Interviewee: David Mills,  aged  78.

Interviewer : Liz Bloom

Date : October 13^th 2009

I came here (St. Albans) during the war as an evacuee from Primrose Hill, London.  We came by coach actually, not by train and we
stopped at the station and we had a teacher and a billeting officer.  We walked down as far as Cavendish Road which was the first
road up from the station.  They had no idea where we were going so they knocked on the doors as they went down the road to see if people would take (me).  I got in with a family called Ford; they already had one evacuee which I knew; he was a Jewish boy. 
I stayed there for about seven or eight weeks; the only trouble was they never gave you enough food.  So one afternoon my father came from London and …..he took me up to the town to the Creamery which used to be Chequer Street and gave me a good old feed.  I had already fallen over two or three weeks beforehand and I’d got a nasty knee and he was quite concerned about it.  Anyway, I stayed there for a little while and then something happened – no I don’t know quite what it was now.  They didn’t want me to stay so I moved from there to Dellfields and at that time it was a pretty rough old place really, Dellfields – with a lady and her husband, and she had a daughter.  Again, that wasn’t all that nice because they didn’t feed you very well.  The only time I had a decent meal there was when her aunt came and she used to make me, you know, give me extra food. 
While I was there, me and my friend, Hennesey, decided we would walk home (to London!) and we cadged money on the way.  We
got on a bus and the conductor realised we hadn’t much money so he stopped the bus and called a policeman, who took us to the police station in Barnet.  They gave us some food, told us to lay down on a mattress while they contacted our parents.  The police took us home in a Black Maria van – we lived quite near each other.  My father was furious.  He brought me back and I was sent to a house in Blandford Road.  They already had three girls and two boys.  The three girls were evacuees.  That was quite nice.  When we used to have an air raid, we used to all go down into the cupboard under the stairs and sleep there while the air raid was on.  It was all right there but I was very prone to getting a cold and getting bronchitis and they couldn’t deal with me there, so they sent me to the Clinic which was in Bricket Road.  I was there for about three or four weeks until they found me somewhere else to go.  I then went to stay with an elderly couple in Royal Road.  He was a tailor and I knew as soon as I got into that house, that was what I wanted – because they had one of these old range fireplaces; they had tomatoes underneath ripening.  Anyway, they treated me as their son really,
I used to call them auntie and uncle and they were very, very good and I stayed there for thirteen years until I got married. 
And then when I got married, we couldn’t find a house at the time so I stayed with my wife’s parents for a year ‘til we looked around and found a house.

During that time, before I moved (when the war was on) I was at Royal Road and they built an underground shelter which was quite big actually.  They also had four or five brick shelters on the road with a big concrete top on and then they eventually built a big water tank, you know, for the fire brigade if they needed it.
Do you remember the actual year when they built the air raid shelter under the rec.?

I think it was there when I first moved in…but it was quite big…

What year was that when you moved in exactly?

I was eight (1939/40).  Yes, I was eight years old then. As I say, they were very nice to me and they looked after me very well.  I was very delicate in those days; every time I got a cold, I got bronchitis.

When I left school, I went into the grocery trade.  I used to do a little job taking groceries out to different people and then this chap asked me if I’d like to work there so I worked there for a little while and then there was a big shop on the corner of Woodstock Road which was called Benningtons.  He found out that I was working at Greens and asked me to go and work for them.  So I worked for them for two years…

That’s where the Chinese Restaurant is? 

That’s where the Chinese restaurant is, that’s right.  That didn’t work out and the gentleman, as I say, who I lived with was a tailor, so he took me into the tailoring at Nicholson’s.  They’d never had young boys in there before and they put me on the machines and I was the first boy to go in there as a machinist.

What year would that have been?

 I must have been about sixteen then.  As I say, I was the first lad on, they’d ever had…they’d always had girls but they’d never had boys, and, in fact, from that time they started taking boys in.  I stayed there, I suppose, for, I suppose eight years.  I then left and went and joined the co-op, in Victoria Street, as an assistant in the menswear because I’d already learnt the tailoring so I was quite handy to be there, you know; I knew what I was talking about.  And I stayed there, I think, for about eight years and I was doing things like serving people and measuring people for suits.  I left there and went to Charles Mares which was on the corner of Spencer Street and the Market Place.  I stayed there for two years, then W H Greens along….Chequer Street. They had a big store there and they opened a menswear department.  They’d never had one before; they had all ladies’ stuff so I went there as manager but it didn’t work out because it was on the ground floor and had ladies’ handbags and shoes in front of me and the men wouldn’t come in.  So that faded.  I then applied for a job in Radlett with Ronald Montague, which is menswear again.  I was there for a year; that didn’t work out either.  So I went back to tailoring for another three years at Nicholson’s again and then, um, Nicholson’s was taken over by an Italian firm, Chester Barry, but that only lasted for about three years and they found that they weren’t doing the trade; they weren’t doing very well, so that ended that.

And then, my father-in-law and my brother-in-law at that time were working at the Hatfield Polytechnic.  My brother-in-law was a lecturer and my father-in-law was a technician.  I’d got in my mind to go to the post office to be a postman; anyway, they got me in there (the Polytechnic). 
I did about a year, I think it was, doing maintenance, which really was tidying things up and then a job came up in the Media Services.  I did close circuit television, showing films at Hatfield and Bayfordbury, which is another part of their establishment.  I ended up in the Industrial Engineering Dept. and I stayed there ‘til I retired. I retired about a year earlier because they were a bit like the hospitals; they had a manager come in who really didn’t know what he was doing.  He wasn’t very good to me and he started getting me to do other jobs, painting and things, and I wasn’t very happy about that.  So I was sixty-four then and I decided to go to the accounts people and I said to them, “If I retire a year early, would it make any difference?” and they said, “Oh yes, we can give you a little bit more pension and a bigger lump sum.”  So that’s what I did and I’ve been retired now for fourteen years.

If you cast your mind back to when you were a child here can you remember very much about the primary school?  Were you at this primary school here?

No I wasn’t, actually.  We took over St Paul’s church.

Oh yes, you did tell me.

That’s right.

Was that because you were an evacuee?

Yes, yes.  We had several different classes in different rooms.

And did the teachers come from London as well?

The teachers came from London, yes.  The headmaster came from London.  We had a Mr Jones who was a very good musician.  He had a choir and I joined that.  We had a Mr Preston who was my teacher and he played the piano and that was very nice and I enjoyed that and then when, of course, I got older, I had to go to Beaumont School.

Now why was it Beaumont and not Verulam?

Because Verulam at that time was a Grammar School.

What did that mean?

Well, you had to do an examination to get into there. 

Oh right, a bit like the eleven plus.

That’s right, yes.

OK, so you went to Beaumont…

…and yes, that was it.  I stayed there until I went to work.

Was it fifteen, was it?

Yes, I actually stayed on a year extra.

And were they happy years?

Yes, I suppose they were, really, yes, yes.

So you used to play a lot on the rec….

Over here, yes, oh lots of times.

What did you get up to on the rec?

Of football and….when they built the shelter here, they had an entrance in Hatfield Road..

…just by the, where the café is..

Yes, that’s right…a bit further down and we used to play around there.

And what did you…sort of rough and tumble?

Oh, all sorts of things.  When they were building, they left a load of bricks and we sort of stacked those up and made sort of hideouts and things like that you know.

Did they have any play equipment at all?

You could play football.  They put some goalposts up…..

..but no slides?

Oh yes, there were swings and a slide and a roundabout.

Did you ever go inside the air-raid shelter?

Yes.

And what did you do down there?

Well, we used to lark about really.

Frighten each other?

Yes, I used to take girls down there.  There was a long passage that went all the way down and they had little tiny entrances that (people could) go up and down to get out.  I used to take girls along this long passage in the dark!

So, little tiny entrances?  And where would they come out?

There were about six.  There was one on this side (east), two the other end and three in the middle, I think there was.  They were, you know, escape hatches

Yes.  And was the air-raid shelter built for the community, for domestic use?

Of course, you had Ballito there then and so people used to come from there down to these shelters when there was an air-raid.

Did you ever see any evidence of there being a tunnel under the road from Ballito’s.

No, I don’t…I never saw that.

I’ve heard that.  I’ve only heard it from one person and it just seems, I suppose…, I don’t know, a bit strange to me, but it’s quite possible, isn’t it?

Yes, because there are tunnels from the abbey, aren’t there?

Are there?

Yes.  (This was when it was a monastery.)

To…?

To somewhere, I can’t remember now.  Somebody told me that there are tunnels under there that they could go through, but where they went to, I’ve no idea.

And then you said that there were concrete shelters along here (the rec. side of Royal Road).

Yes, they were brick, about five brick shelters with a big concrete top along the road here.

So, did you use them much?

We used those as well….we used to play around, actually in there.

Did you get many air-raids in St Albans?

Not really, no.  I’m actually living in…the house I’m living in now was bombed during the war.  An aeroplane came over to try and find DH’s (deHavilland), the air field.  He couldn’t find it so on his way back he just dropped bombs.  He dropped one in Beaumont Avenue….I think there was two people killed there. There were several bombs dropped in Fleetville:  one on Hatfield Road opposite Queen’s Court, in the garden – no-one hurt; one in Hill End area which killed a man walking up the garden path of a house, and a little girl too; and the house that I’m in now, there was a land mine in the middle of the road, and it took the whole of the front (of the) house off but everything was left; the lamps, the bed and everything.  It was just like a dolls house.  I can remember saying when they re-built these houses, because they had a glass door, oh I wouldn’t want to live there, but of course I did eventually.

Yes, so they re-built that house.  Did you move into it when it was brand new?

No, there was an elderly lady there and she wanted to move, and at the time we were looking for a house, and so we moved in there in 1955.  They built two new ones, you see.

Yes, with all mod cons and everything.  So were they better than the other houses?

Yes, that’s right, because the others were terraced whereas these were semi-detached now.

Do you recall any other bombs being dropped in Fleetville?

No, I don’t think there were any more, just those two.

Thank you.  I’m going to leave it at that…….