I can remember the air raid shelters and how, as a child I loved to go into them. In the classroom there was a device which acted as an Alarm. This consisted of a light which would flash if there was a raid and a little hammer. The child who was sitting at the desk where the alarm was would take hold of the hammer and start to bang it if the light flashed. This was the signal that we should go the shelter. What a commotion – each of us had a number of which shelter we should go to. On hearing the hammer, we would all leave our desks and run to our allocated number, where the teacher would be waiting. I loved the shelter because when we got there we were given a lollipop. Lessons carried on as normal, whatever we were doing continued in the dim light of the shelter, but it was all the more enjoyable – because of the lolly!

(Hopkinson 2004)

Another account recalled that if children were in the shelters for more than two hours the teachers would come round and give them a sweet (Anon. 2005c). In some places there were similar arbitrary rules surrounding school attendance and overnight air raids so that if there had been raids overnight school started an hour later than usual to allow students to get more sleep.

### Shelter play

One of the most significant recurring themes throughout this study is children's transformation of the material culture of war into objects of play. This practice takes a variety of forms, from creative reimagining to deliberate subversion, and can serve a variety of practical purposes and psychological needs. Many of the stories of wartime childhood describe using air raid shelters as play spaces, and this takes a variety of forms. Some of these are relatively straightforward references to the shelter as a 'den', able to take on any number of identities:

The brick air-raid shelter built at the end of our small cul-de-sac made a wonderful play area for the children who lived in the street. It became a house, a palace, a log-cabin, a battleship, a tank, a prisoner-of-war camp and many other things as our imaginations took flight.

(Hammond 2005)

The accounts of play tend to be associated with positive memories of the shelters, but the forms of play vary with age. The 'den' or play-space seems to be associated with younger children, as in this account by Ray Jones which like many such stories focuses on the sense memories of touch, darkness, echoing sounds and smell of damp:

We children loved the shelter. It was our play den. We ran down the ramp and through the door, feeling our way along the dark tunnel inside, making ghostly noises and squealing to frighten each other, our voices echoing in the narrow space; then climbing the ladder at the far end, up the shaft and out of the hatch into the fresh air, then back down the ramp again and into the dark shelter, smelling of damp earth, where we would play hide and seek, lying down under the benches and holding onto each other, giggling, our hearts beating with fear

(R. Jones 2003)

This account is particularly interesting as it describes the children confronting a specific fear (of the dark), of the excitement of being scared and scaring others in a relatively safe and controlled environment, and of how this fear was mastered through shared play. Jones goes on to discuss the uses of the shelter by slightly older children as somewhere to go for 'a secret smoke in the dark', and for the even older ones to take their girlfriends 'away from prying eyes' (Jones 2003). He also notes, slightly less pleasantly, that it became a dog toilet, but the smell of urine was a nearly ubiquitous one in public shelters. Another similar account by John Conroy describes how 'the shelter was taken very seriously by the adults, but not by us kids. It became a kind of youth club.' (Conroy 2005). In this case, the shelter was associated with a specific war game:

Close to the shelter was a set of swings, and my first recollection of shelter play, as I call it, was connected to those swings. For some fortunate reason most of the girls in our group were older than the boys. A game evolved whereby the boys on the swings were Spitfire pilots who got shot down and parachuted off the swings, the girls were the nurses who took us wounded pilots to the hospital, (the shelter) to tend to our wounds … as we all got older the games got better, even though the boys were a bit puzzled at first, none more so than me but I do know that the shelter became more popular than the swings … As time went by and we all got older the air-raid shelter at the end of the street was put to good use and perhaps, no, we did grow-up more quickly than we might otherwise have done.

(Conroy 2005)

This sense of the public air raid shelter as a secret space providing concealment for illicit behaviour was a very common one at the time, and alongside moral concerns there was a particularly widespread problem of children vandalizing public shelters that led to many public shelters remaining locked during the daytime. Air raid shelter play was not without its risks: Michael Collier described playing in a brick-built surface shelter on a pavement where the door opened directly onto a road: 'On one occasion I was run over by a lorry as I ran out of that door, I must have been six or seven at the time, fortunately I got off with a cut on the head and a slightly bruised foot.' (Collier 2005).

Children playing out on the street or in parks were under strict instructions to find a nearby shelter if the air raid siren sounded, including asking for shelter in people's homes. Philip Hillman and his cousin took full advantage of this, and on their way to the nearby park they would spot affluent-looking homes.

if the air raid siren sounded we would cycle like mad to the pre-destined house and enquire innocently if we could shelter. We had learnt that the more affluent the house the more 'goodies' were hoarded in the shelter. We of course took full advantage of this, and when the 'all clear' sounded we were very reluctant to leave. We never went back to the same house again but the next time chose a different one to try!

(Hillman 2005)

This cunningly acquisitive approach to taking shelter echoes the more militantly political actions of the Stepney Tenants' Defence League, a communist-influenced local community group who campaigned for better air raid shelters in working class areas, and once orchestrated an occupation of the luxurious deep shelters beneath the Savoy Hotel by working class East Enders to draw attention to the disparity between the meagre and unsafe public shelters and the opulence available to the wealthy.

Air raid precautions made their way into a variety of children's games and activities: Anne Tester recalled a game she and her cousin would play with their rather elaborate dolls' house which was fitted with electric lights and drawing curtains: 'With it we played out all the wartime activities that were part of our ordinary lives and the games always featured an irate warden (always played by my cousin), who would shout at us to "put those lights out!"' (Tester 2005).

### Making oneself at home

In the gendered space of the air raid shelter, the work of providing protection through buying, building or assembling the shelter fell overwhelmingly to men, while the role of women as home makers was to make them feel like homes (Butler 2018). Sometimes this division is made explicit in the memory narratives: 'We dug and sodded and sweated till it was in, then my mother took over, she removed the airing cupboard doors which fitted like a glove and made two beds, with lots of chintz and pink distemper it looked really cute.' (Stone 2003). Just as this gendered division of shelter labour reflected wider social practices, so the shelters themselves came to resemble miniatures or simulacra of the home: following Grayzel, Butler (2018) explores the ways in which the creation of secure, familiar domestic space of the shelter allowed women to assume and perform specific prescribed wartime gender roles. This transformation served a number of different purposes: it provided activities and a sense of 'getting stuck in'; it provided practical comforts such as drinks and soft furnishings that made the experience of taking shelter more pleasant; and for children (and certainly for some adults), it provided a sense of reassurance and continuity. Anne Rudhall recalled that her grandmother 'had an Anderson shelter in her garden in Perry Barr, which she carefully camouflaged with soil and flowers. It was lovely in there as she had made it look like a little house inside.' (Rudhall 2006). Joan Prewer's account shows some of the many different ways that her shelter were made homely:

The shelter inside was warm and cosy with home-made rugs on the floor. Different styles of chairs and stools were arranged around a small table which had candles, matches, books and games on it. An old wind-up gramophone stood on a wooden upturned box which had tins of food and papers stored in.

(Prewer 2004)

Rugs on the floor, furniture, food, lighting, heating and music went a long way to creating a welcoming atmosphere. Like Prewer, numerous reminiscence accounts describe their Anderson shelters as 'cosy', often for similar reasons: May (2003) found cosiness in good heating and light from an oil lamp and stove; Pearson (2004) found it in a carpeted floor and cushions on the beds; while five-year-old Annabel's Anderson shelter was 'made cosy with thick blankets and pillows, and a thick curtain cut us off from doorway drafts'. This last account gives a reasonably comprehensive list of the objects to be found in a well-appointed Anderson shelter, 'with bunk beds down both sides to sleep four, a small table by the entrance with a primus stove, cups and tea. Under the table were tin mugs and plates, spare torch and matches, a small box of first aid stuff, and a bottle of water' (Annabel 2003). The concrete or earth floors of the Anderson shelters were commonly made more homely with the addition of wooden boards, carpet offcuts or a rug. William Willis watched his mother make rag rugs to cover the floor and the bunks of the shelter:

in the shelter it was cold and damp. It smelled of mould, mothballs, candle wax and stale food. Mum had made rugs for us to lie on and to make the cold cement floor a little more homely. There was no spare cash to buy carpet or extra bedding, even if we had sufficient coupons. So the rugs were made from old clothing and Hessian sacks. Mum would cut old disused clothing into oblongs, about 1'x 2' each. She would then fold the cloth into a final size of 1' x ½' and then sew them onto the sack, using different colours, textures and patterns to create individual designs. No two were ever quite the same. We had some examples of these in our home for many years after the war.

(Willis 2004)

In the earlier, daytime air raids many people took picnics, snacks or flasks of tea with them into the shelters, but with the move to night raids more people were eating meals underground: Bill Cole recalled the near-permanent residents of his local underground station: 'Families would stay down there while the husband went off to work or while the wives would venture out to get some food and cooked it on little Tommy Cookers.' (Cole 2005). Many shelterers ensured that they kept a supply of water for drinking, tea-making and washing, with the job of keeping it topped up often delegated to the children (e.g. Hubbard 2005). When raids could be expected every night, as at the height of the Blitz in London, supplies of food were often kept in the shelter: Joan Offord recalled that her family's Anderson contained 'a food tin which could contain biscuits, tinned milk, sugar, tea, cake etc. which we would replenish the following day' (Offord 2005).

As with so many aspects of the war, canny businesses emerged to provide aftermarket additions to the stark, standardized material culture of war. The largest range of these was probably the variety of metal gas mask boxes and oilcloth covers for the standard cardboard gas mask cases, but similarly enterprising businesses offered ways of improving or augmenting your Anderson shelter, as Brian Brooks recalled:

what about the entrance opening? A curtain wouldn't have lasted very long or have worked very well. Fortunately, my Mum said, at such times 'cottage industries' appear to meet the needs. Mr Cuddiford, our ARP Warden, found a local retired man from the Shepherds Bush side of Old

#### 96 Air raid shelters

Oak Common Lane, who looked about a hundred years old to me, who made shelter doors from old fence panels, etc. for half-a-crown (2 shillings and 6 pence = 12p) [actually 12.5p]. Ours was four or five vertical strips with two narrow horizontal cross-pieces on the inside; these had small block pegs on the ends that could be turned outwards to hold the door in the entrance. Two old drawer handles helped with dragging the door into place. It was painted lumpy blue, and I thought it looked very smart.  But showing light during the blackout wasn't allowed, so later even that had to be covered with a little drawing-pinned curtain.

(Brooks 2005a)

Apart from games and toys – 'a box with games and jigsaws' – there was no distinctively childish artefact of the shelter aside from the siren suits discussed earlier (Adin 2004), yet in making the shelter homely a great deal of thought often went into the needs of the children, and as expected this practical and emotional labour fell to the mothers:

I remember that for us the whole thing of hiding in the shelter was rather exciting. It was probably because our parents tried everything possible to make it easy for us, and because we were also mixing and living with other people. My mum and the other women laid some sheets and carpets on the cold cement floor, and they hung on the walls pictures of film stars and people to make the shelter cosy.

(Coppins-Moroney 2005)

The impression of the shelter as a cosy and secure miniature or mirror of the home stands in stark contrast to other viewpoints of the shelter as a cold, damp, terrifying inversion of the domestic space. Part of the aim in 'domesticating' the Anderson shelter was to transform somewhere that seemed uncomfortably 'outside' into a homelier 'inside' space, but these efforts were easily undone by rising ground water, the bitter cold, and unwelcome fauna: several accounts mention spiders in the shelters being more frightening than the bombs (e.g. Maitland 2005), and even inducing families to flee: 'It was during one very bad raid that we saw a spider and me and my Mum and 2 sisters ran out in the garden. Dad went berserk, said we should be more frightened of the bombs! This often happened, we were all scared of creepy-crawlies.' (Brown 2005).

The domesticity of the shelter, and of the Anderson shelter in particular, was a strong reflection of its occupants' social class, not least as only those in possession of a large enough garden could install one. For the residents of the poorest slums in parts of Glasgow, London's East End and elsewhere, the available public shelters were often as poorly built and equipped as their homes and some, such as the enormous Tilbury Shelter in Stepney, with its thousands of overcrowded residents in deeply unhygienic conditions, became a byword for the looming crises of public morale, order and health.

#### Smell and sense memories

I remember when the German bombers came over, us children knew the difference in the sound, then the siren at the top of our road would go, deafening … I can still remember the noise of the bombing in the distance, and the musty smell of the air raid shelter.

(Valerie 2005)

One of the recurring themes in descriptions of air raid shelters in the accounts of wartime childhood is the variety of sense memories, including memories focused on the shelter itself such as smell and dampness, and memories of air warfare mediated through the shelter, such as the sounds and physical sensations of explosions. I want to look in more depth at these sensory dimensions of childhood experiences of air raid shelters starting with smell, although as we will see many memory narratives combine or blend the different senses in describing the shelters. Fred Clark's account of his family's Anderson shelter is a striking example of this, covering smell, damp, sound, restricted space and feelings of safety and security:

The memories that come back to me when I was taken into the shelter are that of a smell of dampness and candle wax, candles being our source of lighting. I believe that there was a radio and some form of bedding. I can remember the air-raid sirens warning us to take shelter, the crump of explosions, and anti-aircraft fire, searchlights sweeping and probing across the night sky also the distant glow from the bombing, depending how near this was, waiting for the all-clear siren, my mother's remarks such as 'some poor sods are getting it heavy tonight, it looks like it could be the docks' … The shelter was not a place that you would want to spend much time in, because most of it was submerged into the ground it suffered from dampness and condensation making rusty marks down the interior walls, which were made from curved corrugated iron sheets covered with earth at the top set on a small concrete base and inner wall, so the interior was a damp smelly and a cramped space but offered a feeling of safety when bombing was near … On the grassy section in front of our houses, another shelter was built, this was a flat roofed shelter probably for the use of the flats. Our family did not use this shelter and I have no memory of it being used much, I can remember going in to look around, it was very dim, there were some tiered bedding along the walls. It smelt quite damp with more than a hint of urine, it was often used as a play area and was not very clean.

(F. Clark 2005a)

As mentioned earlier, a great deal of early air raid precautions work focused on the risks of poison gas, and for this reason many public air raid shelters were built with limited ventilation, and most could be made superficially airtight with heavy doors and other materials. While this was not the case with domestic shelters and many other public shelters, the efforts to maintain the blackout with doors and heavy blankets could also restrict airflow in and out of the shelters.

The smell that most affected the public shelters was the stench of tens or hundreds of bodies, at a time when bathing was generally not as frequent as today, even before the restrictions of the shelter are taken into account, as one man recalled: 'we would get up feeling very dry and grubby having slept fully clothed all night'. This combined with the common overcrowding of the shelter and the lack of ventilation mentioned above created what one account of a boarding school shelter called 'a tremendous smelly fug', noting that 'In the mornings the clean cold air outside was delightful as we emerged blinking and dishevelled and carried our blankets up to the dormitories to hang over our beds to air.' (D. Smith 2004). Looking at the recorded reminiscences there were several other specific smells that were associated with the shelters: several accounts mention the lamps, fuelled with oil or kerosene, that were used for light and heat and 'the continued smell of the earth and muskiness of bedding that had been left down there' (Worrall 2005).

The smell and generally unpleasant atmosphere of some shelters actively deterred the public from making use of them: in fact many shelters, particularly those built in a hurry during the Munich Crisis or the early years of the war, were deemed unfit for purpose in a variety of ways, with flooding one of the most common. Several of the accounts describe baling water out of the shelters before they could be used, but most seem to have not unreasonably deemed the water-filled shelters too unpleasant to use, as Bill Cole recalled:

Most of the underground shelters, like the one in Bedlam Park, were smelly and always damp, so hardly anyone was willing to use them. This was lucky as one night Bedlam's shelter did get a direct hit and no one survived.

(Cole 2005)

Within the shelters the body heat and exhalations of the resident population created an atmosphere that was as moisture-rich as it was pungent, and numerous accounts of Anderson and public shelters describe the problems with damp: 'we had electric lights in the shelter, so you could see the constant rivulets of condensation running down the corrugated iron frame of the shelter '; 'Condensation collected on the concrete walls and slowly trickled or dripped on to our blankets.' (Worrall 2005).

Given the close connections between autobiographical memories and smells, it is unsurprising that many of the accounts of air raid shelters mention these sensations. Roy Keen noted this in relation to the smell of the temporary toilets installed in Aldwych underground station for those taking shelter there: 'The shelter toilet arrangements consisted of large metal drums surrounded by canvas curtains to give some privacy. The drums were filled with a strong disinfectant and even today if I smell that same disinfectant I am mentally transported back to that time immediately.' (Keen 2005). This chimes with my own experience of inviting wartime pupils of a North London primary school to visit the newly excavated school air raid shelter: several of them specifically mentioned how the musty smell brought back very vivid and powerful memories. The memories of the shelters are of course tied to other senses, memories and emotions, as with Patricia McGowan's account:

The entire area of the shelter smelled dank and very earthy and at first it was unpleasant but gradually our nostrils became used to the odour and we even associated this smell with safety, as this was the place where we could have some hope of escaping death or injury.

(McGowan 2004)

The mustiness, mould and damp of the shelters also contributed to ill-health, in particular respiratory problems. Maurice Westcott's mother contracted pleurisy, while Yvonne Worrall's sister suffered from whooping cough: she noted that 'As children, we were always tired, had colds that would today be called bronchitis, they never went away. If you had a childhood illness, you still sat in the shelter.' (Worrall 2005; Westcott 2005). Another common health problem, particularly in public shelters, was scabies, a contagious skin condition caused by infestation with a burrowing mite, as Harold Pollins recalled:

in those circumstances, with people huddled together in air raid shelters, dirt was commonplace and many people found themselves itching. The cause proved to be scabies, occasioned by a parasite that bore into the skin … I remember my family suffered from this and we went to the doctor who told us it was scabies which was something of a shock, as we knew or were told that it was a disease related to dirt, and it was shaming to be caught up in it. He advised that to the next baths we had we should add sulphur. This made the water go yellow but it did the trick of killing the parasite. The word scabies was thought too brutal to use. Instead people called it 'Shelter rash'. (Pollins 2005)

The government commissioned research into the transmission and treatment of scabies from entomologist Kenneth Mellanby, who recruited conscientious objectors as his test subjects, and identified several successful courses of treatment.

### Soundscapes

Alongside smells, the sense that children of the Second World War most commonly associated with the air raid shelter was hearing. Hidden in these deliberately windowless spaces the air war could be heard but not seen, and the variety, intensity and emotional and psychological impacts of these sounds is clear from the accounts in the People's War archive, such as Joy Caswell's memories of one specific evening raid:

#### 100 Air raid shelters

I can vividly remember running down the garden, hearing the sirens and what sounded like guns going off. The German planes made an awful loud pounding noise … It sounded as if these guns were being fired and bombs were being dropped non-stop. The ground shook so badly and one large brick came through the roof of our house. The force of the bomb blast also blew out most of the windows in the back of the house … The noise of the bombing that evening will remain with me forever.

(Caswell 2005)

I have previously explored the issue of soundscapes of air warfare in more depth (see Moshenska 2017), but here my focus is on the air raid shelter as mediator and as the space where the sounds and sensations of the bombing war were experienced. Brian Brooks described the extraordinary, overwhelming sensory experience of the air raid:

It had been quietish for a night or two and, although dressed ready for the Anderson shelter in my siren suit, I was asleep on Mum's bed in the back bedroom. I woke up being pulled from the bed by my sister Beryl. I was puzzled as the 'black-out' and curtains were gone from the window and I could see lots of criss-cross black lines against bright red flames … the noise of crackling, pops, bangs and a roaring sound followed by a 'whoosh cruummppp' suddenly filled my ears. Someone was shouting at me from a long, long way away 'Wake up … come on … Hurry … ' Stumble down stairs – cold air on face outdoors – suddenly wide awake.  And the noise – crack-crack-crump and spang-pertanggg of AA guns and rockets (on Wormwood Scrubs), aircraft engines, crackling roaring and bangs from the fire – and bells. I was pulled into the shelter entrance as Mum ran up with Jasmine, bag and blankets. As I looked back at Mum I saw it all again, reflected in our windows – bright flashes of shells, flames and sparks jumping up, lighting up clouds of smoke. (Brooks 2005c)

While the smell of the shelter might invoke memories most clearly, the sounds that the sheltering children heard seem to have created the most powerful and affecting recollections. The typical soundtrack of an air raid began with the warning siren, or in some areas a bell or similar. This was the signal to take shelter, and from then on the sounds would be muffled by the shelter: the approach of aircraft; the firing of the anti-aircraft guns (and occasionally, as above, rockets); followed by the sound of bombs, and finally the all-clear signal on the air raid siren. Sometimes the bombers would come in waves, and there would be periods of calm between the sounds of engines, guns and bombs. With the arrival of the V1 flying bombs in 1944, a new soundtrack emerged: following the warning would come the rattle of a solitary pulse-jet engine, the simple and cheap propulsion unit for the missile. When the engine cut out there would be a tense silence before the sound of the explosive impact.

As part of the discipline of aircraft recognition (see Chapter 5), many young people learned to recognize the difference between the sounds of different aircraft, in particular 'the very distinct undulating pitch of the engines of the German bombers, the curious rhythm of the unsynchronised twin engines which contrasted with the single engine or synchronised pair on the British fighters that intercepted the attackers' (Collier 2005). As well as the bombers there was the sound of the bombs themselves, some of them equipped with whistles to strike fear. Brenda Maitland recalled the sound of a near miss:

Night after night we spent in the shelter, listening to the sound of antiaircraft guns, the steady throb of German planes going overhead, and the awful piercing whistle of a bomb coming down. One night a bomb screamed towards us, with a deafening whistle. It seemed to take forever before it reached the ground and then, silence. We clutched each other in terror. It had not exploded.

(Maitland 2005)

As with so many potentially traumatic aspects of the war, the attitude and behaviour of parents and other adults provided a model and a framework of understanding for children. One girl recalled that her father rarely joined the family in the air raid shelter, as he was generally either at work or firewatching on the factory roof:

He sometimes got home in the early dawn. When he was there, he was reassuring and confident. 'Safer in here than the trenches,' he said. I didn't know what the trenches had been like then. 'Listen to the guns,' he said. 'That's our lot shooting down their bombers.' I wasn't afraid. I went to sleep lulled by the noise of our Ak Ak bringing down the enemy from the sky.

(Annabel 2003)

Of course, not all of the sounds of the air raid shelter were sounds of air warfare: numerous accounts, particularly of public shelters, describe families bringing gramophones, radios and musical instruments both as ways to pass the time and to help muffle some of the sounds of aircraft, guns, bombs and sirens. With a bit of imagination even the shelters themselves could make some noise: Eileen Whitmore and her sister Grace waited until the all-clear siren had sounded before they leapt onto their steel Morrison shelter and tapdanced loudly on its roof: 'As the roof of it was made of metal it made a smashing sound.' (Whitmore 2004).

For the most part the soundscape of the shelter, particularly the public shelters, underground stations and other more social spaces was the sound of the crowd: talking and yelling; children and babies playing, crying, shouting; and the full range of bodily noises (Figure 3.3). As Bill Cole noted, 'There

Figure 3.3 Children being put to bed in the air raid shelter of John Keble Church, Mill Hill. © Imperial War Museum, D 1439.

were babies crying and children running around, and coughing, and snoring, it was a wonder people slept at all' (Cole 2005). At the excavation of a school air raid shelter one of the former students I interviewed told me that although metal buckets were provided in separate compartments for use as toilets, no child was willing to use it as the noise echoed in the shelter leading to great embarrassment and ridicule: accordingly, he and many other children emerged from the shelter, particularly after long warning periods, in extreme discomfort but stubbornly unwilling to be heard urinating so loudly.

When the bombs and guns stopped, the aircraft departed, and the all-clear siren sounded, the change could be striking, and particularly at night the silence could seem almost unnatural. Yvonne Worrall described how 'If we were lucky, we would get the all clear around three o'clock and manage to get some sleep till eight, then we would go off to school. It was eerie, the quietness after so much noise, like you had suddenly gone deaf' (Worrall 2005).

#### Explosions

The extremely high volume of the sounds from bombs and anti-aircraft guns could move it from the heard into the felt; from an auditory to a fully embodied experience. The majority of bombs dropped from German aircraft were 50kg or 250kg high explosive bombs, and their detonation created a shock wave through the air and through the ground, as well as the effects of blast and shrapnel in the immediate vicinity. The blast could shatter windows and doors but the shock wave could also cause significant damage including structural collapse and could shake shelters to their foundations:

Our house was bombed during the winter of 1941 and I was only fourteen years old. The building was in Golborne Road, North Kensington; I lived there with my parents, my brothers and sisters, but we all survived because at the time of the bombing we were hidden in the air raid shelter nearby with another family. When the bomb exploded the shelter shook and all the children started to cry, it was a terrible and frightening moment.

(Coppins-Moroney 2005)

Anderson shelters such as this one could better withstand this sort of impact: the earth insulated them, and the corrugated steel structure could flex and bend without breaking. In contrast, brick-built shelters were often more fragile: Roy Keen described seeing 'the dust being shaken out of the brick walls as the explosions occurred close by and at the same time seeing a sign on the wall saying "Happy Christmas"!' (Keen 2005). Another recalled the noise of the nearby anti-aircraft artillery as well as the bombs:

The sound grew louder, and as it did the anti-aircraft guns started to fire. They sounded very close as they were mobile and moved around to get the best advantage for firing at the planes. The gunfire grew louder and louder and then the bombs started to drop and explode all around us. The air raid shelter shook and then rocked from side to side but managed to stay intact. (Gloria-Jean 2005)

Many of the accounts like this record the sense of rocking or riding a wave of the explosion. One described 'that extraordinary feeling of the earth coming up and going back down again, and coming up and going back down again' and another compared it to 'rocking like a ship at sea' (Hird 2005). Tom Ebert's account of riding the shockwaves in an Anderson shelter describes both the sensation and the terror of bombs falling so close by:

The explosions came nearer and nearer until at last they were upon us, and the bombers were overhead. I recall terrified screams from the women and children every time bombs landed near us (which was frequently) and everybody being thrown into heaps side to side by the concussion waves of the explosions through the earth. I know that I kept breaking into hysterical laughter which turned into tears every time there was an explosion. The bombing seemed to go on for hours and hours but now and again in an infrequent lull in the bombing, we had to open the door of the shelter to get fresh air.

(Ebert 2003)

One of the more curious pieces of material culture associated with the shockwave effects of bombing was the 'India rubber' mouth guard that was worn between the teeth to prevent biting one's own tongue in the shock of an explosion. In one account, it is worn only by a grandmother, while another entire family is described 'sat shivering, india rubbers in our mouths' and noted that they were also meant to stop teeth being damaged by biting down too hard, again as an effect of the shock waves (Anon. 2005d; Tonsor 2003). Sometimes the rubber mouth guard would be attached to a handkerchief to assist in its retrieval, if it were accidentally swallowed in the shock of the explosion (Shaw 2012: 183).

### Bombing, death and trauma

Very few of the public or private shelters provided for the British population were capable of surviving a direct hit even with a relatively small bomb. The image of the London Underground stations as impermeable to bombs belied the relatively shallow depth of many of the platforms: more than 60 people were killed at Balham station on 14 October 1940 when a 1,400kg bomb penetrated almost ten metres below the road surface, causing the underground tunnel to collapse and destroying water mains and sewers. Some of the most powerful memories of the shelters are of those who survived near-misses or direct hits. Roy Keen experienced a near-miss in his family's Anderson shelter that landed directly across the road, killing several neighbours and tearing away the heavy wooden door to the shelter, as he recalled: 'I had a fit but soon recovered.' (Keen 2005). Bernard Hubbard's father had been seriously wounded in the First World War and was too old for military service, so he was at home with his family on 28 April 1942 during a daylight air raid on Norwich.

That particular day, while we were in the shelter, we suddenly heard 'planes and then bombs dropping like rain. My house collapsed on to the shelter and my father's head was very, very badly damaged. There was so much blood and he died in the shelter. For two and a half days my stepsister, my mother and me sat in the shelter. We were up to our necks in water because a water main had been hit and as a result everything had become flooded. I was only ten years old at the time and I felt I was going to drown. The air-raid wardens finally dug us out. We then discovered that not only had my Dad died in the raid, but many children in the street had as well. Many of these children had been my friends.

(Hubbard 2005)

Such a long delay in being dug out was unusual but not unknown. Alongside air raid wardens and the fire brigade, the civil defence teams included light and heavy rescue squads, who searched for survivors in bombed buildings. Usually made up of council employees and tradesmen, these teams would attempt to secure the more unstable ruins, turning off gas and water and removing rubble and debris. The need to proceed with caution in structures threatening further collapse meant that rescue work was often slow, and in many cases only corpses could be recovered. It is notable how, in describing some of the most horrifying and traumatic events of their childhoods more than 60 years earlier, Hubbard like many of the people whose memories are recorded in the People's War archive seems to revert to a more childish language.

One day before the Balham Tube bombing a large public shelter in Stoke Newington, North London, received a direct hit from a bomb that passed through the block of flats above before detonating in the shelter itself. The shelter beneath the Coronation Avenue buildings was believed to be safe, and several hundred people used the three rooms, sitting or lying on narrow benches.

We had settled down as usual, when there was a dull thud, a sound of falling masonry, and total darkness. Somebody lit a torch – the entrance to the next room was completely full of rubble, as if it had been stacked by hand. Very little rubble had come into our room. Suddenly I felt my feet getting very cold, and I realised that water was covering my shoes. We were at the end of the room farthest from the exit. I noticed my father trying to wake the man in the bunk above him, but without success – a reinforcing steel beam in the ceiling had fallen down and was lying on him. The water was rising, and I started to make my way to the far end, where the emergency exit was situated. Everybody seemed very calm – with no shouting or screaming. By the time I got to the far end, the water was almost up to my waist, and there was a small crowd clambering up a steel ladder in a very orderly manner. Being a little more athletic than some of them, and very scared, I clambered up the back of the ladder to the top, swung over, and came out into the open. It was very cold and dark, and I was shivering. The air was thick with brick dust, which got into my mouth, the water was squelching in my shoes.

(Anon. [Edison] 2003)

Around 160 people died in the shelter that night, and Lawrie Edison and his family were amongst the relatively few survivors (Loewe 2012). Like many young people in the Blitz Lawrie and his sister exhibited a range of trauma responses both at the time and later, and up to the present.

My sister said she was alright, until she went up into our parents room the next morning, and saw soldiers arriving outside, with shovels – then she started crying (she was 15 years old). A few days later, I saw men wearing gauze masks bringing out bodies, and placing them in furniture vans. Having seen bodies since, this is the only thing that comes back in my dreams – the furniture vans and the water.

(Anon. [Edison] 2003)

The theme of fear and lasting trauma appear frequently in memory accounts of children in air raid shelters. Just as the shelters became associated with the sounds of air raids, they were also the spaces in which many of the most violent and traumatic events were experienced or witnessed, such as those described above, and these emotional and psychological legacies are part of the life history of shelters. Children's experiences of trauma were powerfully mediated by parental responses, and many parents made efforts to protect their children from awareness of some of the violent realities, risks and their own fears, with varying degrees of success. When Salisbury experienced its first air raid warning, Margaret Goulding's mother wrapped her in a blanket and hid in the understairs cupboard:

She told me many years later about this episode, and how she had sat there with a small torch trying to read the leaflet 'what to do if there is an air raid', and shaking with fear. She said I was very quiet, but then suddenly asked her when we were going to die – which upset her even more, and she never forgot that moment.

(Goulding 2005)

Some of the traumatic responses are specifically associated with sense memories of air raids, one of the most common being the sound of the air raid siren, including its use in the closing credits of the television show Dad's Army. Roy Keen whose sense memories of the shelters were sparked by the smell of disinfectant (discussed earlier) found that even decades after the war ended the sound of a siren used to summon volunteer firefighters in the far north of Scotland that sounded similar to the air raid warning could trigger a panic attack (Keen 2005). Cultural attitudes to mental health played a damaging role in keeping people from seeking what limited help was available, both at the time and later:

Trauma counselling?? Non-existent … The nearest we would have got to it would be remarks on the lines of 'You're alive, ain't yer? Be thankful! Plenty of poor sods who ain't' and as we didn't realise we were traumatised – we got on with it!! However, even now, aged 70, if I hear the sound of an air raid siren on the television I become emotional and choke up, so there must be something in this counselling.

(Ebert 2003)

In response to the heavy bombing of Southampton in 1940, seven-year-old Margaret May came to believe that the family's Anderson shelter was the only place of safety, and became reluctant to leave it for any reason. Her family tried to lure her out by bringing out her Christmas present and placing it by the back door of the house. As she recalled, 'I ran up the garden, took a peek, said "Yes, it's nice" and ran back to the shelter' (May 2003). Shortly afterwards she was evacuated to rural Dorset, where on requesting to sleep in the air raid shelter, she was pointed to the ditch at the end of the garden and persuaded to sleep indoors.

### Afterlives of shelters

By the end of the Second World War the threat of German air raids had declined, and attacks with V1 missiles had tailed off as their launch sites were overrun by Allied troops, although they and the highly destructive V2 attacks continued until late March of 1945. With the end of the war, the air raid shelters had reached the ends of their useful lives. Many public air raid shelters were demolished, particularly the flimsily-built brick surface shelters, while some of the subterranean shelters beneath parks and playing fields were merely sealed with concrete, and I have had some interesting experiences opening and exploring these (see Moshenska 2007a; 2013). Larger shelters returned to their original uses as basements, cellars and warehouses, while some of the purpose-built tunnels were transformed into storage spaces and in a few cases into underground mushroom farms. The steel Morrison shelters were easily dismantled and removed leaving little trace beyond scuffed floors, while the Anderson shelters buried in gardens presented a greater challenge.  In many cases the shelters were dug out of the ground and the modular steel panels reused, with the curved roofs most often transformed into garden sheds with wooden end panels, doors and windows:

I remember when we took it out, later after the war, my father decided to take it out of the ground and made it into a shed – a lot of people did this – and he painted it green. I don't know where he got the green paint from. He was up a ladder painting the top and I was behind him, and he came off the ladder, the paint went up in the air and it landed all over me. They cut my hair to get as much of this green paint off as possible and then washed my hair in this paint stripper/turps to get the rest out. (Porter 2005)

These often lasted for many decades: David Britton's father had his Anderson shed until the 1980s (Britton 2005). Joan Shepherd's neighbours had built their own shelter out of concrete, and this also lasted until the 1980s when it was demolished with pneumatic drills.

Where air raid shelters in Britain have survived into the present, it is generally through ignorance or apathy rather than deliberate attempts at preservation. Installed or constructed in the panic of pre-war or early wartime preparation, often by private contractors, many shelters have left minimal documentary evidence, and those that were deemed unusable or relatively little-used due to location, water levels or other reasons have often been forgotten. A few of the larger tunnel shelters have been opened as museums including those in Stockport and the Chislehurst Caves in Kent. Some schools have preserved their air raid shelters and open them for teaching use or on special occasions, but health and safety concerns often prevent their use. The greatest amount of interest in air raid shelters operates on local levels, with amateur historians and historical societies working to map, study, visit and preserve shelters. The most notable such organization is Subterranea Britannica, a study group for man-made underground spaces of all kind. Despite this, I would argue that air raid shelters are one of the most neglected categories of heritage sites in Britain today, and there is a significant need for greater scholarship of their architectural, social, cultural, political, artistic and medical histories, as well as greater national scale concern for their preservation and presentation to the public. Much of the significance of shelters and their value of material reminders of wartime life can be demonstrated in this account by Brian Brooks:

Suddenly the war in Europe was over, and we had no need to shelter from air raids anymore, which seemed very strange at first. Some of my friends' families, who had paid for their Anderson shelters, dug them up and put them on the surface. With doors fitted they made useful garden storage sheds. (One or two can still be seen in old gardens.) I wanted to get into and use our shelter. I thought I could store things in it, and play war-games, but when I pulled the door away the shelter was full of black water and was extremely smelly. It was obviously dangerous, so the door had to be wedged in place with stakes, to stop my young sister Jasmine, aged five, falling in. Unfortunately that was the very last time I saw inside it. It had been in our garden for more than half my life, for as long as I could remember, in fact –a large pile of earth that I played round and now finally, on. At long last I could climb on it without 'damaging' it! When it first arrived it was taller than me, now I could easily look over the top. It was, and always had been, part of my childhood 'landscape'. Then –as suddenly as it had arrived –it was gone. I got home from school one day and went out the back – there was just bare lumpy earth where it used to be. Mum said the Council men just smashed the 'concrete', pulled out the corrugated iron, put the earth back, and straight on to the next one. It was gone in no time at all she said, smiling and obviously pleased. The garden suddenly looked big and it was strange to be able to look, and walk, straight across it. Mum wanted to put grass seed down, and perhaps make another rockery; to put it back to the way it looked before the war. Although I was only ten, I understood that adults wanted to wipe-out the war-time things, the reminders of bad times and unpleasant memories. But I remember feeling an uneasy sense of loss at its disappearance. I had lost something large, reassuring and protective. I think we owed it a lot, and I would have liked to have seen our shelter go … But it was still down there – the remains of the crumbly concrete floor and walls, a pin-up picture of 'Jane' of the Daily Mirror, a toy Spitfire, and a lot of my childhood – noisy, exciting, anxious, precious and very, very lucky – yes, a sheltered childhood.

(Brooks 2006)

Here is the air raid shelter as a symbol of wartime childhood: an object of play; a scale to measure oneself against; a hazardous place; a familiar and comfortable part of a child's geography; a source of security and protection and finally – even in its absence – a repository of memories.

#### Discussion

Air raid shelters were artificial or artificially delineated spaces that, like gas masks, were experienced by British children as direct material impositions into their everyday lives. While the gas masks could be ubiquitous in their presence but only rarely worn, many children (varying greatly by location) spent considerable amounts of time inside air raid shelters, particularly in the early years of the war and again later, following the beginning of the V1 attacks in 1944. Shelters were created, adapted and crafted into gendered spaces to a similar if not greater degree than the family home, and in many respects aimed to replicate the familiarity and comfort of the home through fittings, decorations and creature comforts. This was the case both in private shelters where the space could be more easily and totally controlled and also in public shelters where private spaces were often claimed or marked out with blankets or simply by near-permanent occupation.

Children's experiences of air raid shelters were complicated and varied, ranging from positive feelings of safety, cosiness and fun through to devastating trauma, terror, injury and death. These extremes and the diversity of lived experience that they enclose are encoded in the memories examined in this chapter, and it has been particularly interesting to note the variety and raw power of the sense memories associated with air raid shelters, some of them functions of the materiality of the shelters themselves, and others relating to the shelters as the medium through which most people experienced the air war. The overwhelming sense memory relating to the shelters was smell: the damp and musty smell of earth, humidity, restricted airflow, chemical toilets, unaired or mildewed bedding and the stench of unwashed human bodies pressed into a small unventilated space for extended periods of time. This barrage of powerful sensations combined with the emotional intensity of the experience of bombing seems to have created enduring memories in many children who experienced them; memories easily brought to mind by those same smells. The second powerful memory of wartime childhood in the air raid shelter was sound: the warning sirens and the engines of approaching aircraft, then the louder sounds of artillery and bombs exploding, and at the extremes the shockwaves of the exploding bombs that moved beyond the audible to shake buildings, shelters and bodies.

More than the bombsites, the schools under wartime restrictions or the places of evacuation, the air raid shelter was the most significant defining part of most children's geographies of war. As inhabited spaces, purposeful structures and frameworks for imaginative play they stand out amongst all forms of the material culture of childhood in wartime for their sensory impact and enduring mnemonic power. There is a great deal more work to be done on these fascinating spaces across more than a century of air warfare spanning the globe and continuing into the present day.

But perhaps my most vivid wartime recollection of all – were the bombsites. Blanketed with brambles and clumps of pink willowherb, we peered down the gaping craters, littered with crumbling bricks, pipes and planks and wondered about the houses which had once stood there and the families who had lived in them. And for many children of my generation, these ruins became our personal playgrounds. Of course we all knew that they did not really belong to us, but in our childish fantasies we liked to think that they did! In my mind's eye, I can see them still and oh, there were so very, very many of them.

(Noble 2004)

#### Introduction

The ruins of bombed buildings in Second World War Britain were disorderly, marginal spaces in the urban landscape. During and after the war they proved fertile ground for weeds and wildlife, as well as for artistic and literary representations of violence and loss. But while the works of John Piper, Henry Moore, Rose Macaulay and others represent one vision of wartime urban ruin, the literature of wartime childhood in the works of Jill Paton Walsh, Robert Westall and Michelle Magorian has instead emphasized young people's anarchic, joyous and sensory engagements with bombsites (Agnew and Fox 2001; Macaulay 1996; Stansky and Abrahams 1994). Like the willow herb that had sprung up in the ruins of bombed homes, the children who rampaged across the rubble were a symbol, a celebration and a cause of this disorder and fertility.

Architectural ruins have a rich intellectual and cultural history. From the unfinished Tower of Babel and the fragments of ancient Rome to the shell of Oradoursur-Glane and the twisted wreckage of Ground Zero, ruins have served as symbols of human folly, wickedness and failure, but also as sites of nostalgia and romance (Macaulay 1996; Woodward 2002). In recent years a growing number of geographers, photographers, anthropologists and archaeologists have turned their attention to the modern ruins left in the wake of war, economic decline and environmental catastrophe (Dawdy 2010; Edensor 2005; González-Ruibal 2008). These ruins of modernity or supermodernity in Bhopal, Banda Aceh, Beirut and Detroit are often discussed in negative terms, categorized alongside mass graves and concentration camps as spaces of abjection, trauma, 'super-destruction' and the 'failure of modernity' (González-Ruibal 2006; 2008). My aim in this chapter is to offer a counterpoint to these foundational studies, weaving together narratives of young people's often ambivalent encounters with bombed buildings in Second World War Britain to create a more subtle way of conceptualizing ruins as literally and figuratively fertile spaces of anarchy, play, transformation, freedom and ecology, and for the creation of enduring and often treasured memories. Following Dawdy and Edensor, ruins emerge from this study as neither abject nor romantic, but as living, multi-layered spaces of human activity and experience.

The ruined buildings that came to characterize urban landscapes in wartime Britain were a considered outcome of German military strategy. The strategic bombing of British cities during the Second World War was intended to destroy industry, infrastructure and housing, and to kill civilians, diminishing the capacity of the surviving population to work and fight (Overy 1982). The ARP wardens, police, fire brigade and rescue squads focused on recovering casualties from the bombsites, then deterring looters, salvaging usable materials, and converting the newly available spaces into resources for civil defence and fire fighting (O'Brien 1955). With gas and water leaks plugged, and bodies and valuables recovered, the shells of homes and workplaces were most often left in ruins where weeds took over.

The children of Britain approached this landscape of ruins with a very different mind set. Throughout the war years and long afterwards, as attested by photographs, memories, memoirs and censorious contemporary accounts, children used bombsites as adventure playgrounds. Despite official and parental disapproval and the inherent dangers involved, the ruins of urban Britain played host to the full range of childhood activities including creative and destructive play, war games, gang fights, den-building, looting, arson, collecting, hoarding, sexual experimentation and general socializing (Figure 4.1).

In this chapter I examine the bombsite through the eyes of war children as a physical space, a social place, an ecological and entropic process, and as a marginal 'disordered space'. I attempt to piece together the nature and broader significances of this interaction of people and place, with its necessary reimagining of concepts of play, transgression, ecology, risk and the unhomely. At the same time, I am interested in the adult responses to children's appropriation of bombsites which included intense scrutiny, violent punishment and, on occasion, thoughtful reflection. I am particularly interested in the social and educational reformers who saw in children's play on bombsites a model for healthy play, psychological development and recovery from trauma, and ultimately for the construction of 'formal' adventure playgrounds in post-war Britain. My examination of bombsite playgrounds is focused on three questions: what kind of spaces were these? How did children interact with and recreate them? What were the social and psychological implications of these interactions?

Figure 4.1 Children working on a makeshift allotment on a London bomb site. © Imperial War Museum, D 8957.

#### Creating bombsites

The transformation of a building into a bombsite was in some respects a very rapid process. In other respects the creative process continued in the hours, days, weeks and years after the moment of detonation as search and rescue efforts gave way to infrastructure repair, salvage and general clearing up. Following these anthropic efforts, the bombsites began their second transformation, an ecological one, as the omnipresent purple rosebay willowherb colonized the ruins. The creation of a bombsite begins, however, with a bomb.

The vast majority of the bombs dropped on Britain by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War were general purpose weapons such as the Sprengbombe Cylindrisch 50 or 250, 50 or 250 kgs in weight respectively and fitted with a short-delay fuse (Price 1997). They were fin-stabilized to fall nose first, while the fuse and relatively strong steel casing enabled the bomb to bury itself in the ground before exploding, thus maximizing the structural damage caused by the blast. Approximately half of the weight of the bomb was the explosive charge, typically a mixture of Amatol and TNT. With no propellant or guiding mechanism these bombs followed a parabolic trajectory, with the initial forward velocity provided by the aircraft causing the bomb to strike the ground at an angle. At the moment of detonation the solid explosive charge of the bomb was transformed into a high temperature, high velocity gas, causing blast damage in its immediate vicinity and seismic effects over a larger area. Further damage was caused by bomb fragments and other material projected outward from the detonation with considerable speed.

The effects of a bomb on buildings varied considerably, based on the size of the bomb, the construction of the building and its distance from the point of detonation. Most were capable of completely annihilating a building leaving only a crater in the earth. At short range the walls of buildings could be pushed in or sucked out by the blast causing structural collapse. At longer range the tremors caused by subterranean detonation could shake buildings to the point of collapse. At a slightly greater distance these tremors might distort the walls without causing catastrophic failure, and bomb fragments and other debris could destroy windows, doors and roofs. At an even longer range the damage might be limited to broken windows and roof tiles. Any of these could cause death or serious injury to inhabitants with flying glass and falling debris amongst the most common causes. Even an apparently slightly damaged house might be found to be structurally unsafe following bombing and require demolition (O'Brien 1955).

Following the explosion various emergency services converged on the site. The local air raid wardens were usually first to arrive, followed by the fire brigade, ambulance and the heavy and light rescue squads as required. Fires caused by the bomb or by ensuing gas leaks were extinguished and survivors were located either in the wreckage, in nearby shelters or elsewhere. In some cases the efforts to find survivors trapped in the rubble would continue for days, as emergency services found resources stretched by a constant stream of urgent callouts. Surviving residents often attempted to recover possessions from the ruins of their homes with the help of salvage teams, and looting was not uncommon leading to police or air raid wardens declaring bombsites out of bounds, and guarding some sites. As the fire brigade rolled up their hoses, the wardens and rescue teams would begin to clear the debris from the street and pavement, usually stacking it back onto the rubble of the house (O'Brien 1955). The bombsite had reached the next stages of its life as a fleeting spectacle and an enduring presence in the urban landscape. Within hours or days the children would begin to take ownership of the new and entrancing space that had emerged in their familiar environment.

#### Sense memories

Bombsites are aesthetic spaces in both senses of the term. First, as the subjects of art, literature and other forms of representation they invite critical response and understanding. Second, they are experienced – by children in particular – through the world of the bodily senses. This second category is of particular interest, as it highlights not only the ways in which children and adults encounter the material world at war but the ways in which memories of ruins are constructed and maintained. Young people and young children in particular tend to engage with the material world with the full range of their senses, particularly before they have been impressed with the enlightenment concept of 'look but don't touch'. Children approach new spaces and objects in a more tactile way, touching and smelling and grasping and tasting in ways that adults have been taught to find odd or distasteful (Buck-Morss 1993). In this process of learning to know the world, children form strong memories and impressions of the world around them. It is unsurprising that so many of the accounts of bombsites and playing on bombsites recall the sensory experience of those sites, particularly the smells:

I have to admit it was childlike morbid curiosity that led me with two or three other friends to walk to Putney to see the destruction. By the time we got there the bomb scene had been vastly tidied up, but the fire service and Civil Defence were still in attendance and hosepipes and other rescue paraphernalia littered the scene.

 It seemed to permeate the air everywhere' (Forrest 2004a). McGarry (2004) recalled that bombsites were 'a playground for us children that often smelled of burnt wet wood' and the 'air that tasted of ashes'. One former Blitz child recalled the difference in smells between London and the rural evacuation areas, the former

covered in bombsite brick dust, the smell stayed in your nostrils and the dank lingering smell of gas from totally demolished houses. People with their heads bent low, scurrying to and from work, not knowing if their house would be still be left standing when they got back. The smell had gone now, and we were left with the sweet aroma of summer flowers and fresh cut grass.

(Payne 2003)

Sense memories can also be connected to trauma and traumatic acts of remembering:

Eclipsing all these memories was the awful stench of fire and water after our home had been set alight by incendiary bombs. Even now, on those rare occasions when my nostrils are assailed by the same combination of smells, I visualise that damp, smoke-blackened scene in all its grim clarity. (Smith 2006)

The smell of a bombed house is quite unique, something like wet plaster and damp wood, and I have only very occasionally smelt it since, usually when passing by buildings being demolished on building sites.

(Blanchard 2003)

The smell of plaster that Blanchard alludes to is a common memory of children who were bombed out or who explored bombed houses, as Clark (2005b) notes: 'The most recently damaged houses and shops had a very strong smell that I recall, the smell was one of damp plaster.' The involuntary autobiographical memories are not always unpleasant ones, as Wallis (2005) points out:

The mornings were pungent with the smell of brick dust from the buildings bombed the night before. Even now, when I smell that smell of smashed bricks, I remember the blitz. It heralded new exciting bombed buildings to play in and a day of adventure to come.

(Wallis 2005)

It is easy to forget the degree of trauma that children suffered during the bombing of British cities in the Second World War, with rates of PTSD thought to be comparable with that of soldiers in combat (Werner 2000: 212–3). The memories brought up by the smells associated with bombsites – as well as sounds, tastes and other sensations – have in many cases remained painful throughout their lives:

About six houses in the street were destroyed and some families totally wiped out. For several years after the war I played on the bomb site with the other kids in the street. Unlike many other children who remained in London for most of the war, that one experience left me with nightmares of bombers coming over in great fleets (I can picture them now in my mind) and these went on for a number of years. Also, I took a long time to get used to the sound of my mother's Hoover as it reminded me too much of an air raid siren. (Butcher 2003)

The sense memories of the freshly bombed building – plaster, burning and gas – were not the same as the sights, sounds and smells of an older bombsite that nature had begun to reclaim:

Two things stand out as being with me throughout the war. One was the smell – possibly of gas polluted clay soil that seemed everywhere – and the

other was a plant, one I now know to be rose-bay willow herb, that seemed to thrive on every bombsite as well as in the ruins of the old school. Oh yes, and there is another – there were many more butterflies!

(Hassall 2005)

The bombsite as a marginal, disordered space attracted wildlife, wild plants and wild children, and it serves us well to consider them all as part of a natural ecology of urban ruins.

### Disordered spaces/uncanny ruins

How can we better understand the relationship between a bombsite and its environment? Why have bombsites and other ruined or derelict places proved so attractive to children? Cloke and Jones (2005) suggest that children are instinctively attracted to 'disordered spaces':

childhood is associated with places and spaces which are seen to be outside of adult control and ordering, where the fabric of the adult world has become scrambled or torn, and the flows of adult order are disrupted or even abated.

(Cloke and Jones 2005: 312)

Furthermore, they argue that such places, once common in rural spaces and urban environments alike, have been diminished by the ordering and commoditization of children's play. Cloke and Jones draw upon a range of sources to examine the correlation between childhood, nature, disorder and the romanticist conflation of these categories. They draw explicit attention to the bombsite as a disordered space of childhood, referring to 'the unequivocal and disastrous disorder of the bomb sites of Second World War London' (Cloke and Jones 2005: 318). While Cloke and Jones are reluctant to subscribe to simplistic dualisms of adult/child, order/disorder, indoors/ outdoors, they recognize the inevitably adversarial nature of the relationship founded in children's common desire to disorder space that they do not, ultimately, control. The greater part of their argument focuses on naturally disordered spaces, many of them in nature, but they also examine the phenomenon of disordered spaces created by adult agency, including spaces of conflict, which they regard as 'the form of adult ordered space most hostile to childhood' (Cloke and Jones 2005: 325). Despite this apparent hostility they recognize:

the disruptions caused by war can open up 'new' and different orders in which childhood can find its own space … the bomb sites of London and other cities became celebrated childhood spaces even before they were colonized by nature.

(Cloke and Jones 2005: 325, emphasis in original)

This analysis suggests an opening up of the categories of ordered and disordered space. As we shall see in this chapter, both children and nature colonized and transformed abandoned bombsites; arguably children can be regarded as a part of the process of natural disorder or entropy. Bombsites were not static sites but places in transition. In this context, children are not disordering adult space, but neither are they reordering violently disordered adult space. Thus while the concept of disordered childhood space expounded by Cloke and Jones is a useful analytical and descriptive tool, it is too crude to fully unravel the complexity of children's relationship to bombsites.

Despite the sense of escapism amidst the flowers and ponds in many of the accounts of bombsite play and adventure, there is a recurring sense of unease – either experienced at the time or in retrospect – of playing games on sites of death and destruction, often surrounded by uncanny reminders of the former residents:

The weeds, called rosebay willow herbs (although I didn't know what they were called at the time) were as tall as I was. They grew thickly all over the rubble. You suddenly came across a doorstep with pretty tiles. I didn't think then, how sad that someone's home had been razed to the ground. Bombed buildings were just words to me and I didn't realise their literal meaning. If a house had been bombed at the end of a terrace, on the sidewall you could see the floor layers and fireplaces half way up the wall. (Ison 2005)

When Macaulay described ruined houses with 'empty window sockets' (Macaulay 1996: 453) she tapped into a language of physical injury and the human body that is often used to describe the destruction of buildings. Vidler (1992: 69) examines the use of body metaphors in architecture and the natural extension of this language to describe demolition and adaptation in terms of dismemberment. Vidler's study focuses on what he calls 'the architectural uncanny', drawing on Freud's work on the uncanny or unheimlich (which also translates as un-homely or un-hidden). Freud defined the uncanny in a variety of terms, many of them decidedly material, such as dismembered limbs and body parts encountered in isolation from the rest of the body, and more generally the revelation of things which should, properly, have remained hidden. In this sense the bombsite is an inherently uncanny space: the body/house laid bare and fragmented, the private interior of the home rendered public and the fabric of the structure torn apart (Figure 4.2). The ways in which children in the Blitz responded to bombsites reveals a number of different responses to this phenomenon, including horror and discomfort or merely a sense of unease:

very often a building had some of its exterior walls reduced to piles of bricks, exposing the interior rooms with beds and furniture tattered and broken like a dolls house that had suffered from a childs temper tantrum. I can remember seeing rows of houses where the damage caused by blast

Figure 4.2 A child plants a Union Flag in the wreckage of his home, destroyed in an air raid on London. © Imperial War Museum, D 1303.

had a peculiar effect, as if a giant hand had scooped out the roof timbers and tiles leaving the dividing walls in the loft space between each house. Bomb blast did strange things, a building could have severe damage but sometimes fragile articles like mirrors or vases remained intact and standing on mantlepieces whilst devastation was all around.

(Clark 2005)

We went one day after the blitz and a policeman told us to go and have a look at something.  It was uncanny.

(Ollerenshaw 2005)

Many of the memory narratives that recall playing in ruins include a retrospective understanding – more than half a century on – that their wild playground had been the ruin of a home just like their own:

I did see bombed houses in other places and it was always strange to see in some cases the way the stair case would still be there, clinging to the exposed inside walls with the wallpaper peeling down and hanging off.

(Simon 2005)

This callousness (perhaps better understood as numbness) extended from the remains of buildings to the remains of their inhabitants, which in many cases remained undiscovered within the ruins until their smell revealed their presence:

During daylight hours my friends and I would play, in our naive childish manner, among the sometimes smouldering debris of bombed houses, houses which the day before we had seen standing complete. It just seemed natural to us. Occasionally we discovered the odd finger, an ear or some other small pieces of a human casualty, but it never registered with us, death was not a thing with meaning although we recognised the objects; we would pick up such items and throw them at each other.

(Ronnie 2003)

The fascination with bombsites was by no means limited to children, with many people taking trips to newly-bombed areas to see the ruins, although here again the difference between adult and child experiences of the sites are sensory: parents went to look, children went to look, touch, smell and taste.

Whenever there was a new bombsite my mother would take me to see it. It seems rather ghoulish now, but other people did the same. We'd see houses demolished, beds hanging half-out of upper floors. There was the odd plank placed across gaps that we could cross to get a better view. (H. Morgan 2005)

Mary never struck me as being particularly morbid but she had to go and see every new bomb-site in the locality. This was at first when the devastation was fairly isolated. I still remember the smell of the soot at bombed houses and how the wallpaper seemed always to look as though the decoration had been neglected … Bedroom walls looked all wrong with no floors to keep them company and the chaos of beams and floorboards and heaps of bricks I found very disconcerting. We saw all sorts of houses, large and small, posh and mean, but I always felt the same sense of foreboding.

(Tanker 2003)

It is unsurprising that in many cases bombsites could be creepy for children with active imaginations and perhaps a better understanding of the deaths that may have taken place there. Equally, that same sense of the uncanny – of the hidden revealed, the body dismembered – could have been a part of the attraction and the thrill of exploring these marginal spaces and staking a claim to them:

There was the fascination of going into a freshly bombed building. I suppose it was the silence and the emptiness where there had been noise and activity. I shall never forget one building in particular. It was a cloudy day and having clambered over the debris, I found myself in a long, large factory room. I started to walk around this room, marvelling

at the stillness and silence, when I suddenly felt very scared. I turned around and got out as quickly as I could. Imagination? or indigestion maybe, but all these years later, I can remember that cold fear and it still sends shivers down my spine.

(Wallis 2005)

### Bombsites as (dangerous) playgrounds

Tales of childhood adventures amidst the bombed ruins abound in memory narratives of life in the Second World War. Like gas masks and air raid shelters, bombsites are sites of memory: catalysts for stories and debates around the experience of childhood in a world at war (Moshenska 2009). In surveying these memory narratives, a number of recurring themes emerge, the most common and prominently expressed being the direct comparison between bombsites and playgrounds, particularly adventure playgrounds.

With us being children, it was quite exciting in a way when we did eventually get bombed. Wherever there was a bombsite we would go and inspect it. In fact it was a little bit like an adventure playground. It was our playground in a way.

(Feeney 2005)

One of our favourite playgrounds now was 'the wreckage' this was the bombsite of four houses that had gone down in Stanhope Avenue, at the end of our road. Most of the rubble had been cleared, but there was still plenty left for us to build dens and play on.

(Mathieson 2006)

The key to this comparison is obvious: despite parental and official discouragement, a large proportion of children used bombsites as places to play, alone and with others. The resources that the bombsites offered, their inherent danger, their aesthetics, ecology and architecture all contributed to their value and significance in children's lives. However, by forbidding children to play on them the air raid wardens and concerned parents predictably succeeded only in making bombsites more alluring. As McCain (2003) recalled: 'Yesterday a home – today a bomb site. A place we were definitely not allowed to play, even though we longed to.'  According to Jackson (2005) 'There was lots of good climbing stuff', while Powell (2005) whimsically describes 'loads of kids playing in the rubble for weeks, swinging round lampposts on ropes never knowing the heartache just the joy and comradeship of youth'. Some accounts describe in more detail the games that children played, many of them war-games. Martin Kirby recalls:

In these ruins (some quite dangerous) we played many games – tin can copper, run outs etc. I had a Dinky collection and a friend had a vast Dinky army collection and we played 'wars' in the weeds of the ruins. It was great fun!

(Kirby 2005)

Kozlovsky's (2007) study of the bombsite roots of adventure playgrounds highlights Marie Paneth's work with troubled and disruptive children during the Blitz. Paneth (1944) treated violent outbursts as pathological rather than criminal acts in the young and sought to study them to understand their psychological roots. Following the violent destruction of her play centre Paneth reviewed her methods and proposed working with these children on a specially designated playground/bombsite, based in part on Freud's idea that playing can allow children to repeatedly replay traumatic events and eventually to master them. As Paneth noted of the site:

It is a damaged bit. Its very existence is a reminder of damage and destruction.  But it could be put to good use even before the war is over. It seems to me it could have a very healing effect if one were allowed to build upon the very spot where damage has been done.

(quoted in Kozlovsky 2007: 22–3)

Bombsite playgrounds mark a point of transition in the infrastructure of children's play between the pre-war official playgrounds for 'fixed play' on swings and slides, and the post-war adventure playgrounds built on urban wastelands – and on bombsites. Children playing on bombsites might have had access to a park with fixed, modular, metal play equipment but many would not, and others might have lost their parks to anti-aircraft guns, balloons and searchlights. The post-war adventure playground movement was rooted at least in part in adult observation of bombsite play with its emphasis on creation, transformation and risk (Cranwell 2003). Today an adventure playground of this period, with its rough wood, crates, scaffolding and hand-tools looks terrifyingly dangerous for young children, but compared to the dangers inherent in exploring bombed houses these were negligible, as attested by the numerous tales of childhood injury and death:

Nearly every street had at least one bombed house we could play in, we climbed on roofs, we dropped from upstairs windows, climbed over rubbish and wreckage with our wooden guns, hid in cellars, and to us the bomb damaged areas were just somewhere to play. I remember one time we were playing in an old terraced house in Gaylor Street known locally as 'Hatties', and a lad was playing with us, he was upstairs and he fell down through the rafters, fell through the rafters on the ground floor, and ended up in the cellar, and the amazing thing is he only twisted his ankle.

But we never really appreciated the danger in what we were doing, it was just the environment we lived in.

(Maher 2004)

Amongst the dangers of a world at war, bombsites presented a specific set of hazards for curious children. Even relatively complete-looking buildings were often rendered structurally unsound by bomb damage, and ruins of all kinds were liable to collapse without warning. Broken gas mains and the wooden remains of roof structures created a fire risk while broken sewage pipes and rotting organic material presented a biohazard. Meanwhile unexploded munitions – bombs, incendiary bombs and anti-aircraft shells – presented a consistent and enduring risk of death and injury (Jappy 2003). Accounts of playing in bombsites are peppered with reminders of the risks involved, often recalled with amazement years later.

This bombed house made a tempting playground for us children, but it was unsafe and we were forbidden to go in there, but I remember climbing in on more than one occasion. The temptation to climb about on a derelict building should not be underestimated by any caring parent. How we didn't have serious accidents I can't imagine. I suppose some children must have done.

(Wright 2003)

Some accounts are comical, such as John Garrett's account of his 'war wound' sustained by cutting his leg on a broken toilet while rampaging through a bombsite (Garrett 2003). Others however include reference to death and serious injury from playing on bombsites:

My friends and I could find other more exciting things to do. Tarzan was all the rage at that time, and as a lot of bomb damage was being repaired following the raids, one of our favourite games was swinging on the hoist ropes used by builders. One such site was at the bottom of Gloucester Street, my pals and I were playing Tarzan, one friend that we always called Davis was swinging, when all the bricks stacked above began to fall, we called 'lookout!' but it was too late, he was hit by all the bricks and was rushed to hospital. The next morning at school assembly the head teacher Miss Davies told us that Davis had died and all the children in assembly had to promise to never play that sort of game again. As children in the war years we lived with danger but we could never see it. Playing on the bombsite was a huge past [sic] time.

(Hulbert 2005)

Clearly even the risk of serious injury or death was rarely enough to deter children from taking ownership of bombsites as play spaces, as Noel Froggatt (2005) recalled: 'despite the warning notices on the side of the ruins we still played there ignoring the dangers as if they didn't exist'. But as Ernest Curd notes in his account of bombsite near-injury, risks can seem diminished in a world at war:

One day, during one of these war games, my mate Bobby Dove managed to get up to the first floor of a bombed-out house. Suddenly, without any warning, the floorboards gave way and Bobby came crashing down to the ground. We all rushed over, but he was completely unharmed. So we just carried on with the game … I don't think any of us appreciated how dangerous our games were, any more than we gave much thought to the war. We didn't really realise what was going on. My friend falling through the floorboards was an added bit of excitement, but at the time it didn't seem out of the ordinary. It certainly didn't stop us playing on the bombsites!

(Curd 2005)

Several accounts of bombsite play recorded in the early twenty-first century draw comparisons between the freedom to play dangerously in the war years and the more protective attitude towards children and risk in contemporary society. As Forrest (2004b) observed: 'We seemed to be completely unsupervised. But then apart from the danger of the War, children could wander around, in safety, in those days.'

Like the adventure playgrounds that they helped to inspire, bombsites provided a wealth of materials and spaces for children to explore different forms of play and other activities. The disorder and adaptability of urban ruins and the abundance of brick and timber meant that children could manipulate the very topography of the sites to fit their individual imaginations and collective endeavours. From the narratives that I have collected there appear to be a range of different types of games played on bombsites, depending in part on the age and sex of the children involved, including role playing and organized sports.

One of the most common activities recalled in the memory narratives was war games, as one young boy recalled: 'the war affected the games we played, too. We would wage war on the kids from the next street, building our own trenches in the ruins of bombed-out houses, flying our homemade flags and throwing stones at each other.' (Curd 2005). Smith (2006) acknowledged that 'Even our games reflected war', recalling:

playing among the ruins (there were at least two houses just a little way up the road from us that were badly damaged but rebuilt so that one would never know) with a wooden tommy-gun whilst wearing a cast-off service hat sequestered from an uncle.

(Smith 2006)

The most famous depiction of war games on a bombsite is undoubtedly Cecil Day-Lewis's popular children's book The Otterbury Incident (1961), in which a group of school boys act out elaborate ambushes and manoeuvres on a bombsite – the 'Incident' of the title – to thwart the efforts of a gang of local criminals. As in this case, the games were often a little too serious or physical, when war games became a substitute for gang fights or territorial disputes:

The bombed houses became great places to play, when they were cleared of rubble, on a housing estate like ours. There had been a land mine fall early in the war opposite our house which had destroyed about eight semi-detached houses.  It was not built on until quite a long time after the war.

(Lewington 2004)

Similarly Marshfield's (2005) reference to 'brick fights, building defence walls out of the rubble, rushing forward with dustbin lids for shields' sounds a little rough. In contrast Osborne (2005) recalled that 'We mostly played Cowboys and Indians'. Studies of adventure playgrounds showed that in many cases children built miniature houses, in one case 'converting 10,000 feet of used timber into shacks in a matter of days' (Claydon 2003). Many of the more elaborate games on wartime bombsites seem to have followed this pattern of domestic play, such as the rather charming scene of cooperation and music that Payne recalled:

Another harmless activity we did was on one of the cleared bombsites; we would all built [sic] a clubhouse made from recycled timber and old lino to make a waterproof roof. The only money we spent was for a few nails and candles. Boys and girls of all ages lent a hand.  We would all sit around and play the instruments as best we could. It must have sounded like a bit of a din but we all enjoyed it, and all lit by a dim candlelight.

(Payne 2003)

The younger children also engaged in more conventional domestic role-play, creating simulacra of their homes and adopting adult roles, as Chancey (2006) recalled: 'All the children in the area would meet on the bomb damage site to play mums and dads and build houses using the old bricks.' (Chancey 2006). Taylor's account describes how the truncated ruins of a block created child-sized homes to play in:

One of my favourite playgrounds, where my friends and I played with our dolls, was the cleared site of a block of flats that had been bombed killing 92 people in one raid. These former homes were like life-size plans, with rooms and doorways, where we played 'mothers and fathers'. We could push our dolls' prams along the passages to visit our dolly-friends.

(J. Taylor 2004)

Some of these games became more elaborate, with Young (2005) describing building a shop out of the debris on a bombsite, and selling broken household goods and stone 'sweets'. It is worth noting that none of these activities were unique to British children during the war: German children were just as keen on collecting shrapnel and also 'played in the ruins of the bombed buildings, building little houses and making walls with the fallen bricks.' (Seldon 2005).

Despite the dangers and inconveniences, some bombsites were used as open spaces for organized sports: in practice these were most often sites that had been levelled or cleared of rubble in preparation for rebuilding. Duggins (2005) describes playing cricket with wickets chalked on the wall of a bombed-out house, while Campbell (2003) recalls the 'debris' being used as football pitches. Some of the play was of a more destructive nature, and here the already-ruined nature of the bombsite may have given the children license to further disorder it:

We also explored the shells of the bombed houses, clambering up the strewn stairs looking down through holes in the floors, opening cupboards, breaking everything we could. Bill and I were smashing glass lamp-shades in one house when a policeman came in and shocked us rigid

(Marshfield 2005)

Skipp's (2005) account recalls that local children burnt scrap wood in the bombsite beside his house, in one case threatening to smoke or burn his family out of their home. Bombsites could also be spaces for experimenting with dangerous chemicals and intriguing artefacts such as bullets and incendiary bombs, as Greenaway (2003) recalled: 'I used to play on a bomb site in Water Lane with a Junior School friend, letting off home-made fireworks of a sort. The romance of chemistry sets!' But aside from these more destructive activities, the overwhelming majority of children's play on bombsites appears to have been balanced between the disorderly – climbing, war games and the like – and the orderly – attempts to replicate their home environment. Whatever the form that the play took, the over-riding sense remains that children's curiosity about the new spaces that had opened up their local environment was tempered by a desire to domesticate them, to master them through what Kozlovsky (2007) and others have called 'junkology', or play in ruins (Figure 4.3).

### The ecology of bombsites

Rose Macaulay's Pleasure of Ruins (1996) explores at length the fascination and enduring cultural significance of romantic architectural ruins. The final few pages of the book are devoted to a note on 'new ruins', written only a few years after the Second World War. In this note Macaulay reflects on the new ruins of bombed cities and their lifecycle as nature reclaims them:

Figure 4.3 Children playing next to a bomb crater full of rubble in the playground of Lombard Wall School, South East London. © Imperial War Museum, D 3170.

new ruins are for a time stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless; blackened and torn, they smell of fire and mortality. It will not be for long. Very soon trees with be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them.

(Macaulay 1996: 453)

Macaulay's timescale is a little pessimistic. Depending on the time of year most bombsites had sprouted a healthy crop of weeds within weeks of an air raid, most commonly the tall, purple rosebay willowherb that became popularly known as 'bombweed' or 'fireweed'. Richard Mabey notes that rosebay thrives on burnt ground to the extent that: 'the summer after the German bombing raids of 1940 the ruins of London's homes and shops were covered with sheets of rosebay stretching, according to some popular reports, as far as the eye could see' (Mabey 1996: 236).

Rosebay willowherb was one of many plants that colonized the newly available land. In May 1945 the director of Kew Gardens, E.J. Salisbury, gave a public lecture on the wild flowers growing on bombed sites in London, noting the prevalence of species such as coltsfoot and Oxford ragwort. Most but by no means all of these plants were spread by wind borne seeds, as Salisbury noted, with others 'long buried and springing to life, some brought in horses' nosebags, some on muddy boots or the tyres of motor-vehicles, some on clothing, and some "escapes" from gardens, including a Peruvian plant from Kew' (Anon. 1945: 2). Altogether more than 150 species of plant were found on bombsites in London and dutifully catalogued. Without this understanding of the rich ecology of bombsites it would be easy to imagine them as the blackened ruins of war as they appear in newsreels, but the bombsites that British children rampaged across were often far from bleak or sterile: they were 'mellowed' (McGarry 2004) or 'softened' (Bettie 2003):

The ruins were quickly tidied and then they mellowed: bombed areas were flattened, turning green with weeds between the piles of bricks and jutting metal pieces, puddled with innumerable muddy pools whenever it rained, obliquely crossed by shortcut paths

(McGarry 2004)

I can remember a wasteland of ruins, cellars and broken walls softened by the Budleia and Willow Herb which grew there. The ruins were inhabited by cats who emerged with tribes of kittens in the hope of being given food. (Bettie 2003)

The presence of stray cats is a reminder that the ecology of the bombsites was not limited to the plant life, not least due to the natural ponds that appeared in craters and holes where the underlying clay prevented rapid drainage:

Like all the kids we played amongst the willow herb in the dangerous ruins. We and our friends 'owned' bomb-craters which remained for years after the end of the war. The water filled ones were very educational –with dragonflies, water-boatmen, water-spiders and so on.

(Nightingale 2003)

The other source of water on many bombsites were the emergency water supplies: large containers, many of them metal tanks but others built from the bricks on the ruins and lined with pitch and marked 'EWS' in white letters so that they could be found in the blackout more easily by the fire brigade, who often had trouble finding water sources in the midst of air raids (Tidmarsh 2005). These became another home for wildlife, occasionally with some outside help:

Where one of the big bombs had dropped in Bristol after the November blitz they put in a water tank so that the fire service could fight the fires. As kids we used to go to the local pond by the brickworks and catch newts and sticklebacks and put them in this tank. By the end of the war it was alive with newts.

(Miles 2005)

Many accounts of bombsite play allude to the presence of plants, animals and insects on the sites. In some cases they were actively useful: one account mentions blackcurrant, gooseberry and raspberry bushes growing on a bombsite that provided welcome afternoon snacks (Clark 2005), while for others the presence of wildlife reinforced the sense of bombsites as disordered, marginal spaces with a greater sense of privacy and non-urbanism. Children in wartime were regarded by many in authority as wild and unruly, in need of strong and even militaristic discipline. In light of these attitudes and the natural attraction of children to disordered spaces, I think it is reasonable to suggest that children on bombsites be considered part of a disorderly urban ecology of ruins that encompasses plant, insect and animal life.

There is a growing appreciation of urban ruins as ecologically vibrant and productive spaces: informal or semi-formal parks, nature reserves or smallholdings (e.g. Dawdy 2010; Edensor 2005; Hinchcliffe et al 2005). While several of these studies conceptualize the fertile ruin largely in terms of (adult) human activity it is better, I would argue, to view nature and culture on the bombsite as mutually constitutive – at least for as long as the site remains (formally) abandoned. This aligns with studies of ruins such as those by Macaulay (1996) and Woodward (2002) which have regarded the encroaching wildlife as part of a continuous process of entropy, ruination or transformation.

### Conclusion

From Barcelona to Berlin to Beirut, the urban bombsite has become one of the iconic traces of twentieth century warfare. In a century when the bombing of civilian populations became the new way of waging total war, many hundreds of thousands if not millions of homes have been reduced to rubble and ash by bombs dropped from aircraft (Tanaka 2009). These bombsites are the foundations, literally and figuratively, of much of modern urban life and culture. The architect and planner Patrick Abercrombie looked at the ruins of London and saw the ground plan for a new modernist metropolis; Albert Speer planned to build the grandiose neoclassical Germania on the rubble of Berlin, even as it was being blasted to pieces around him (Tiratsoo 2000). Artists and writers from Henry Moore and Virginia Woolf to Picasso and Sebald recognized the imaginative fertility of ruins. In this chapter I have tried to see past the military, political and cultural histories of bombsites to look at them through the eyes of the children who inhabited them. The firstperson accounts that form the basis of this study were recorded some 60 years after the war had ended, but the lively emotions and fine-grained details in the accounts that I have drawn upon are a reminder of the social and psychological significance of bombsites to children in warzones.

In my introduction to this chapter I posed several questions for the study of bombsite playgrounds. What kinds of spaces were bombsites? As I have tried to show, they were many things to many children, often at the same time: playgrounds, climbing walls, natural resources and nature reserves. They were dangerous, exciting, disordered, hidden, marginal, wild and contested. How did the children interact with these complex spaces and recreate them for their own uses? They rebuilt them, using the raw materials of bricks and wood; they staked claims to them, named them, set fire to them, planted seeds, visited them, and in the course of all this, they explored them with the full range of their senses, forming memories that endure into the present. What were the social and psychological outcomes of their games and adventures? Playing on ruins allowed many of the children of wartime Britain to engage in destructive, violent and physical activities for which they had no other outlet. Equally it provided them with a space that they could physically make and remake to suit their imaginations and needs for specific games and activities. This control over the ruins and the sense of ownership that their marginal status allowed was a powerful and important factor, as some educators recognized, of helping children traumatized by war to work through their fears and regain a sense of control in a world where the physical and social landscapes around them were subject to sudden, violent changes. In this sense the legacy of the bombsites was the adventure playground movement that they inspired and enabled.

The gradual processes of urban rebuilding in the decades after 1945 might not have matched the imaginative hopes of Abercrombie or Speer, but they systematically erased the vast majority of the bombsites in urban Britain and the few that remained – mostly churches – were preserved in a very tidy manner, what Stone (2004: 139) has referred to as 'the best possible state of ruin': no rubble, and certainly no rosebay willowherb. To find the bombsites of Second World War Britain we are better off looking in photographic archives, in the child psychology literature of the period and in the memory narratives left behind by those who lived and played on the ruins.

As you read this, somewhere in the world there are houses being pounded into rubble by bombs and artillery: today as I write it is Syria. As I have learnt from studying children's lives in wars across the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some things are constant. When the gunfire and explosions die down the children will be collecting and swapping cartridge cases and shrapnel fragments, and they will be exploring the new ruins and the older ones. The flowers will not be the ones that grew on the ruins of the Blitz, but the rest is pretty much the same.

## 5 Aircraft down to earth

#### Introduction

On my bookshelf I have a set of six blue quarto-sized hardback books, battered and well loved, a gift from Michael Kenton, a late relative who was a young boy during the Second World War. Aircraft of the Fighting Powers was a multi-volume work published over the course of the war and aimed at the aviation enthusiast and aero-modeller (Cooper et al 1941). The volumes contain a host of beautiful advertisements for aircraft manufacturers and model aircraft manufacturers, uneasily juxtaposed. The main part of each volume is a series of descriptions of military aircraft, friend and foe, from all combatant nations including Russia, Japan and Italy. Each aircraft is illustrated in silhouette in front, side and plan view at 1/72 scale (one inch equal to six feet), with cross-sections given for the fuselage and wings. The books aim to educate and inform about the specifications and abilities of the various aircraft, but also to aid in aircraft recognition and aero-modelling. Michael was an avid model maker as a child of the Blitz and explained to me how he would carve and sand the delicate aerofoil shapes from balsa wood before gluing and painting. The pages of fold-out plans are stained here and there with glue, where Michael rested a model on the paper to check the alignment of a wing or elevator. The success of Aircraft of the Fighting Powers and similar publications rested on the enthusiasm with which children like Michael, mostly boys, would spend their pocket money on aircraft-themed toys, books, magazines, cards and the materials to build models.

This fascination with aircraft and flight, sometimes termed 'airmindedness', was a powerful force in British culture during the 1930s. Airmindedness was a primarily nationalist, militarist mind-set focused around the concern that Britain was ill-prepared for the 'knock-out blow' that air power would deliver in a coming World War, but it also drew on a widespread awe at the technological triumphs of aviation in global transport and travel, and in high-profile international air races such as the Schneider Trophy. In the inter-war years airmindedness was actively promoted through competitions and substantial cash prizes for iconic long-distance flights or speed records (Hamilton 1994: 38–9). Young people, primarily boys, in Britain in the Second World War grew up in an airminded society and imbibed militaristic air power propaganda from their very first 'Biggles' stories: for the majority, the air war on the Home Front would be their most intense and immediate experience of the conflict. Their fascination with aircraft shines out in accounts of wartime life:

Towards the end of the thirties, I had developed a serious interest in aviation and remember well cycling out to Dyce Airport to see the latest Hawker fighter aircraft, aggressive looking biplanes and the last to be produced before the Hurricane and Spitfire arrived on the scene.

(Hall 2005)

Well of course it was wartime, and I think nearly every young lad, I was 14 years old, was pretty interested in aeroplanes at that time, I mean they were everywhere.

(Crawley 2006a)

This youthful passion for aviation that grew out of an airminded society was nurtured by government, industry and popular culture. Following the outbreak of war, the aircraft and men of the Royal Air Force would achieve hero-status amongst young people. Some would go on to serve in the RAF or other flying branches of the armed forces, while many others would be employed in the vast industry that grew up around the air offensive against the Third Reich in the latter years of the war. For most young people, particularly those living in cities, the aircraft that they idolized and feared would remain tantalizingly out of reach.

The notion of British airmindedness is a fairly recent and contested one. Historian of technology David Edgerton (1991) has tried to overturn what he regards as an inaccurate and misleading perspective on the relationship between England and the aeroplane. The popular view as Edgerton describes it is that England lagged behind other nations in its development of air power between the wars, due to a lack of martial spirit amongst the electorate and a governmental unwillingness to invest. Only in the face of aggressive war did this sleeping giant of a nation awake and begin to prepare for air warfare, with the driving force coming from private enterprise and individual initiative. Instead, Edgerton presents a wealth of evidence for England's 'over-enthusiasm' for aircraft, showing that throughout the Second World War an already formidable aircraft industry (with far greater capacity than Germany's, even in 1940) grew to dominate the national economy. He suggests that aspects of the development of the welfare state were in response to the labour needs prompted by this vast growth of aircraft production. Overall in Edgerton's view 'the commitment of England to the aeroplane exemplifies a commitment to armed force, science, technology and industry' (Edgerton1991: xiv–xv). Edgerton diagnoses an ideology of what he calls 'liberal militarism': a response to the mass casualties of the First World War, emphasizing the use of technology rather than manpower in the pursuit of aggressive warfare, as well its value as an economical means to police the more remote parts of the Empire such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

#### 132 Aircraft down to earth

Brett Holman's study of British airmindedness focuses on the popular notion that unstoppable waves of bomber aircraft would inflict a 'knock-out blow' at the outset of any modern war, a theory that rose to prominence during the 1930s and only faded, he argues, when the Blitz of 1940–41 singularly failed to produce any such effect (Holman 2014). Holman examines the rise of airmindedness and its careful, deliberate promotion by forces including the right-wing press and the burgeoning aviation press (which, he notes, was also markedly right-wing). Helen Jones has noted the significant role of WE Johns' Biggles books featuring the eponymous heroic airman in stimulating airmindedness amongst young boys, alongside a steady stream of aviation-themed action movies (Jones 2006: 125). Holman is rightly cautious about making sweeping characterizations of British public opinion about air power in the pre-war and war years, despite the wealth of sources such as Mass Observation. However he notes that 'the rapid growth in popularity of the Hendon Air Pageant and Empire Air Day, first held in 1920 and 1934 respectively, demonstrate an interest in the RAF on the part of the public, though … It may simply have been a love of spectacle which drew such large crowds.' (Holman 2014: 170). This interest and its impact on young people is well-attested in reminiscences:

My lifelong interest in aircraft began at this time and was no doubt connected with the fact that my father was interested in aircraft. Before WWII he used to cycle to the Hendon Air Displays and would describe aerobatics with enthusiasm and also the exploits of Klemm [Clem] Sohn the Birdman. We once cycled to an airfield near Ashford, which must have been the Heathrow grass field as it was a short distance from the end of Clockhouse Lane. I was around 9 or 10 years old at the time and remember that they were singleengined aircraft in camouflage colours with RAF roundels but the type I cannot remember. Most likely they were Fairey Battles or Hurricanes. (Armstrong 2005)

So many accounts of wartime childhood attest to the awe, fascination, fear and adoration inspired by aircraft. Particularly in the early years of the war in Britain that were mostly fought defensively, the aircraft of the RAF were the most visible and tangible manifestations of the nation's ability to defend itself and to strike back. Crucially however, the aircraft themselves were not very tangible. For a small minority, as we will see, it was possible to get close enough to an aircraft through lax airbase security or acquaintance with aircrew, and some boys managed to get to explore and even fly in aircraft as part of Air Training Corps cadet programmes. For the majority of children aircraft remained 'up there', visible as silhouettes and vapour trails and distinctively audible, but out of reach:

I seemed to be totally detached from what was taking place above me as though it was an entertainment. It was, of course, extremely exciting, but all the time nothing came straight at me (and nothing ever did) there was no fear. The nearest I came to being hit by anything was a falling .303 round, which I could hear sometimes landing in the grass as I lay on my back to watch … The abiding impression is of total confusion. Vapour trails at high altitude and, as the bomber formations were broken up, things happened lower down, with aircraft wheeling around in all directions and machine gun fire over the engine noise. We soon learned to distinguish between the sound of the Merlins in our Hurricanes and Spitfires and the Daimler Benz engines of the ME109's and 110's. The sound of the Merlin engine will get me rushing from the house to this day. My young brother and I became experts in aircraft recognition, as did most schoolboys. After all, this was our war.

(Martin 2006)

At first it was exciting: air battles through the long, hot summer of 1940 seemed to hold little menace for a ten-year old. The drama though was real enough with the roar and whine as engine notes changed as the combatants wheeled about the sky and with occasional falling parachutes, brilliant white against the bright blue sky and the billowing whiteness of the clouds.

(Bayliss 2003)

These accounts are typical of many: the fascination, thrill and sense of distance from the air war; the view from the ground, looking up; the nascent skills of aircraft recognition; and the multisensory theatre of aerial combat in spectacle and sound (Figure 5.1).

From a material culture perspective, the aircraft-as-object was not generally experienced in a tangible way like some of the other types examined in this volume. The visual and auditory aspects are significant and are explored in more detail in Chapter 3. My aim in the remainder of this chapter is to explore the various ways in which children in Second World War Britain experienced, materialized and mastered aircraft in their work (including war work), their play, their actions and their interactions.

The first part of the chapter looks at the practice of 'aircraft recognition', the skill of observing often tiny, distant, fast-moving aircraft and ascertaining their type (and more importantly, whether they were friend or foe). Aircraft recognition was a hugely popular activity amongst young people, particularly boys, during this period with official clubs and even examinations and certificates for dedicated enthusiasts. This was supported by a wealth of books, most notably The Spotter's Handbook by Francis Chichester (1941), and Aircraft Recognition by RA Saville-Sneath (1941) and by a huge variety of materials including flashcards, posters, cigarette cards and dedicated magazines. Aircraft recognition was practiced by both adults and children, and was formalized into the activities of factory rooftop 'spotters', the Royal Observer Corps and the training of air cadets.

The second and largest part of this chapter examines simulacra of aircraft: the hugely popular practice of aero-modelling, building toy aircraft, flying and static models. Like aircraft recognition, aero-modelling created a sizeable

Figure 5.1 Children playing in a layer of sand on the roof of their air raid shelter stop to watch aircraft pass overhead. © Imperial War Museum, D 20623.

industry of wooden models, kits, plans, accessories, magazines and books supported by a number of model shops nationwide. As with aircraft recognition, there is also a suggestion that government support was provided to encourage a hobby seen as being good for morale, encouraging airmindedness and generally supporting the war effort. Aero-modelling was not just a solitary activity: children engaged their models in mock air battles, clubs were formed for flying models in particular, and in some places public exhibitions of models were held as fundraisers for the war effort. Some models even incorporated materials from crashed aircraft in their construction, suggesting an almost magical connection between the real and the simulacrum.

The third and final part of the chapter looks at the rare but precious interactions between young people and actual aircraft. As mentioned above, some boys experienced joy-rides in aircraft as part of Air Training Corps cadet schemes, while others were able to climb inside and explore aircraft at public displays or at airbases. Many others encountered aircraft only in their crashed and broken state, their wreckage spread across beaches, agricultural land, homes, gardens and streets. Some of these encounters included interactions with weapons and human remains, and in most cases were motivated by curiosity or driven by souvenir hunting: the collection of aircraft wreckage was part of the militaria collecting obsession detailed in the chapter on shrapnel. For some young men who grew to adulthood in wartime a childhood interest in collecting and aeromodelling could lead to service, and sometimes injury and death, inside or alongside real aircraft in the armed forces.

### Aircraft recognition

… you had to be sixteen to be required to firewatch, but I did help out once when younger, as it was thought that my aircraft recognition skills would be useful. Being able to tell 'one of ours' from 'one of theirs' was a useful art in those days. With several friends I joined the Erith branch of the National Association of Spotters' Clubs. A Govt. magazine 'Aircraft Recognition' was issued, together with quite well-made model aircraft in the popular 1/72nd scale. We would have talks and quizzes, and could take tests where we were shown one view only, head-on, side or plan, of an aircraft for one second only and had to identify it correctly, including in some cases the actual Mark number. The pass mark was 90%, no less. Class 3 involved 40 basic types, Class 2 the same plus 60 more and Class 1 the same 100 plus another 30 Russian and Japanese types. We all passed Class 1, which just shows what enthusiasm can do!

(Wooderson 2006)

This brief reminiscence illustrates a number of significant features of aircraft recognition as a wartime activity that appealed to children and became a consistent part of youth culture for the duration of the war. Aircraft recognition emerged out of a combination of airminded enthusiasm and wartime necessity, in particular the employment of rooftop 'spotters' on workplaces. Aware of the risk of excessive lost production during air raids, many workplaces began to place 'spotters' on their rooftops so that workers could stay at their stations after the sirens sounded, only taking shelter when the spotters reported aircraft close by or nearly overhead. Historian Helen Jones has described the emergence of spotters' clubs on a grassroots, local level early in the war and their growth with government support. Some were based on existing groups such as model aircraft and glider flying clubs, and the growth was supported by The Aeroplane Spotter magazine and its editor Peter Masefield. The National Association of Spotters' Clubs was formed in May 1941, and by the end of 1942 there were more than 500 clubs nationwide with

#### 136 Aircraft down to earth

thousands of members, many of them holding or working towards certificates based on the tests described in the account above. Jones notes that spotters clubs were just one aspect of the clubs and societies, or 'associational life', common to civil society in Britain at the time and which enjoyed a modicum of government support and interference.

I was very keen on aircraft and had several books on identification and knew all the armament details etc. At the age of 8 or 9 I entered a competition on aircraft identification when 20 or so local shops placed an aircraft model in their window which had to be identified. I got through to the final and found at the event, where we were shown slides of aircraft, all the other contestants were teen-agers mainly from the Air Training Corps and I remember being furious because a British aircraft which I could identify I had ruled out because it had German markings and when I complained to the others afterwards I was regarded as being really naïve. (Heathcote 2003)

Many accounts of aircraft enthusiasm such as the one above recall the competitive nerdiness of young spotters. Aircraft recognition fits firmly within the category of 'interests' in child psychology, and at the level of investment and emotional intensity described above can be described as an Extremely Intense Interest: 'A substantial proportion of normally developing young children become fascinated with particular categories of objects or activities. They display a passionate, sometimes bordering on obsessive, attraction to items in their interest category' (DeLoache et al 2007: 1579). Extremely Intense Interests are often apparent at quite a young age, are fairly long-lasting, manifest themselves in a number of different settings and are reasonably common amongst young children. The focuses of the interest vary considerably but common categories include trains, planes and other vehicles, and dinosaurs.

Helen Macdonald has explored the strong connections and overlaps in terminology, philosophy and practice between aircraft recognition and bird spotting, both of which grew to prominence in the 1930s (Macdonald 2002). The phenomenon is also heavily gendered, with up to six times as many boys displaying these behaviours compared to girls (DeLoache et al 2007; Johnson et al 2004: 339). Certainly the overwhelming majority of accounts of airmindedness and aircraft recognition in the People's War archive are from men, and there is a gender divide here that is stronger than for other material cultures of childhood in the Second World War. Most of the psychological studies of these intense interests focus on very young children below school age, but many of the behavioural patterns are common to contemporary childhood practices amongst older children, such as memorizing technical details about fictional worlds, games, sporting figures and teams, vehicles and similar categories. Aircraft recognition fits firmly within these categories, as in the account below from a self-proclaimed 'gen kiddy':

Well if you are an enthusiast it was just a matter of reading so many papers and books. There were so many books on aircraft recognition, and of course you had the real things flying around you like bees round a honey pot, so it wasn't difficult. I was very, very interested, and I became, even though I say it myself, quite a 'gen kiddy' as regards aircraft recognition. I was a member of the National Roof Spotters Association where I qualified for three National Certificates on Aircraft Recognition.

(Crawley 2006a)

### Literature and ephemera

The popularity of aircraft recognition both drove and was driven by the production of a wealth of printed materials. The most common were books and series such as Gibbs-Smith's Aircraft Recognition Manual, the Aircraft of the Fighting Powers discussed earlier and similar volumes of cutaway plans, silhouettes, photographs and technical specifications.

When [my father] came home on leave during his time away from Dunstable, he would purchase 'Aircraft Recognition' books for me, I believe from Smith's on the London stations. These volumes each had a description of 20 – 30 different aircraft with photographs and silhouettes. I eventually had a collection that covered British; American; German; Italian and Japanese aircraft and in the case of the British and German aircraft, 3 or 4 volumes of each. My friend and I studied these assiduously so that on one occasion when we were invited into the warden's post in Edward St., we surprised the wardens by being able to immediately identify the model aircraft they had hanging in their room, these were official aircraft recognition models and were painted black.

(AW Morgan 2005a)

For me I was usually buried in borrowed copies of Aeromodeller or Aircraft of the Fighting Powers and occasionally I managed to acquire the odd copy of the official publication Aircraft Recognition, which was supplied to the forces; when I won a prize for English at school in about 1942 I can remember my disappointment at getting a copy of Peter Pan; what I really wanted was R.A. Saville-Sneath's Penguin book, Aircraft Recognition, Part 1! (Dilly 2005)

Alongside these relatively expensive books there were a number of different magazines, focused variously on aircraft recognition (The Aeroplane Spotter, Aircraft Recognition), aero-modelling (Aero Modeller), and general aviation interest (Aeroplane, Flight). Some of these publications also marketed additional literature and resources for the airminded youth: Flight sold aircraft identification wallcharts of British, German and American types; sets of collectable postcardsized photographs with new types being added continuously and even a set of identification tables printed on waterproof celluloid. Other ephemera included flash-cards to use in teaching, learning and practicing aircraft recognition and improvised plotting devices such as the one described in this account: 'One of my possessions was a cardboard device that one held at arm's length, consisting of two arms pivoted together at the bottom. A list of aircraft types was printed up one side and when you had identified a type and moved the cardboard arms so they appeared to touch its wingtips you could read off its altitude on a scale' (Dilly 2005). Canadian troops stationed in the UK were routinely shaken-down by local children for the Aircraft 'Spotter' Series of cards that came attached to Canadian Sweet Caporal cigarette packets: 'these were highly collectable and the cry "Got any Sweet Caps" followed any soldier with a "Canada" shoulder flash. We were after the packets rather than their contents and much enthusiastic swapping took place in order to get a complete set of silhouettes' (Dilly 2005).

### Cadets

The boundaries between aircraft recognition as childish enthusiasm and as valuable civil defence or military knowledge often blurred. Certainly there was an official view that schoolboys with aircraft recognition posters on their walls were honing useful skills as the RAF pilots of tomorrow, a view shared by many of the boys themselves. The importance of aircraft recognition might have loomed large in the minds of the boys, but it is unlikely, as some thought in retrospect, that the government gave tacit or material support to aeromodelling as a useful element of the war effort:

There weren't many toys available at that time. None that used war resources. You could still buy balsa wood model aircraft. I think it was available because we were in effect learning to identify aircraft and it kept kids' morale up. There was no such thing as plastic. I actually made some rather good models. We managed to get cellulose paint to finish them off, little tins of it. They were nearly as good as the Airfix kits that you can get nowadays. We made Spitfires, Hurricanes, Typhoons, Blenheims, Messerschmitt and other German planes.

(Bukin 2005)

In 1938 the Air Defence Cadet Corps was founded at the initiative of retired RAF Air Commodore John Chamier, then Secretary of the Air League, founded in 1909 as the Aerial League of the British Empire. Chamier's campaign was successful and large numbers of young men signed up to the Corps, taking part in activities including military drill and physical fitness training, as well as learning about military aircraft and aviation in general. Part of the purpose of the ADCC was to encourage and prepare boys for service in the RAF and Fleet Air Arm. Official interest in the Corps from 1940 led to its takeover by the government from 1941 as the Air Training Corps with clearer connections to the RAF. Aircraft recognition was one of the principal formal activities of the ATC, as attested in John Crawley's account below. Crawley was a member of the National Roof Spotters Association and held certificates in aircraft recognition but had been excluded from military service due to a curvature of the spine. He became an ATC aircraft recognition instructor following a chance meeting with the Commanding Officer of his local cadet squadron:

I got talking to him and he brought aeroplanes into the conversation, and I think he was a bit surprised that I was able to talk to him on very near equal terms on modern aircraft. He said, 'Where have you got all your knowledge from?' I said, 'Oh, I'm just an enthusiast. I'm an aircraft recognition enthusiast.' I told him I'd got this certificate and that and he said, 'Ah, you are just the man we are looking for!' I said, 'Oh, yes!' He said, 'Well, I'm the Commanding Officer of 134 Squadron of Bedford Air Training Corp, and we haven't got anybody to instruct air cadets on aircraft recognition.' He said, 'Would you be interested?' So I said, 'Oh, well I can't think of any reason why not.' So that was the start of it … As I say I used to go along purely for aircraft recognition and then I became so involved and interested I was doing a class one night a week and building model aircraft … one day the CO called me into his office and said, 'Ah, Crawley,' he said, 'I think I've got a job for you!' I said, 'Oh, yes Sir!' he said 'well, it might be up your street on the other hand it might not.' I thought, tell me more, Sir. He said, 'I've had a request from a Mrs. Monk and she is the Commandant of the Girls Training Corp, and they meet at the Shire Hall on a Friday night. She wondered if one of my people could go along and instruct her girls on aircraft recognition and since that is your particular forte I'm offering you the job.'

(Crawley 2006a)

For a more detailed discussion of the airminded youth organizations including the ADCC, ATC and Air Scouts see Adey's Aerial Life (Adey 2010) which considers their role in the training and shaping of future airmen's minds and bodies.

Aircraft recognition in the UK was taught using a system known as WEFT in which students learn to identify the distinctive wings, engine(s), fuselage and tail of the various aircraft types, based largely on profile drawings. This system was adopted in the US and elsewhere, but was criticized in a later review of training methods as unsystematic, overemphasizing the more easily named characteristics of the aircraft, and for generally bearing little relation to the views of aircraft as they were likely to be encountered in the wild (Vicory 1968).