When peace on earth and goodwill ran out

Eighty years on, Annabel Venning finds how her family survived the first Christmas of the Second World War

The run-up to Christmas can be a stressful time for families. This year, we have an election to add to the tension. An election is one thing, but a war is quite another. Eighty years ago, in December 1939, our grandparents and greatgrandparents were facing the first Christmas of the Second World War.

War had been declared on September 3, but it would be three months before the first British soldier would be killed in action in Europe – Cpl Thomas Priday died on December 9 when he stepped on a French landmine during a night patrol.

By December, many families were waiting anxiously for news of their loved ones: some had sons or husbands serving in France, where the weather was so appalling that water froze in soldiers’ water bottles and they had to shave and wash in snow. Other families were separated by evacuation. At the beginning of September, 825,000 schoolchildren were evacuated from urban areas to the countryside.

It would be nine months before the Blitz began – and parents without their children chafed at the idea of spending Christmas apart from them, while their children begged to be allowed home.

“Please God, make Mum come and take me home for Christmas,” wrote one little boy who had been billeted with a cruel host family.

The government tried to dissuade parents from sending for their children, urging them:

“Keep them happy, keep them safe,” while Woman’s Own magazine advised mothers to “put the happiness of your children before your own” and spare them “the sorrow of yet another parting”.

The authorities laid on special buses so that parents could travel from the cities to rural areas and spend a day or two with their offspring at Christmas, without the children returning. My own family was one of those scattered by the war. My grandfather, Walter Walker, was one of six siblings, four boys and two girls, who were all aged between 20 and 30 when the war broke out. Walter and his older brother, Edward, were army officers, both stationed in India, Walter with the 8th Gurkhas and Edward with the 8th Punjab Regiment, while a third son, Peter, was a tea planter in India. In 1939, Walter was on the North-West Frontier between India and Afghanistan, embroiled in a savage war against the tribesmen. So it was a relief to have a few days away from the fighting at the fortress of Razmak, where they could relax in comparative safety. On Christmas Day, a horse show and a boxing match were put on for them, and officers were allowed to change out of uniform into tweed suits. They ate Christmas lunch and afterwards the rum came out, and they sang Christmas carols in the snow.

It was snowing in Britain, too. The winter of 1939-1940 was a bitterly cold one. In Tiverton, Devon, where my great-grandparents, Arthur and Dorothea, lived, the streets looked rather different from the previous year. The shops and houses were swathed in blackout blinds, and there were horses everywhere: since petrol rationing had been introduced, businesses had swapped their delivery vans for horses and carts.

Food rationing had not yet been introduced, but it was around the corner: bacon and butter would be rationed in the new year. This would be the last Christmas without rationing for 14 years.

The Walkers were expecting three of their children home for Christmas. Although three boys were in India, their fourth son, Harold, was a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, while their youngest daughter, Ruth, aged 20, had just completed the first part of her nurse’s training there. Bee, their glamorous elder daughter, was a model for the couturier Norman Hartnell.

It was an odd Christmas for families up and down Britain. Would it be unseemly to carry on as usual? Or was it their patriotic duty to make this a happy Christmas, in defiance of Hitler?

There was the lurking fear that, for some, it would be the last Christmas – or the last one before their lives were changed irrevocably.

The Blitz began on September 7 1940, and, in the early hours of September 9, St Thomas’s was hit by a bomb that fell on the nurses’ home. The top storeys of the building collapsed in a tangled mess of masonry. Ruth, who was sheltering in the basement along with other nurses, was buried under the rubble. She lay there for some time, before a rescue team – which included Harold – found her and pulled her out unhurt.

Six nights later, another bomb hit the hospital. The doctor to whom Harold had been chatting was decapitated by flying metal, and Harold was hit in the head. Bravely, his colleagues tunnelled through the rubble to extract him. Harold had a fractured skull and was in a coma.

Incredibly, he recovered completely and, by Christmas 1940, he was recuperating in Tiverton under Dorothea’s watchful eye. He was back at work by the spring.

By Christmas 1941, Peter had joined the Indian Army, and was in the thick of the fighting against the Japanese in Malaya. But after the surrender in Singapore in February 1942, he became a prisoner of war, suffering torture and ill-treatment on the notorious Death Railway.

By Christmas 1944, Dorothea and Arthur had two sons at war – Walter was fighting the Japanese in Burma, while Edward battled the Germans in the snowy Apennine mountains of Italy. Meanwhile, no one knew whether Peter was still alive, as nothing had been heard from him for two years. At one point, he came so close to death that he was mistaken for a corpse, but rescued from the funeral pyre in time.

At home, there was happier news: Bee had married an American airman named Gaddis Plum and had had a baby, Mary. Harold was training as an obstetrician – he delivered one baby in an air raid shelter – while Ruth had gone to nurse in Cairo.

Miraculously, all six of the Walker siblings survived the war, but not unscathed. Peter returned to England in October 1945, physically and mentally shattered: his back was scarred from beatings, and he suffered nightmares all his life. And Bee’s husband was on a plane that disappeared over the Atlantic in March 1945, leaving her a widow.

Arthur and Dorothea knew how lucky they were that all six of their children had survived when many of their friends and neighbours were preparing for a bleak Christmas.

Although life would never be the same again, they could, at last, have a peaceful Christmas.