Free Blitz Kids by Sean Longden

a coffin in close proximity, let alone six of them.’ On 3 May 1940 he was selected to play ‘The Last Post’ at the funeral of six seamen who lost their lives, some from a Royal Navy minesweeper, some from a Norwegian merchant ship. Arriving at the cemetery, he found there were many senior officers in attendance, led by RearAdmiral Harold Walker, better known as ‘Hooky’ because of the hook worn in place of a hand:
    I was completely overawed and completely alone with my fear of all this ceremony with no one to tell me what to do. The mass funeral started and then it came to my solo piece, Last Post and Reveille. I started well, but halfway through I could feel my lips going like jelly, until eventually, I unashamedly burst into tears.
    He was expecting to be in trouble for his emotional reaction. However, Admiral Walker laid his hook on the youngster’s shoulder and said, ‘Never mind, laddie.’
    Notes
    1 . Ourselves in Wartime (London: Odhams Press Ltd, 1944).
    2 . Sarah Gertrude Millin, World Blackout (London: Faber & Faber, 1944).
    3 . ‘Pilgrimage for Hearts of Oak; Scapa Flow survivors remember fallen colleagues’, Glasgow Herald (15 October 2004).
    4 . Millin, World Blackout.
    5 . The youngest member of the armed forces to die on active service was Royal Marine Boy Bugler Peter Avant, who died aged fourteen when HMS Fiji sank at Crete in 1941. He was one of eight ‘Boys’ lost on the Fiji .

CHAPTER 4
Eruption – May 1940
    â€˜After Dunkirk, I was guarding vulnerable points, like radar stations. But I had no bullets for my rifle.’
    Ted Roberts, a soldier at fourteen years old
    On 9 April 1940, German forces attacked Denmark and Norway, where they finally came face-to-face with British troops. The next day Denmark surrendered, then on 3 May the British and French were forced to withdraw from Norway. One week later the Germans attacked Belgium and the Netherlands, and the British advanced into Belgium to meet them. Next, the assault on France was unleashed. After seven months of waiting, the so-called ‘Phoney War’ was finally over.
    For John Cotter and Peter Richards, the German invasion of the Low Countries and France meant one thing: their cycling holiday to the Isle of Wight had to be cancelled. With war raging just across the Channel, the two boys were more concerned with spending a long-weekend in the saddle than with what was going on in Europe. Furthermore, Peter had something else on his mind: his sixteenth birthday and the Civil Service examination that would determine his future in the Post Office.
    For some British children the German invasion of the Low Countries had an immediate and violent effect. Sisters Yvonne and Julienne Vanhandenhoeve were living in the Belgian port of Antwerp with their English mother and Belgian father. Born in south London in 1928, Yvonne and her family left London after Mr Vanhandenhoeve’s furbusiness had collapsed following the Wall Street Crash. Her sister Julienne had been born in Belgium in 1930. At home the two girls spoke English, whilst at school they spoke Flemish, and with their Belgian family they spoke a mixture of Flemish and French. As Julienne later recalled, she only spoke English until the day she started school, when she cried her eyes out in confusion to hear everyone speaking a language she could not understand. As both sisters recalled: when they were in Antwerp they thought of themselves as Belgians, but when they were in England, they thought of themselves as English.
    With Belgium under threat from Germany, the sisters and their mother were uncertain of what the future might hold. Then, in May 1940, with the Germans advancing, eleven-year-old Yvonne began increasingly aware of the ominous situation: ‘We didn’t have much time to think about things. The war started and suddenly we were off. People were loading up carts. We saw people we thought had come from Holland. Maybe they were heading to France? We