HOUSEWIVES REMAIN CALM

Evening Star, Issue 23702, 9 October 1940, Page 11

HOUSEWIVES REMAIN CALM

COASTAL AIR RAIDS Housewives are playing a key part iu the coastal town air battles. All those interviewed said it was their duty to remain to cook and scrub and care for their husbands and children and their neighbours whose homes were blown up in the daily air raids. They are most resentful of the published stories suggesting that they are leaving towns pushing prams loaded with possessions (writes a London correspondent to the Sydney 1 Morning Herald ’). British women are as unafraid as the men. “We are in the front line, too,” they said. For the nightly raids they move the children’s beds into the airraid shelters, where the children spend the entire night undisturbed. During the whistling of the bombs, the swooping planes, and the rattling machine guns, women in the shelters look as calm as if they were at a tea party. During the worst raid on one coastal town, wiien several were killed, police patrolled the streets with loud-speakers, asking shoppers to take cover. Dover housewives caught in the streets during six daily raids reduce their wasted hours by forming a shopping club. When the all clear siren sounds one dashes to the greengrocer, another buys meat, a third attends to the groceries, then they pool all provisions. When the police pointed out the machine gun ballots falling thickly during the Messerschmitts’ attack on the barrage balloons on Wednesday, they failed to persuade the women to go indoors, who were restive after hours of sheltering. “ I must go,” the dinner is spoiling,” was the general comment.

Distinguish Noises. Women have learnt to distinguish between the noises of machine gun, cannon, and anti-aircraft fire. They are not anxious when the dull crump indicates a bomb. Everyone takes the children everywhere with them lest they are caught in the streets and prevented from getting home. Mothers and children look bored and unanxious.

All have achieved a jolly philosophy. The wife of a postman in a small town outside Dover arrived in Dover iu the middle of an air raid. “ 1 came here to visit my sister, who came to spend a holiday with her parents right in the middle of the blitzkrieg.” It is a favourite joke to point to the French coast, “ there’s Germany.” The occupants of an entire street of tileloss and windowless houses are laughing because an air raid worker was just going to bed at mid-morning after night duty when a bomb dropped next door A row of four houses iu the 10s a week district was blown up by a single bomb and became a mass of splintered wreckage. The contents were unrecognisable, yet tbe occupants dug out some of the wounded.

A housewife sheltering in a cellar with her baby heard the explosion, ran out to extricate the victims, and helped to dig out a woman from beneath a copper whore she was beginning to do the week’s washing. All neighbouring houses an hour afterwards looked like a scone from the film ‘ Gulliver’s Travels ’ with every man sitting on a windowsill nailing linoleum or three-ply to replace the missing tiles or glass, or to cover the shrapnel holes in the walls. When a bomb fell in the five-yard space between two Anderson shelters, a young mother said: “ I was a bit frightened for my ten-months-old baby. Ho cried for five minutes, but was unhurt. We wonder what happened to the chickens in the run where the bomb fell, as wo have not found even a leather.” Asked whether she intended to repair some shattered windows, a fat, jolly housewife who helped to dig out the" victims, said ; “ T believe it is the landlord’s responsibility ; but if he takes as long as bo did to repair one tile, wo won’t have windows until the war is over.” •