大象传媒

One superstition about war is that if you were born during one then you would also die during one. Fortunately it seems just that - a superstition because both my father, Bert, and mother,Violet, were born during the Boer War and both long survived World War II, Violet even living on to the ripe old age of 94. Admittedly both came close to death in the second world war, but more of that later..
My name is Pete Brown and I was nine when World War 2 broke out. We were, I suppose, an average family, mum, dad, my sister, Noreen four years older than I, and myself.
At the time, we lived in Dagenham, Essex, and when my father was called up into the navy at the ripe old age of 39 (he had been a reservist)we decided it might be a good idea to move away from London as well. So we moved to Rustington in Sussex, the first
of many moves as it happened. Because of the
imminent danger of a German invasion, we were soon advised to move away from the south coast, which we did, but not far enough as it happened. We moved to Addington
in Surrey soon to become Battle of Britain
country.

We had been issued with gas masks at the beginning of the war and were supposed to carry them everywhere with us. We did at first but as the war lengthened into the so-called "Phoney War" we started to leave them at home. We also had to contend with
the black-out at night and ensure that either heavy curtains or blankets were covering all windows to prevent the least chink of light escaping for German bombers to spot. If a chink showed we ran the risk of an air raid warden shouting at us to 'Put
that ruddy light out !' Vehicles on the road had black metal grills fitted to their headlights to prevent the light reflecting upwards but fortunately there were not many vehicles about at the time and they were
further restricted by petrol rationing.

Being young I found life now quite exciting. Most of the fields round the town had been filled with old scrap cars and vans
dumped in them and spaced some 50 yards apart to prevent German paratroop aircraft from landing. Me and my mates had a great time playing in these cars imagining we were driving them. Added excitement came when we spotted the farmer and had to try dodging him.

One evening playing in the fields, we heard the drone of aircraft and a line of Stukas
whined high overhead then dived down and bombed Croydon Airport. From then on things became rather hectic with daily bombing raids and dogfights. So our next move was to my uncle and aunt's home in Ponders End near Enfield to escape the raids in "Hellfire Corner" but again it proved to be a disastrous move. The raids followed us and increased in intensity during the following nights.

Our housing estate enjoyed the facilities of Durrant's Park nearby, and every night a mobile anti-aircraft battery and searchlight would trundle into the park and during a raid start hammering away hopefully at the night sky. By morning a strong smell of cordite still hung in the air from the night before. We kids also engaged in an extra hobby - searching for shell shrapnel. On one occasion a piece of shrapnel had smashed a glass panel in my uncle's greenhouse, so naturally we looked inside for it. We found nothing. Eventually a large splinter of shrapnel turned up in the garden several yards away. The shrapnel had struck the greenhouse, smashed the glass and somehow bounced out again. They made the glass tough in those days !
Early in 1941, the Edison Swan radio factory at the near end of the park was hit by a landmine causing extensive damage and some damage to our home was also sustained including a collapsed wall by our bed. Since me and my cousin, Bill, were in it at the time having forsaken the cramped conditions in the air raid shelter for the relative comfort of the house, we counted ourselves lucky to have escaped serious injury since the wall just missed us. But elsewhere my mum suffered a bruise on her face from falling masonry, and that was the last straw as far as she was concerned. We moved yet again, this time far away up north to Buxton in Derbyshire, and there we survived the rest of the war in relative peace except for one nasty incident in late 1944 when the Luftwaffe released flying bombs from their aircraft over the North Sea and these roared low over Buxton frightening the life out of us. Fortunately they did not land on the town but ended up harmlessly somewhere near Manchester.

We also had to endure food rationing - meat, eggs, sugar, bread for instance were in short supply. Vegetables were more plentiful because the nation was encouraged to "Dig for Victory" by growing its own. Sweets also were rationed but I didn't eat a lot of sweets so I gave my coupons to my mum and my sister. We were rationed for some 10 years or so altogether, and later reports suggested that the nation was at its healthiest during this time and may even have been a significant factor in lasting good health particularly for the young. At 74 I can certainly vouch for having enjoyed good health and to still being fit and active. If you survived the war, that is. It has to be said that World War 2 was the first war in history with more civilian casualties than military casualties. It was the age of 'Total War' where, more often than not, civilians were in the front line from incessant air raids to ubiquitous battlefield bombardment and street fighting, and if one mentions Coventry, Dresden, Leningrad or even Oradour where innocent French villagers were herded into a church and burnt alive by the callous SS, then the totality of war with all its attendant horrors are immediately conjured up.

Meanwhile my father, a stoker in the navy, had been assigned to a destroyer on the Dover patrol guarding the Channel. Unfortunately during this time his ship hit a mine and sank leaving him and others of the creew in the water for some 3 hours or so. After being picked up he was posted to Chatham and, I believe, had taken part in the Dunkirk evacuation. Oddly enough I never got around to asking him about that and he never talked about it. But later in the war he was posted to a shore base at Greenock near Glasgow and sat out the rest of the war uneventfully there.

During 1943 my mother obtained work in HM Customs Statistical Office which had transferred to Buxton from London for the duration of the war. Because of the shortage of male clerks my sister also joined her there. My schooling had been seriously interrupted during these years and I had attended no less than 6 junior schools (as primary schools were called then) in the space of 2 years. During that time I had taken the 'eleven plus' and failed. I made up for it later though by passing London Matriculation externally via a correspondence course after I left school. But before that my last school was Kents Bank Senior school in Buxton. It possessed a grand total of six teachers, 3 male and 3 female, and a male headteacher. There would have been more male teachers but some were away serving in HM forces. Leter, under the 1944 Education Act, the school was regraded to a secondary modern. I returned there some 10 years ago on a nostalgic visit only to find that the school is no longer used as such but instead combines the role of public library and education offices.
Being patriotic at the time, in 1944 I joined the Air Training Corps, a junior cadet force, and learned the rudiments of air navigation and morse code. But the war ended before I could put any such training to use and perhaps as well on reflection. The main thrust of my interest then was aircraft recognition because naturally war planes had proliferated. In fact I still possess some of the principal aircraft books from those years and they have become something of a collector's item.

大象传媒 Radio was a big media attraction during the war not only for news but for entertainment as well, and we laughed at such programs as ITMA with Tommy Handley, Sunday Hippodrome with Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warris, and the Lyon Family with Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels. And we listened to Vera Lynn singing, the Glenn Miller orchestra, the Squadronnaires, Geraldo and his orchestra and others like them. The other main media attraction was of course the cinema, and we watched such films as 'The Wizard of Oz', 'Mrs Miniver', '49th Parallel', and 'In the Navy' with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and another comedy was 'Ghost Train' with Arthur Askey. The programs then usually included a newsreel and I've known some of my friends go just to see the newsreel !

Anyway our final move was after the war in 1945 to Southend-on-Sea where I and my family have lived ever since apart from a spell of national service which I naturally served in the RAF.

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