Children of the Blitz captures vivid and moving testimony, while we still can

Anita SinghMon, May 11, 2026 at 3:36 PM UTC

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A boy sits in the ruins of a building during the London bombings, 1945 - Toni Frissell

Soon there will be no one left who lived through the Second World War, and that is why we need documentaries like Children of the Blitz (BBC Two). It is a collection of testimonies, both moving and matter-of-fact, about living through that time. They are in their 80s, 90s, and 100s now, and in some cases their short-term memory is fading, but they can still recall their wartime experiences in vivid detail.

Some were so young when war broke out that they struggled to make sense of it. One girl loved looking over the wall into the garden of a neighbour who kept chickens. The morning after a bombing raid, the garden was no longer there. “I stood staring at this pile of rubble and I said to my mum, ‘Where are the baby chicks?’ And she didn’t pull any punches. She said, ‘They’re dead, love, they’re under the rubble.’ It didn’t occur to me until years later that people lived in that house, and that they must have died.”

Ernie Gaskell can still recall his wartime experiences in vivid detail - Jack Warrender

In Northern Ireland, and a terraced street where no one had a garden to accommodate an air raid shelter, another little girl sheltered with her mother in the cupboard under the stairs. “It was nice, because Mummy would cuddle me and we would play spoons and talk to each other. I told Mummy not to be upset because my Daddy would chase the bad noises away.”

Many of us automatically think of evacuees when it comes to children in the Second World War, and more than 800,000 were sent away. But two million stayed with their parents. “My mother and father said, ‘If we’re going to die, we’re going to die together,’” said one woman from Croydon, south London. She remembers the red glow in the sky from a raid on the docks; remembers too the realisation that “it was real and people weren’t playing at war” when her two best friends, Jean and Ernest, died in a direct hit on their home.

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Coventry was bombed in November 1940 - Getty

The contributors recall childhoods in London, but also Liverpool, Coventry, Hull and Belfast. This is important because, as one lady from Coventry reminds us: “The Blitz was not confined to London. I hope people realise that it was countrywide. It’s very annoying to everybody else in the country that London is always thought to be the be-all and end-all of everything.”

While some can still conjure the feelings of warmth and safety in their parents’ arms, others had different experiences: “These days people talk about caring and loving and being together. That never happened in those days. You just had to look after number one as best you could, even when you were little.” Some of the stories were terribly unhappy, but it’s hard to know if they were a product of the times.

Certainly, the film shows that the wartime generation do not think with one mind. They offered contrasting opinions on the Allied bombings of Hamburg and Dresden. “They’d allowed the Nazis to take over their country and bomb the hell out of us – why should we feel sorry for them? They’d brought it on themselves. We’ve been through it, now it’s your turn,” said one, but another was horrified by the raids: “I thought the people who’d done that to us were disgusting people. I don’t think we were disgusting. It’s very sad that people think the only answer is to do what’s happened to us, only even more so, to the other chap.”

Dorothea Barron is featured in the programme, now aged 101 - BBC

Dorothea Barron, still teaching yoga at the age of 101, said she rarely talks about those years. Why do it now? “Because everybody’s asking, because they realise that we’re the last elements of the generation that went through the war. So few of us are left.” As a young child, I remember being given a school assignment to interview an older person about their experiences of the Second World War. We spoke to our grandparents, our neighbours. In a few years’ time, that will no longer be possible, and we shall have to rely on programmes like this.

Children of the Blitz is available now on BBC iPlayer and airs on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday 11 May

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”