad who was a very good violinist.

I will finish by saying that I feel the women played probably the biggest part. They had an awful job keeping their families nourished to go to work. They worried about their husbands and sons who were away fighting. They bore the brunt of the air raids and still had time to work. Some worked in munitions factories, a lot in shops taking the places of the men in the forces. They mended and made clothes from nothing (clothes were rationed).

If only we could all work together in peacetime like we did in wartime then we would not have all the problems we are having with unemployment etc.

Love from grandpa.

My dear Venessa,

To begin, I will start answering your questions.

1. Did I think we would win? There was no question that I was confident we would. But I was only ten when the war was declared and sixteen when it ended. So, you are getting the answers of a teenager.

2. No, I did not think I would die, although we knew of some of the atrocities from newsreels, at the pictures and from the wireless. We seemed to have the confidence that being an island we could stop Hitler from invading, and this is virtually in our favour.

3. Did we survive on the rations? Yes, we did but our mother’s had that difficult task to make ends meet but also I suppose we didn’t have such a large variety of foods, just basic foods anyway, because that was all that people could afford, so just having a bit less we were able to manage. Obviously, having to go without sweets and ice-cream was difficult, but we got used to it. We used to buy some fruit pastilles, liquorice root from the chemist, and our mothers used to compromise. They would give the men the meat and often I fear went without a lot themselves. We were encouraged to grow more food, keep chickens etc. Of course there was a black market. My granny used to come across a rabbit or two from a friendly farmer, and being near the coast fish were often available-if you knew someone.

Clothes and household linens etc were on coupons too, merely because of the lack of importing goods. There again my mum used to buy some from friends of hers in the factory who were only too glad for the money, and then my mother could dress my sister and I a little better.

4. The air raid shelter at my school was just a long dug out. But when the siren did go we had a few moments before the planes came over and went down in an orderly fashion, taking our books with us. The year I should have taken the eleven plus, I and lots of others lost a lot of schooling. Because my parents had moved out of the area, they wouldn’t let me take the exam with the rest of my schoolmates and was singled out to attend another school in a different quarter to take it. I’m afraid the results were not so good. However, I moved back and lived with my granny again and went to what they called the Elementary School. At that time my dad went to the Royal Engineers and my mother got a better job for an Insurance Firm.

We used to play a lot in the street, my cousin Eric and I were always together with my little sister tagging along behind and Eric had a little sister too, so we had to look after her, rather reluctantly. However, I hope we weren’t too mean to them.

5. Yes, I did have a job later. In the last year at school, I took an exam which I managed to pass and that paid for me to go to Commercial College for six months, five days a week. There they taught me shorthand typing and book keeping. I remember at the time I left school it was the day before I was fourteen. We still didn’t have the result of the exam. I had been accepted on that understanding and on the first morning my mother had to pay for the course in the hopes she would get the money back if I passed. Guess how much it was £9.00 for six months. Luckily she got it back but if she had had to pay that was the best £9 ever spent because it really gave me a good start. It was an exam for children in Elementary Schools and for the boys they could go on a carpentry or engineering course.

Having left college I had no problem getting a job and my first was with the Halifax Building Society. At fourteen and a half I was too young for the National Service.

6. No I wasn’t evacuated, as we didn’t live in the area where children were, being in Norfolk. Although I will say that we were all the time reminded of the war with the constant drone of planes going over and back, sometimes dropping their bombs on a large Engineering works in Norwich and then the blitz when Norwich was attacked repeatedly.

At that time my mother and Aunt sent Eric and I into the country to stay in a little village, which we both hated and wanted to be back at granny’s house. By then her house had all the windows and doors blown off and lots of my friends in the street had their houses completely flattened. Thankfully all them were saved in their Anderson shelters. My granny had a Morrison shelter. I can see my mother now showing me the flames outside the window and pleading with me to get out of bed having zipped up my sister in her siren suit. She was sent to friends at Bristol at the time of the blitz and she hated it because she was only five years old.

7. Well I suppose we really hated the Germans at the time and had every reason to do so. I never would have believed that in future years I would meet another lonely mother in London with two small children and a long way from home. She was from Hamburg. What a lovely friend she was. She told us they did not know all that was happening. Hildegard also told me that when her mother was killed in the bombing how upset she was. She would never salute ‘Heil’ to Hitler. She hated him.

8. On VE day, I was in GT Yarmouth with my mother and sister in a chalet at Hemsby and we went down the promenade at Yarmouth and sang and cheered and people were happy, getting drunk but enjoying the relief of the past six years.

Going back through to when the war was declared, everyone was sitting round the wireless listening to Neville Chamberlain and when he said we were at war I remember my mother crying. I knew then how serious it must be but being only ten we did not know the horrors of war.

Having said all this, having my father going off in the Army and my Uncles’ too, we were lucky that they came home telling us tales of their experiences. My dad was so proud to go out on D-Day and you will see that he was in the 79th Armoured Division and was on Sword beach. He came home and told us how homesick he felt, but we cried so much when he returned.

D-Day was a very moving experience, when we saw those planes above us in the sky, at that time I was going to work on my bike and the sky was full of planes and gliders. We knew it was happening. It made us feel so proud. All the time though there was a great bond that people had with one another. We were all striving for the same purpose. There were sad times but also happy times. As I began to grow up my mother would allow me to go to dances and there we made many friends. We met lots of airmen, our own and Americans too. They did much in the war also. It was nice to be given some of their rations as they had sweets and chocolate and gum of course, but I wasn’t so keen on that. They also introduced us to peanut butter and my sister enjoyed that too.

To conclude, I am glad that there has been this tremendous celebration of VE Day now because there are some of us alive to remember it. It was truly a great day and makes us ‘oldies’ feel sad and happy. As you can see on TV we can even meet up with the Germans now and feel friendly to them.

This must never happen again. It’s a bit strange to look back and remember these times, never realising how things will be in the future.

Lots of love,

Nana.

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