Above Ground on the London Underground—Day 43: Heading to Hayes

 If it's Friday we must be back in London. Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings. Here are the previous days. One more Piccadilly line post. This is Day 43.

Last week as we reached the end of the Piccadilly Line at Cockfosters, I was reminded that underground stations were used as air raid shelters during World War II. The people in this photograph look very settled in, clothes hung on pegs, bedding spread on the tracks!

And I wonder if my mother ever dashed into one. If that’s how it worked. She was a teenager in London, fourteen years old when the war broke out in 1939. Like millions of boys and girls from cities around England, she and her two younger brothers, Peter and Robin, were evacuated in September, sent to the English countryside where strangers took them into their homes. Kids were sent all over the world to Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Some children were even sent to the U.S. They called it Operation Pied Piper with 3.5 million children being evacuated in the first three days. 

Operation Pied Piper via DefenseMediaNetwork.com

These children look pretty happy and excited but for my mother, leaving her own mother was difficult. Relying on volunteer hosts, the government tried to keep families together but my mother found herself separated from the boys, put up in a house where she felt in the way and uncomfortable. Plus she hated leaving her own mother alone in London while her father and her eldest brother Don were both off fighting the war. 

Miserable, she was allowed to return home and eventually went to work as a clippie on the buses. My mother loved working on the red double-deckers, running up and down those stairs, taking money, making change. 

A British clippie ... not my mum

She was young, and even though it was wartime, like young men and women everywhere, she was alive and eager to live each moment to the limit. Growing up, I loved listening to her stories of dating Yank soldiers—she liked their American accents—sometimes barely making it home before curfew, diving under the Morrison bed when the bomb sirens squealed. 

My mum Enid 

I can’t imagine living under such conditions but she never talked about being afraid. The sound of the incoming bombs was as much a part of the soundtrack to her young life as the constant beeping of incoming texts and tweets are to the millennials of today.

Home was a house on Mansfield Drive in Hayes, Middlesex, on the outskirts of London. It’s where she grew up, the home she lived in until she was 23, when she left it behind to marry my dad. Cute couple, eh? 

My dad, Edward.

On the Uxbridge branch, the leg of the Underground that takes you to Hayes is the only remaining section of the Piccadilly Line I’ve yet to see. If I can dig up the address—I thought it was #10 Mansfield Drive, but google earth says there is no #10—I’ll see go there next week. Come with me?

Getting there is easy. I’ll hop on the Piccadilly Line right here at Cockfosters and take the tube back towards Heathrow. At Acton Town I’ll switch trains, take the tube to Uxbridge and walk the rest of the way. It’s a long train ride, but at over 20 miles an even longer walk. Not saying I couldn’t do it, but no way I’m going to try. I’m just too excited.

Link up to British Isles Friday hosted by Joy Weese Moll