大象传媒

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During our stay in Cornwall we learnt quite a bit about gardening and country life. Mr Trevains garden provided the majority of fruit and vegetables eaten in the house, two outhouses provided a suitable storage area for vegetables stored for the winter. A third outhouse stored dried logs and kindling for the house fires; every so often a ten-foot tree trunk was delivered, sometimes it was split down its length, and sometimes we would have to split it. One of my tasks was to help saw the long lengths into about nine-inch lengths. I would also chop up these logs into a suitable size for the house fires, some of the logs I would split down even more into kindling, ready to light the fires.

The army came and camped under the large beech trees of the drive up to the front of Lanhydrock House, everybody was in bell tents. The officers mess was set up in the playground of our school, the officers were very generous with their bars of chocolates. While the soldiers were in camp, we arrived home from school one Friday to find armed guards outside our house. We soon discovered that the Royal train was parked on the Bodmin 鈥� Bodmin Road branch line, the King and Queen had come to inspect the soldiers in camp. We went along to have a look at the train, but didn鈥檛 see anybody other than soldiers.

We went to church up at Lanhydrock House, Sunday school took place in the music room of the house itself, led by Miss Violet (I believe a sister of Lord Roberts). In the winter, the evening service was moved forward to the afternoon, because of the light. Several of my school mates took turns to operate the organ hands bellows. When we arrived in Cornwall one of the first things we were asked was 鈥渁re you Church or Chapel?鈥� there were a few special occasions when we attended the local 鈥楥hapel鈥� it was well out in the country, and we sat on long beaches.

When we first went to school, everybody ate their pasties out in the playground, whatever the weather, after a while an empty house across the road from the school was used as a dining room, arrangements were made to heat our meat pasties. This, I believe, was at the same time that school dinners were introduced. During the school holidays my brother and I sometimes went out onto Bodmin Moor with Mrs Trevains nephew, and built dens out of ferns; on our way across the fields, we would pick a root vegetable to eat for our dinner.

During the time we were in Cornwall a fete was held in the grounds of Lanhydrock House, there were all the usual stalls etc to be found in a country fete, including bowling for a live pig. Also during the fete we were able to walk around inside the house itself.

As we were about three miles from the nearest newspaper shop (in Bodmin), the daily papers were put on the branch line train to Bodmin Road Station. On my way home from school, I would walk to the station to collect the morning paper. While I was at the station the Cornish Rivera express train would pass through at speed, I always enjoyed feeling the rush of air that accompanied the train. When the branch line train left Bodmin Road Station for Bodmin, it doubled back and passed in front of the cottage where we were staying, we could wave to anybody coming or going by train, if we knew when they were travelling. Sometimes we would catch the train via Bodmin to Wadebridge, and then another branch line to Padstow where there were some lovely sandy beaches. We also visited Par Sands some Saturday afternoons.

One night, during the Plymouth blitz, just after my brother and I had gone to bed, we heard the whistle of a bomb falling, followed by a loud explosion; we both arrived at the foot of the stairs before the explosion, and probably without touching the stairs. Shortly after this as the London bombing had ceased, our Dad came and took us back home. The journey home took us over 24 hours, stopping and starting, backwards and forwards, until we eventually arrived home, very tired and hungry.

In September 1943, two or three of my friends and I joined the 6th East Surrey Company of the Boys Brigade. A young man recruited us while we were kicking a ball around, he asked if we wanted to play on a proper football pitch with a real football to kick? And to go camping? It was too good an opportunity to miss, I remained in the BB until I joined the Royal Navy at 18 about 5 陆 years later.

We took to sleeping back in our beds again as it was so quiet. One hot night the following summer, I had gone to bed with the window wide open, allowing the curtain to billow out of the window to get some fresh air into the room, the siren had sounded, but I didn鈥檛 move as there had been several warnings of late, but without any enemy action near us. Soon I could hear the sound of an aircraft, an unusual sound, so I wasn鈥檛 sure whether it was friend or foe. As the wind blew my curtain out I could see an aircraft flying along with a white light on, then I saw banks of rockets going up and the aircraft seemed to pass through each bank undamaged. I was just about to say to my Dad, who had come into my bedroom, that the pilot was either very brave or an idiot, when the light went out, and shortly afterwards there was the flash of a large explosion. The next morning we heard that it was the first of the new pilot-less planes called V1. We nicked named them Doodlebugs, and within a day or two there was an air raid in progress nearly all day and night. Mostly while the engine remained running, the aircraft continued to fly but when the engine stopped it generally would dive to earth with a large explosion on contact, occasionally, one would glide for quite some time, before falling to earth, they were even known to turn around after the engine had stopped.

As soon as we heard of the Normandy landings, our history and geography teacher said 鈥減ut your books away, this is history in the making, and we are part of it鈥�. He then produced a large wall map of Europe and pinned it to the blackboard. We all took newspaper cuttings to school and inserted pins into the map where we knew that the allies had taken and joined them up with cotton. This procedure continued after I left school in the April of 1945. During this time the Germans started to launch what they called V2鈥檚 these were rockets with huge explosive charges. It was not possible to hear these rockets coming, but when they did land, mostly in residential areas, they would flatten an area bigger than a football pitch.

As soon as I left school, I started to work at the Croydon Iron Foundry with my father. A weekly collection was started of two and sixpence, for every pound that we collected, the firm added another. This was towards a party, which was to be held in a neighbouring caf茅, where most of us ate our lunches. We held our party on the night that we heard of VE day, the following day was a holiday, during the afternoon we took a train into London, and walked around everywhere, until we finished up on the queen Victoria monument, outside Buckingham Palace. Here we joined the crowds shouting for the King and Queen, the princesses and Mr Winston Churchill and waved to us for quite a while. We only just made it back to Victoria Station in time to catch the last train home at midnight.

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