1940: the bombing of 82 Silver Street, Edmonton in World War Two

In the second half of the 1930s, the Clarke family moved from Sweet Briar Cottage, a little cottage in Warwick Road on the Huxley Estate where their children grew up, to 82 Silver Street, Edmonton, a large house in a set called Pymmes Villas opposite Pymmes Park. People were surprised when they moved, because it was such a large house, bought rather than rented, and a big step up the social ladder. It was a one of a terrace of five or six and had been bought from David Hatfield, a preacher in charge of Tanners End Mission which the Clarke family attended regularly. It had was on three stories with an upstairs bathroom, five bedrooms, a study and a games room, all of which were fairly unusual for the time. Beyond the house was the North Middlesex Hospital and beyond that a factory which made stockings. Then came Weir Hall where Jim Clarke had an allotment.

In 1938 I married into the Clarke family and moved with my husband, Len, away from Edmonton to Edgware. It was on the day after Boxing Day, 1940, that something awful happened. A landmine hit Pymms Villas during a German air raid. Maude, Len's mother, was killed outright, and Jim, his father, was taken to hospital, as were his sister Doris and brother Eric. His other sister, <Living person>, had to have her leg amputated on arrival at hospital and was afterwards in and out of hospital for months at a time for years. Horace, Len's brother, identified the body of his mother (who was originally from the Fisher family of Wedmore). Horace was in the forces and came home on compassionate leave. Not long afterwards he himself was killed on active service. He was a lovely man, charming and with good looks. He left a wife, Hazel.

I remember that it was a very short air raid. I knew because we heard the siren and the all-clear in Edgware. It seemed that there was no time at all between them, and Len and I went back to bed almost immediately, little realising the devastation in Edmonton. It being the Christmas period, we had left there only the day before. We had been prevailed upon to stay longer, and as it turned out, it was a good thing for us that we didn't.

The following morning (a Saturday) Len went to work. Yes, people worked on Saturdays until lunchtime in those days. Somebody rang him at the office of the Advanced Linen Services (ALS) where he worked in Golders Green to let him know what had happened. We were not on the phone at home at that time. Very few people were. Len wondered how to let me know that he was setting out for Edmonton. He looked down the list of ALS customers and saw that there was one in Penshurst Gardens, the next road to ours in Edgware, and he phoned them to ask if they would be good enough to take a message to our house at 9 Brook Avenue. When they knocked on my door, they simply told me that my husband's parents had been bombed.

My first thoughts were how to get in touch with Edmonton and Len. I put baby Pat into her pram and went out to try public phone boxes - but I was unlucky, not because of vandalism but because there was a war on. As my brother Ted was on the phone, I thought perhaps the manager of the Co-op shop would let me use the Co-op phone to phone him. He did. Apparently he had, at one time been the manager of the Silver Street Edmonton Branch and knew Pymms Villas well. So I got through to Ted and asked him if he would go and check on 82 Silver Street. He replied, "There is no 82 Silver Street". When I asked him to take a message there, he advised me to wait at home for Len. I learnt later that he was relieved to hear from me because a baby had been found dead in the rubble and he had assumed it was Pat and that Len and I had been killed too.

When Len eventually came home, I said, "Where's your mother?", thinking he would be bringing her back with him. I had even prepared the spare bedroom. He just said, "They haven't found her yet". Then I heard the facts. It hadn't entered my head that anybody had been hurt. One somehow only ever thinks that things like that happen to other people.

Len didn't talk about the bombing much. He just seemed to accept such things. For example, when the next air raid came and we were sitting by the stairs (which was supposed to be the safest place), I said to him, "I feel I can't pray to be kept safe after what happened to your mother", and his reply was, "You have no business to ask for that. You should pray for courage and fortitude."

It fell to the Pioneer Corp to clear up after the bombing, and quite a lot of things seemed to go missing. After Doris, Len's sister, was discharged from hospital, though, she came to see me in Edgware, and gave me a parcel. She said, "Here you are Florrie (that was the name I was known by in the Clarke family). I know that mother would wish you to have this as Len brought it home from Africa for her." It was the ivory crocodile that everyone who has visited my house knows so well. It had been retrieved from the rubble of the bombsite, and was in three pieces which we glued together. Len had brought a number of things back from Africa, and I appreciate and enjoy most of them, but I always look on the crocodile as something sinister. It sits on the mantelpiece of my fireplace and has been admired by many people. When I tell them the history of it, I say that it is a symbol of the horrors of war, although I know that Pat regards it as a symbol of human triumph over adversity.

 

This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as Join me in the 1900's and is © Pat Cryer.