Steaming to Victory by Williams Michael

Author:Williams, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

THE COCKNEY SPIRIT – THE BLITZ PART III

‘It was May 1941 and I was a cleaner at Stewart’s Lane shed at Battersea in London. My mother, sister and I were at home asleep in bed when we had a direct hit from a German bomb. We were buried alive for five hours. Afterwards, we were dug out by the rescue people. We had a cup of tea. It was 5.50 a.m. At 6 a.m., even though I was in quite a state, my mother made me go to work.’ So he went. Cool in adversity, with the classic British knack of keeping calm and pressing on, there is no better distillation of the Blitz spirit than the story of Reg Coote – known as Cooty to his friends – recounted in the plain words of a straightforward man.

‘On arrival at work the cleaner foreman noticed my dishevelled state. I was taken to the office and explained what had happened. I was told I was entitled to two days off for being bombed out. I asked for a note for my mother, who might not have believed me. When I returned to work the the drivers gave me ten pounds they had collected to give to my mother to help her out after losing our home.’ Reg never forgot the generosity – running a relief society for sick engine men until he was forced to end it in the mid-1990s because the newly privatised rail companies were not willing to make the deductions through their payrolls. Without a computer, Reg, now getting on in years, had to give it up, bringing an era of mutual support for working men to an end.

Unflappable under fire and with a wry sense of humour, Driver H. A. Butcher tells a similar tale, this time of a hair-raising journey at the controls of the 8.15 p.m. from London’s Liverpool Street to Enfield at the height of the bombing of the capital in March 1941, quoted in Steaming through the War Years, a book of reminiscences by a former engine man, Reg Robertson.

We arrived at the next station, and were just leaving the platform when there was a hissing sound, which we realised was incendiaries dropping, starting fires all round us. After this it was really exciting, with the heavy stuff coming down both sides. My mate was calling to me: ‘Look up! Duck down! Dodge!’ and goodness knows this wanted doing, seeing that I had to look where I was going, and also to watch the train to see it had not been set on fire. All the same I more than once found myself taking his advice without meaning to, and more than once our tin hats clashed when we happened to duck at the same moment. I had to laugh because I thought of the caper I must have cut.

By this stage of the war London had witnessed unparallelled devastation, even though the German attack on the capital had got off to a stumbling start.

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