At the FAP I had been told that Dr Richard Castillo was out with the Mobile Squad from St Stephen’s Hospital. A bomb had fallen on Bramerton Street and I feared it was on his house. One of the most agonizing strains suffered by the staffs in the Control was having to record and deal with the reports of bombs which had fallen on homes – sometimes those of their own families, relatives, and friends. Their job was to take the reports of incidents and carefully note the time and place. Dr Richard Castillo had been out working for hours on the Cadogan Shelter tragedy and had just gone out again with the Mobile Squad when his own house was demolished in the day-light raid. He had been working during the morning with two wardens, Bert Thorpe and Mathews, who were preparing bodies for removal. Both his house and Thorpe’s, which was in Smith Street, had been demolished by this day-light raid while they were again on duty. Digging on Dr Castillo’s house was going on – but his wife and daughter and his little son, known to have been in the house at the time, had not been found and were presumed to be dead.
This was the first tragedy of someone known to us all in Civil Defence. Dr Castillo was well known not only because of his work in the Service, but also as an excellent doctor to the patients of his large practice in Chelsea, of whom I was one. Dr Alice Pennell lived in Bramerton Street, but at the far end, not the King’s Road end, and although her home was damaged by glass being broken and she herself badly shaken, they were both all right.
The digging on the site of what had been Dr Castillo’s house in Bramerton Street was to become a classic in the story of Chelsea’s Blitz. The first to reach the heap of ruins was Jo Oakman, a doctor’s daughter and a clever painter, with another warden. They and the Reverend Arrowsmith and his curate began working frantically with bare hands at the debris. They had not been scrabbling long when they heard a voice calling and it proved to belong to one of Post Don’s messengers, a seventeen-year-old boy called Fox. After some hard work and help from other wardens he was released almost unhurt, with only superficial cuts and bruises. It was a miraculous escape – for the whole house had fallen into the basement and he had apparently been at the back of it when the bomb fell.
Heavy rescue arrived with all the paraphernalia for rescue work but there was no further sound from the site, no answer to their calls and signals, and it seemed that young Fox was the only survivor. What had been a happy family home was now reduced to ground level, with the basement, where the wife and children of Dr Castillo were known to have been, filled in with huge blocks of masonry and heaps of debris. Desolate and grim, it was a reminder that the raider had passed that way.
Four days later, when the heavy rescue were continuing to dig in the debris, they heard a faint cry of Mama which came from what had been the basement. Using blocks of wood to shore up the walls they made a tunnel some twenty or thirty feet long through which, with infinite patience and determination, they managed to squeeze. Seven and a half hours after they had first heard the cry they reached Dr Castillo’s twelve-year-old daughter, Mildred, who was buried up to her neck in debris. This little girl, whose heroism became a by-word in Chelsea, had been buried for four days and four nights and had been conscious most of the time. She was given tea through a rubber tube and biscuits, and she asked for her rosary before undergoing the terrible ordeal of being pulled inch by inch through the long tunnel by her rescuers. This was a tortuous, agonizingly perilous task which took hours, and all the grim persistence and humour of the rescuers was needed, as they wriggled backwards inch by inch pulling their little charge to safety. At last it was achieved – she was out – and all three rescuers safe too. Her mother and little brother, Richard, were found dead in the ruins – Mildred was the sole survivor.
During the long period while the tunnel was being made the whole of Chelsea had held its breath for Dr Castillo in his anguish and suspense. No one who has not watched a perilous task such as the rescuers, George Woodward, Wally Capon, and George Pitman, performed to save Mildred Castillo can have any idea of the superb courage needed for such a feat. The slightest misjudgment, the smallest false movement, the most infinitesimal slip – and the whole structure could crash down and bury the tunnellers. Theirs was a double peril – for they had not only to reach their goal but to return from the gates of death with the child. They were not young men – few of the heavy rescue were young. The young were disappearing all too fast into the Services, leaving older men, and the women, to deal with the Blitz.
This epic of that day-light raid made a tremendous impression on us all. Here was a child – and not such a robust one either – who had survived a terrible ordeal with a courage and fortitude equalled only by that of her father’s devotion to duty even in his terrible loss. The names of the rescuers were on everyone’s lips during the next weeks. When I spoke to Wally Capon later when he was working on a site clearing debris he said, ‘’S all in the day’s work – I’ll get you out if you’re ever stuck in yourself!’
The bomb which had hit a house in St Leonard’s Terrace was an oil bomb – a nasty messy affair. Fortunately it was not one of the most beautiful of the old houses in that terrace and it was not the home of our Medical Officer for Civil Defence, Dr Symes, in charge of our light rescue and stretcher parties, as we had feared when it was first reported to Control. There were not many casualties from the raider’s flight from the Spitfire but he had left a trail of damage everywhere.
The bombs had shattered some gas and water mains and our gas and water seemed to be mixed up with air in the most extraordinary way! To get enough gas to boil a kettle was difficult. I went at once and bought two electric kettles – it seemed to me that this would probably be a frequent occurrence now. My mother had told me that in the 1914-18 war they had all made hay-boxes to save fuel. These, she said, were excellent for keeping food hot, once it was cooked. Mrs Freeth and I constructed one from a box given us by Mr Ferebee, whose wife was most interested in the idea. That we should have to get accustomed to going without baths was also evident if there was to be no gas. One of the things which often gave me the jitters was the idea of the contents of the open grate at one end of the huge studio being distributed over the room by one of the terrific explosions which frequent bombs in the river caused. We were very near the river and it was obvious that the Luftwaffe were trying to get the power stations and the bridges over the Thames. Bomb after bomb would go in the water, making loud long explosions without damaging any of the bridges. That they would do this had been foreseen and small makeshift bridges had been constructed near the permanent ones from Battersea Park to the Embankment.
On the night of the 11th the full barrage of our anti-aircraft heavy guns opened up. The noise was appalling – but the effect on the morale of us Londoners was miraculous! ‘Now they’re getting it! They’ll shoot ’em down now! They’ll soon put an end to their nightly circling…’ Joy greeted the angry bark of the guns, which now mingled with the whooshes of bombs and the wail of sirens taking up the cry in one area after another, and pieces of shell and shell-caps were to be added to the objects arriving from the sky. It was a magnificent barrage on that first night – and it increased nightly. Day-light warnings were constant now as well, and we could get caught anywhere at any time. I met Suzanne out shopping in the most elegant tin hat I’d seen. She looked as if she had had it especially designed for her – but it proved to be French and to have belonged to her brother in the 1914-18 war. If we went out with our tin hats hanging over our shoulders in a raid we could be ordered to put them on our heads by the wardens. I had a horrible one which was both heavy and far too big. Richard was working a great deal at the Ministry now with Mr Rock Carling the surgeon, who had become special adviser to the Home Office and with whom we had become very friendly. He thought that as I was out so much at night I should have a tin hat which I could wear, and he produced one for me which was much better, and on which I not only painted my name and identity number as directed, but also several adornments from my paintbrush. Even so it was nothing like a
s elegant as Suzanne’s – the French, it appeared, showed their graceful flair for hats, even tin ones!
When the sirens wailed in day-light the shops closed – and we could get shut out without having bought anything. The same thing happened at railway stations. Dr Graham Kerr was finding this – and that any taxi driver willing to bring her to the FAP needed a large bribe. After all, the public had been enjoined again and again to take shelter – even ordered to. The authorities could not foresee that the raids would become such a daily and nightly occurrence that all these injunctions would break down of themselves. People had to be fed – the housewives had to shop – people had to get somehow to their jobs – life had to go on, bombs or no bombs.
Dr Graham Kerr was finding a lot of patients complaining of general malaise and their complaints ranged from headaches to ‘just can’t take any food’. She put this down in many cases as the result of sleepless nights in shelters, and much of it to fear. She said that they made such a faint-hearted attempt to adjust themselves to the new sleeping conditions. Many people complained to me that they resented the lack of privacy– they hated having to be seen in undignified stages of undress but admitted that they felt ‘safer’ when together with others. They could not stay alone – they felt too nervous.
The Blitz was providing something besides bombs. It was making people talk to one another. People in shops, in the buses, in the streets often talked to me now. They opened up amazingly about how they thought and what they thought – how they felt and what they felt. They all liked to see the nurses’ uniforms – and were loud in their praise of the nurses, the firemen, and the wardens. But they did not like the indignity of sleeping publicly in a bunk in a shelter with hundreds of others. The Blitz was doing something else – it was continuing the slow difficult process already begun before the war of breaking down class barriers.
Another shelter received a direct hit in our area on the 13th and very early in the morning we had many casualties at the FAP which Dr Graham Kerr dealt with. This was the large shelter of Manor Buildings, an LCC block of flats in Flood Street. The water main had been severed and the poor sufferers were soaking wet. We put them all with their feet in hot water and wrapped in blankets until they could be got dry things. They were all filthy and had a lot of cuts and bruises and were all suffering from shock. Shelters were rapidly getting a bad name and some of the casualties said that it was obvious that they could be seen from the air! Residents in Paultons Square had no gas at all as a bomb had severed the gas main. It had also killed one of the wardens in the hut there.
The bomb and everyone’s special bomb was still a subject of endless interest and possibilities – but they were coming so thick and fast that everyone had a better story than his neighbour. All over London people were full of stories of the Blitz, but life was going on as usual – in spite of it. September 14th was a date which few of the personnel at Post Don will forget. In a further day-light raid another shelter was hit – this time under a church. The Church of the Holy Redeemer is a massive building and I had been there several times to see the shelter in the crypt because some of our refugees liked the idea of this shelter so much that they wanted to change to it. It was very close to Cheyne Hospital and when, at first, two of them did go there, I had gone to see that they were all right; but we persuaded them that it was too far and that their own was just as safe. It was a very popular shelter – perhaps because, like the refugees, others felt that nowhere would they be safer than under the protection of the Church – and at the time the bomb fell it was crowded.
The bomb was recorded by one of us telephonists in the Control Centre at 18.35. The message said that there was fire and casualties trapped in Holy Redeemer Church in Upper Cheyne Row. Requests followed in rapid succession for ambulances, blankets to cover the dead, fire services, and reports came in that there were many casualties.
The bomb had struck the church at an angle through a window in a most extraordinary way and had penetrated the floor and burst among the shelterers, mostly women and small children. Here George Thorpe, who we knew as ‘Bert’, lost his life with those women and children he had visited to reassure them – as he always did, although he was not the shelter warden. He knew that they were apt to become nervous and needed moral support in the heavy raids and he used to drop in there to boost up their courage and cheer them up. He had just despatched Jo Oakman on duty and gone there when the bomb fell. The bomb exploded right amongst the shelterers, A woman who was in the shelter told me about it when I visited her afterwards in St Luke’s Hospital. She was badly injured and said that the scene resembled a massacre – in fact, she compared it to an engraving she had seen of the massacre of the women and children of Cawnpore in the Indian Mutiny, with bodies, limbs, blood, and flesh mingled with little hats, coats, and shoes and all the small necessities which people took to the shelters with them. She said that people were literally blown to pieces and the mess was appalling. She herself was behind a pillar or buttress which protected her somewhat; and there was a pile of bodies between her and the explosion for it was still day-light – no one had gone to their bunks.
Jo and Len Lansdell were quickly at the scene, followed by all the ARP Services. They could not get into the crypt at first because the body of a very heavy woman barred the only entrance. The explosion had set fire to the great heaps of coke stored there for heating the church and the smoke from it made it difficult to see. Jo and Len Lansdell immediately set to work with stirrup pumps to try to extinguish it before the whole place became a crematorium. The body of Bert lay there face downwards. Jo, who had spoken to him only a few minutes before the bomb fell, turned him over. She said afterwards that she wished so much that she hadn’t, so that she could have remembered him as he had been when he had sent her on duty. His equipment, which was taken back to his post, was described to me as being bright red with blood – as was everything which had been in that crypt.
The work of the ARP Services that night was magnificent – by nine o’clock in the evening the casualties were all extricated and were laid in the grounds of the church with the Home Guard in charge, and wonderful work was done by Dr Castillo and Fr Fali, of Tarapore. In our FAP we had numbers of casualties again, including some rare and interesting fractures which Dr Graham Kerr commented on for the instruction of us VADs. To watch her at work, deft, neat, cheerful, and competent, was a lesson in itself.
After a heavy raid with many casualties such as this one there was a task for which we were sometimes detailed from our FAP and to which both our Commandants disliked having to send us. This was to help piece the bodies together in preparation for burial. The bodies – or rather the pieces – were in temporary mortuaries. It was a grim task and Betty Compton felt that we were too young and inexperienced for such a terrible undertaking – but someone had to do it and we were sent in pairs when it became absolutely necessary. Betty asked me if I would go as I had studied anatomy at the Slade. The first time I went my partner was a girl I did not know very well called Sheila. It was pretty grim, although it was all made as business-like and rapid as possible. We had somehow to form a body for burial so that the relatives (without seeing it) could imagine that their loved one was more or less intact for that purpose. But it was a very difficult task – there were so many pieces missing and, as one of the mortuary attendants said, ‘Proper jig-saw puzzle, ain’t it, Miss?’ The stench was the worst thing about it – that, and having to realize that these frightful pieces of flesh had once been living, breathing people. We went out to smoke a cigarette when we simply could not go on – and some busybody saw Sheila smoking and reported her for smoking when in uniform and on duty. Betty Compton, who invariably supported her VADs, was most indignant about this, as indeed she was about us having to perform such a task at all. I thought myself that butchers should have done it.
After the first violent revulsion I set my mind on it as a detached systematic task. It became a grim and ghastly satisfaction when a body was fairly cons
tructed – but if one was too lavish in making one body almost whole then another one would have sad gaps. There were always odd members which did not seem to fit and there were too many legs. Unless we kept a very firm grip on ourselves nausea was inevitable. The only way for me to stand it was to imagine that I was back in the anatomy class again – but there the legs and arms on which we studied muscles had been carefully preserved in spirit and were difficult to associate with the human body at all. I think that this task dispelled for me the idea that human life is valuable – it could be blown to pieces by blast – just as dust was blown by wind. The wardens had to gather up pieces after a bad raid – they had no choice – and someone had to assemble them into shrouds for Christian burial, but it seemed monstrous that these human beings had been reduced to this revolting indignity by other so-called Christians, and that we were doing the same in Germany and other countries. The feeling uppermost in my mind after every big raid was anger, anger at the lengths to which humans could go to inflict injury on one another.
A Chelsea Concerto Page 13
