While the Bombs Fell

“While the Bombs Fell” by Bobbie Cheadle and Elsie Hancy Eaton is a story based on Eaton’s true experience. While it is not a history book of WWII, it contains many details of the hardships, rations, and simple joy of the family lived through the unpredictable bombing.

Elsie recounted her wartime memories as a four-year-old girl living in the town Bungay, East Anglia, England in 1942. Germany bombed England, and the air raid sirens were part of her “normal” life. When sirens came on, the family rushed to the bomb shelter.

The family lived on the farm with cows and vegetables to help to supplement their rations. Items such as bananas, oranges, and lemons were unknown fruits to Elsie. Families those days kept the books of coupons used to purchase rationed items such as clothing and meat. Despite the freezing cold, Elsie’s family only had enough energy to light the fire in the living room. At nightfall, all the rooms were dark except the living room. The young children took baths, but the adults and older children used the bowl in the scullery to wash themselves. They used the same bowl to mix batters and dough and wash the dishes.

Regardless of the bombing, children continued to attend school. Elsie started school in 1942 and enjoyed simple learning and fun, such as playing with modeling clay and singing.

Elsie remembered going to the movie and saw Back from the Front. She got some wool and knitting needles for her birthday present. Her first knitting had many holes from skipped stitches. Elsie kept it as a memento.

Robbie Cheadle is known for her children’s books and recipes. In this book, she included two recipes during WWII, the Lord Woolton Pie, and the Potato Pastry.

The book is a well-told story. It reminds me of my parents’ experience during WWII. They retreated from the city to live in a village where they had a farm to grow pigs, chicken, and vegetables. My older sister’s job was to feed a 500-pound pig. The farm sustained them until the war was over.

Mother and daughter collaborate beautifully in this story of the war years based on Elsie Hancy Eaton’s memories of her early childhood.

As we sit in our centrally heated homes and pop to the supermarket to buy our week’s groceries with produce from all around the world, it is easy to forget that only 80 years ago it was very different for millions of people in Britain. Times were hard anyway after the great depression that hit the UK in the 1930s, followed very quickly by World War II and food rationing and restrictions on use of essential utilities.

This is a detailed snapshot of life on a small farm in Bungay in Norfolk. A place steeped in medieval history with a ruined castle now a playground for children. Apart from those evacuees seeking sanctuary from the big cities, particular Norwich, hard hit by bombing raids, there is a small community which includes four year old Elsie Hancy and her extended family of grandmothers, uncles, aunts and cousins.

Her father is a dairy farmer who supplies the town with milk seven days a week in all weathers, including on Christmas Day. Whilst the family has milk fresh each day, with food rationing in force, butter, cheese, meat and fresh fruit is scarce and feeding a large family is a huge daily challenge.

The story is told through the eyes of Elsie and she shares every aspect of daily life from building an air raid shelter in the back garden, freezing bathing routines during the winter, the farm activities that began at the crack of dawn until last thing at night, going to school for the first time and stories of grandmothers and newcomers to the town.

As children, Elsie and her brothers and sisters are very resilient as they take these tough times in their stride. There are fun times too as the children head off in the summer school break to paddle and swim in the river taking packed lunches of jam and bread. There is the delight of a hand me down doll in a pram for Christmas, and the family involvement in the making of the pudding rich with saved up dried fruit.

Added to this first hand account of this harsh time in our history, is a section containing authentic recipes used by millions to make dishes from the meagre ingredients available. Whilst they may not contain the rich and diverse produce we enjoy today, in many respects they are ingenious and also nourishing.

Definitely a recommended read.

There’s a saying about real life: it’s very poorly organized. In fiction, we can have our make-believe people say all the right things in all the right places, craft our villains into anything from being totally evil to fatally misunderstood, and decide if our protagonist is going to be a hero. When you’re writing about something that really happened, all that freedom goes away. In many respects, it’s the ultimate writing challenge.

This book rises to that occasion. It’s the remembrances of a girl growing up in WWII England, so the antagonist is the war itself. Young Elsie couldn’t remember a time when food, coal, and clothing hadn’t been rationed. One of her greatest reliefs was that she didn’t have to actually wear her gas mask. She’d never seen poison falling from the sky, but she could see the worry in her father’s face when he talked to her about it.

That’s the sort of detail that makes up this story. A terrible threat that modern readers never had to face—or worse, prepare their children for—but it’s taken in stride. That’s what life was, and people simply had to adapt to it. The house was cold, but there wasn’t enough to coal to heat the front room. Everyone grew gardens as part of the “Dig for Victory” war initiative, and the children remembered the words to the anthem that went with it decades later. And at night before she fell asleep, young Elsie would listen for the engines of German bombers and the whistle of the bombs as they flew toward England.

Not all the story related directly to the war. Elsie went to school, made plum pudding with her mother for Christmas, rejoiced in the gift of her very own doll, and went swimming in the summer. But even there, on something as idyllic as a riverbank in rural England, unexpected tragedy could befall. One of Elsie’s neighbors cut his foot while playing, like any kid could do, only he died swiftly of lockjaw. No tetanus vaccines or antibiotics were available back then.

This is the sort of history that I love to read—all the stuff you can’t find in newspaper stories, but it made up the fabric of people’s lives. If that sort of tale is your cup of tea, I strongly recommend checking out this book.

While the Bombs Fell, written by Robbie Cheadle and her mother Elsie Hancy Eaton, is a fictionalized account of Eaton’s life as a young child growing up in rural Suffolk, England during World War II. I was initially drawn to the book because I have a long-standing interest in the history of daily life in the twentieth-century, in particular the daily lives of everyday people during times of war and other national and global events.

The opening of While the Bombs Fell skillfully establishes its intended audience as middle-grade readers:

In June of 1942, as World War II raged, a little girl grew up in one of a row of small cottages on a street called “back lane” in a town called Bungay in East Anglia, England.

Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany since 1 September 1939, and the little girl could not remember a time when the distribution of food, coal, and clothing had not been controlled. She listened for the sound of bomber planes and air raid sirens without even realizing it and even possessed her own gas mask.

This opening brought to mind the cinematic technique of starting with an extreme long shot that brings us to the door of the cottage where one little girl lives with her family; then the door slowly opens to reveal the family inside. I could also envisage the opening as a conduit from a present-day child’s history textbook into the living, breathing past as seen through the eyes of another child.

For an adult, While the Bombs Fell reads as creative nonfiction, with each short chapter a fictionalized account of a particular event in Elsie’s life supplemented by accurate historical research. The chapters include “Swimming and fishing”; “An introduction to school”; “A war-time Christmas”; “Goodbye Jean and the Bungay Buckaroos”; and “Illness in the house and D-Day.”

The deprivations of life in wartime are deftly woven into the fabric of each narrative, as can be seen from the following examples:

“The pantry had a meat safe on the floor. Shelves, empty except for some bread, lined the walls.”

“The Sunday dinner usually comprised of a tiny shriveled piece of beef, cabbage, cooked dried peas, and a batter pudding.”

“People ate herrings and other fish as a treat to supplement their bland and unfulfilling diets. Elsie would feel happy that Father had something more substantial than bread and jam to eat after a hard day of work on the farm.”

For me, the highlight of While the Bombs Fell is its authorship: a mother relating memories of her childhood to her daughter, who uses her talents as an author to mark the importance of these memories and share them with readers to ensure that they will not be lost.