How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On Read Online Free Page A

said
he would go into the sewer, tie a rope to the bomb and pull it out. So I gave him a safety lamp to use, and then he said, ‘Oh, by the way, are there any rats down there?’
    And when I said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Well, I’m not going down there, then. We’ll dig for it instead.’ And he made his men dig a hole thirty feet deep and got the
bomb like that. He was prepared to face an unexploded bomb – but not a rat!
    G. A. Shapland, Lancing, Surrey

    Bodiam in Sussex, 3 September 1939. Lots of Londoners were picking hops. We’d just heard that we were at war. About half an hour later, we heard a lot of planes
     coming. As we’d already been kitted out with gas masks, we just put them on, thinking they were planes with gas. And there we sat, in the hop garden, with our masks on. Eventually some
     Londoners told us: ‘It’s all right, mate – they’re ours!’
    L. Beaney, Tenterden, Kent
    As a young woman during the Second World War, I lived with my crippled mother and an aged aunt in a ground-floor flat in a large block, surrounded by similar blocks of flats and
a few houses.
    During an air raid, we would sit at the end of an inner corridor to be safe from splintered glass, as windows always blew inwards with a blast. On one occasion there was a direct hit on the
block next door, and its flying masonry descended on our own block, causing it to shiver and shake for what seemed like an eternity. Finally it decided to stand firm. Terrified, we clung to each
other in the dark on the floor where the blast had hurled us. The flats had coal fires and separate anthracite boilers, and the smell of soot was stifling. All doors but one were off their hinges
and, judging by the noise, every window was out.
    Suddenly a flickering light appeared where our front door had once stood; a dark figure, holding aloft a lighted candle in one hand, made its way unsteadily towards us. It was the lady from next
door, simply covered with soot, her red-rimmed blue eyes shining out of her black face. In her other hand she held an almost spotless pair of white corsets.
    ‘Isn’t it disgusting?’ she said. ‘New today and now they’ve got a bit of soot on them!’ She was very shocked and had no idea that she looked like a black
minstrel. Very soon her equally sooty husband, who bore a bottle of Chartreuse and a mug, joined her. And we all shared a loving cup by candlelight.
    Suddenly two more excited figures entered the corridor. One was the lovely daughter of our neighbours, barefooted, dark hair streaming over her white nightdress; the other was her fiancé.
The house nearby where they lodged had been razed to the ground and they were the sole survivors. You can imagine the emotional impact on the girl’s parents. There was also a young
schoolmaster we knew. There seemed to be safety in numbers.
    By the time I had brewed some tea during a lull in the bombing, the ARP arrived to ask how many refugees I had and if I could cope. I could, and bedded everyone down in the corridor with
blankets and pillows.
    Just as we were dozing off, there were loud screams from the lavatory on the corridor and the sound of fists pounding on the door. The poor girl in the nightdress had gone in there and the door,
being the only one left on its hinges, was out of true. The lock had jammed and refused to yield to pressure. Eventually the ARP had to return with a pickaxe to free her – not an easy task
without injuring her.
    Twenty-two years later, I met this girl again in Brighton. She’d grown into a poised and elegant young matron and invited me to her charming home where we laughed about the caricature
element in that horrific night of long ago.
    Mrs C. Tennant, London
    Although I worked as an electrical and magnetic instrument maker, in the evenings I played in a band. At the height of the Blitz, we were playing at a function in Altrincham,
in a large hall that doubled up as the local ARP headquarters.
    On this particular evening,