VE Day was a great day for celebrations for so many people each in their own way, but of course there were also so many dark times which had to be endured. Perhaps especially for many Londoners in 1940 who lived quite close to the Docklands during the constant night time bombing that became known as the Blitz. I suspect that there are many South Oxhey residents who also have memories of their own during this period and although I was only five at the time, these experiences are for me still so vivid.

I lived with my parents and grandmother in Eleanor Road, Hackney, not far from the docks and we all spent every night during that Blitz period in our Anderson shelter in the back garden. Cold, musty, damp and for me as a small boy very frightening, especially as my dad, before being called up volunteered as an auxiliary fireman and was on duty most nights. Each night we couldn’t sleep much because of the ear-splitting bangs from the anti-aircraft batteries close by. But one evening it became even worse as a stick of bombs was dropped along our road, destroying houses at each end and we all hugged each other during the whistling, the noise and the huge explosions which I can still remember now. Next morning, being young, my other memory is having to climb over rubble to get to the local shops, which for me was then great fun.

Not long after this frightening experience my mother and I were evacuated to Wigston Magna near Leicester and I still have a cutting and a photograph which was in the local Leicester Mercury newspaper showing evacuees being welcomed. In that cutting there was a quote, which I don’t recall saying, which said “this is nothing to be unhappy about”.

After a short time, we came back to London. During the wartime I was evacuated twice more, ending back in Battersea, going to school there until 1949 when the LCC offered my parents and I a brand new BISF house in Ilkley Road and for me another new life in South Oxhey.

Whilst that time in 1940 was so tough, it does mirror the strains and concerns we are all now facing with this awful pandemic in 2020. But we came through then, not just in London but in every village, town and city throughout the UK. We will see our way back and return to whatever normality will be, as we did then.

Roy Clements

Oaklands Avenue, Oxhey Hall