On 8 May, 2025, it’s the 80th anniversary of VE Day. To mark the day, Duncan Barrett remembers the stories of the Blitz Kids, told to him by eyewitnesses who, as children, lived through the bombing of Britain’s cities during the Second World War.
It’s 2012 and my partner Nuala and I are in the USA, visiting Sylvia O’Connor, an 84-year-old British war bride who has been living there for the past five decades. She lived through the Blitz on London as a child.
Sylvia was only 12 years old when the German bombers first visited the city, on 7 September, 1940 – a date that would go down in infamy as ‘Black Saturday‘.
Her mother was working at Woolwich Arsenal at the time, making shell casings for the war effort, and it was with her colleagues at the factory that she passed the first long night of the Blitz. Sylvia and her dad, meanwhile, were cowering in the cramped Anderson shelter in their back yard, wondering whether her mum was dead or alive.
It wasn’t until the following morning that Sylvia’s mum finally made it home. And she wasn’t happy.
“My mother was a funny lady,” Sylvia tells us, as we sip on enormous cups of sweet coffee. “She used to say she’d love to get hold of Hitler and shove one of his rockets up his arse!”
As a child of the war years, her mother’s strong personality left a lasting impression. And Sylvia has carried something of that same Blitz Spirit with her throughout her life. After discovering her handsome GI husband was in fact a hopeless gambling addict, she had to draw on the tenacity and grit she developed as a child during the war.
In fact, she and her fellow war bride friends developed a motto: ‘We got through the Blitz. We can get through anything!’
On that visit in 2012 we weren’t really supposed to be talking about Sylvia’s childhood. We were researching a book about the GI brides, and wanted to know about her experiences in America. But the more she told us about growing up in Blitz-torn London, the more fascinated we became.
We ended up spending six hours with Sylvia that day, hearing what it was like to live through World War Two as a teenage girl. Suffering the pain of separation as her siblings were evacuated without her… Worrying about the safety of her mum and dad… Even witnessing a devastating daytime attack on a London commuter train.
And, of course, trying her best to enjoy what remained of her childhood at the same time.
But 12 years on, in the summer of 2024, it’s stories like these that Nuala and I are searching for. We’re working on a new book, Blitz Kids, which will tell the story of the Second World War through the eyes of children.
Born in 1928, Sylvia was one of our youngest war brides: she met her GI husband as a teenager, right at the end of the war. If she were still alive today, she would be one of our eldest Blitz Kids – a girl who was a child when the Germans first came to bomb London, but a young adult by the time the war was over.
Sadly, by the time we come to research the new book, Sylvia has passed away; but at 90 years old, her ‘baby’ sister Audrey is alive and kicking. I’ve not met Audrey before, but I decide to pay her a visit, driving out to see her and her husband Reg at their home in Essex.
Unlike Sylvia, Audrey missed the Blitz in London. Her memories are not of bombs falling and homes reduced to rubble, but of the series of strange people she stayed with as a young evacuee. The eccentric couple who kept a pet eel in a huge tank in their back garden, or the even dottier lady who would dress up in a suit of armour in the middle of the night and stalk the corridors of her supposedly-haunted home.
Compared to memories like these, Sylvia’s Blitz seems positively run of the mill.
By the time I come to visit Audrey, Nuala and I have been researching the new book for a while. We’re taking things slowly – and methodically. Putting the word out as widely as we can, all over the country, and gradually working our way through the scores of responses from former Blitz Kids.
We’ve also been poring through the transcripts of the 400-odd interviews we’ve conducted over the past 15 years, searching for stray references to wartime childhoods that we can follow up with a repeat visit.
Our plan is to synthesize this vast archive of material into the last word on wartime childhood – a sprawling account of those six eventful years, as seen through children’s eyes, interweaving scores of individual stories and anecdotes.
In fact, we’re just starting to get into the swing of our research when our agent Laura calls with an update from the publishers. “The good news is they’re really excited about the new book,’ she tells us. ‘The bad news is they need it by Christmas.”
With the 80th anniversary of VE Day approaching, our editor has spotted a marketing opportunity. But that means writing the book in about half the time we had planned.
The timing is tricky to say the least. After years of juggling side-gigs, I’ve just accepted an offer of a full-time job. Nuala, meanwhile, is heavily preoccupied with home schooling – both legacies, in their different ways, of the Covid maelstrom that has turned our family life upside down, and never quite put it back together again.
Less than a year to deliver a new manuscript is very much not what we had in mind. But we know better than to push back when a publisher actually seems interested in what we’re working on.
“No problem!” we reply. “We can do that.”
The plans for a sprawling, complex tapestry of individual experiences goes out the window. Instead, we decide, this will be our simplest book yet: we’ll tell 15 individual stories, in one chapter each, and between them do our best to give a flavour of the overall Blitz Kid experience.
After a few months, we have more than 80 interviews recorded — and we’ve begun to identify our favourites.
I talk Nuala through the story of Doreen, who I met in a care home in Coventry. She and her mum survived the truly apocalyptic raid there by sheltering in a pub cellar, after they nipped out to get some faggots and peas for their dinner.
When they returned home the next morning, their house was gone – and Doreen’s pet dog along with it.
Nuala tells me about a lovey lady she met in Bristol, who was buried in her family’s Anderson shelter and had to be dug out by her dad with his bare hands.
But there are lighter stories as well. The Southampton girl who made friends with the American GIs, before waving them off on the morning of D-Day. The two brothers who spent their free time searching for shrapnel in the bushes of their local park. The gang of Birmingham girls who snuck into a bombed-out cellar to play House.
In fact, one of the surprising themes that comes through in our interviews is not just the joy and fun kids experienced in the war years, but how many of them claim they weren’t actually afraid during the bombing raids.
“We just got on with it,” is the oft-repeated refrain. I suppose, as kids, they didn’t have much choice in the matter.
But I was struck by an article in one contemporary magazine, which advised parents on how to deal with their children’s fears:
“Explain that the slightly shaky sick feeling which they experience during raids is not really being afraid, but is the result of the interference with the normal vibrations in the atmosphere due to the explosion. This will help take away the feeling of guilt that schoolboys and even schoolgirls are apt to experience when they fear they’re not being as brave as they would like to be.”
Had a whole generation of children been gaslit into believing they weren’t really scared?
Either way, it seems, the traumas of the war years would find their way to the surface eventually. Doreen in Coventry told me about a panic attack she suffered when she got stuck in a broken-down lift in Primark – and suddenly flashed back to that long night in the cramped pub cellar.
In London, a man called Terry who witnessed a V1 explode at close hand told me how he later suffered from alopecia as a result of his wartime experiences.
For others, though, living through the Blitz was a source of resilience and strength. As Sylvia put it, after surviving night after night of the bombs falling, they felt they could handle anything.
Blitz Kids: True Stories from the Children of Wartime Britain by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi was published on 24 April, 2024.
See more about this book.
Duncan is a writer and editor who specialises in biography and memoir. He’s the author, with Nuala Calvi, of the bestselling The Sugar Girls, GI Brides and The Girls Who Went to War.
Read Duncan’s review of The Hidden by Mary Chamberlain.
You may also enjoy these related Historia features:
Why I started a podcast – and what I learnt (about interviewing Britain’s wartime generation) and
Uncovering Jersey’s wartime resistance by Kate Thompson
The voices of the Second World War by Ros Taylor
A surprising gap in Second World War fiction by Liz Macrae Shaw
Review: When the Germans Came by Duncan Barrett by Mary Chamberlain
“Put those Christmas lights out!” The Home Front during World War Two by Jean Fullerton
Writing popular history: Three lessons learned by Eric Lee
Don’t mention the war! by Keith Lowe
The Spanish Civil War: a war against children by Maggie Brookes
And the winning story in the 2022 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Competition, Collapse by Chrissy Sturt
Images:
- Three children sitting outside their bombed home in the East End of London, September, 1940: The National Archives via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Mrs Alice Prendergast of Balham, London, watering vegetables growing above her Anderson air raid shelter, 11 July, 1940: Imperial War Museum IWM HU 63827A, © IWM (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
- Nuala Calvi and Sylvia O’Connor: photo supplied by Duncan Barrett
- Air raid practice at the National Children’s Home at Harpenden, the Sphere magazine, October 1940: theirhistory for Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- Children searching for books among the ruins of their school in Coventry after a night raid, 10 April, 1941: Imperial War Museum IWM PL 4511A, © IWM (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
- Doreen in Coventry: photo supplied by Duncan Barrett
- London children in an air raid shelter, c1940, from Britain at War ed Monroe Wheeler, 1941: pellethepoet for Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
