World War II Remembered

England Under Siege

228 When England declared war on Germany on Sunday, September 3, 1939, the air-raid sirens went off. My father was in the bathtub and scrambled to get dressed and find out what was going on. I was in church and was equally mystified. The congregation paused but then continued with the service. When church was over, we all went home to listen to Neville Chamberlain on the wireless. At the time, a single plane flying overhead was enough to send us into a panic. No one knew what to expect. Were we going to be invaded? Was the plane a scout for the Germans? It turned out to be one of our own, but the worry continued. Germany and Russia were invading Poland and soon to follow were the Netherlands and Belgium. Was England to be next? I lived with my parents in Bromley, a suburb of London in Kent. At 17 years of age, I had completed a course at a business college and qualified as a shorthand-typist. After taking a Civil Service examination , I was temporarily working as a secretary at the Lever Brothers head office in Blackfriars in London. When the results of the examination became known about three months later, I was asked to report to England Under Siege • Pamela Scoffin Phipps England Under Siege: Pamela Scoffin Phipps 229 the Admiralty Headquarters in Bath, where all naval operations had been evacuated. My secretarial job at the Admiralty was with Naval Stores, which handled supplies of everything for ships from ammunition to food. Bath suited me well, as I had relatives near there. Later, my parents moved to Wiltshire, so I was not too far away from home. The railway provided a good enough service for me to travel to and fro, a journey of about 40 minutes. When the worst of the bombing raids took place between September 1940 and May 1941, passengers sometimes were transferred to busses to go round a place where a bomb had destroyed the line. Bath itself was also bombed. Later, when Hitler turned most of his air force against the Soviet Union, I was transferred to London at the time that part of the Admiralty moved back to Whitehall. One section of offices—including Naval Stores, where I worked—was in a building in New Oxford Street, with shops on the ground floor. If we had an air raid, we would go to the basement and make ourselves as comfortable as we could with our own blankets. The Underground was nearby but was too crowded and noisy. After a midday raid at lunchtime, one young married couple did not return: the Tottenham Court Road restaurant where they were eating had been bombed. During this time I was also a volunteer fire watcher. The Germans were dropping incendiary bombs that landed on rooftops and contained a material like napalm that could not be extinguished with water ; standing on the roof, we were supplied with buckets of sand to put out the fire. Fortunately, I never had to cope with a bomb of this kind. Also at this time, I volunteered at the canteen for service men from all branches except for the Americans, who had their own canteens. Between the explosive bombs, the fire-watching, and the canteen, I got very little sleep. In the last eight or nine months of the War, the Germans began sending unmanned V-1 and V-2 rockets over London. The V-2s were especially frightening. Because of the way the sound carried, you heard the explosion first and afterwards the whistle of the missile’s journey. My parents, who were in a suburb, had an iron table in the dining room which was so heavy that the only way to move it was to take it apart. Although it was supposed to protect them from bombs, they did 230 World War II Remembered not use it much. Their neighbors, who had what was called an Anderson shelter in their garden, invited them to use that underground room whenever it became necessary. A school friend, fire-watching at our parish church, was killed when the tower received a direct hit. Rationing was quite severe. There was plenty of bread but very little butter, sugar, cheese, eggs, meat, or fish, among other things. When I was in Bath, I had friends who owned a poultry farm. They supplied us with eggs when...