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Our wireless was fed by a large high-tension battery and a wet battery, the accumulator. It was contained within an extravagant black-crackle enamel case and connected to an external loud speaker. In spite of these refinements its tuning was accomplished by my father twiddling the right-hand knob with one hand while raising the other and emitting periodic utterances of ‘Shush’. The left-hand knob needed no attention since it was always at maximum. Several ‘wee-ah-wees’ indicated that Dad was closing in on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Droitwich; more ‘wee-ah-wees’ interspersed with ‘whatdeesay’s’ then it was Mr Chamberlain announcing that a state of war existed with Germany.

Nothing much changed at first. The posters at Abergavenny station exhorting visits to ‘Sunny Torquay’ and ‘Blackpool Illuminations’ gradually faded. Smaller posters laid over them depicted the top echelon of the Third Reich serving drinks at British military cocktail parties, and reminded all that careless talk costs lives. Our knowledge of the appearance of Hermann Goering, for example, was established by watching barrage balloons aloft over the neighbouring port of Newport, since all English cartoonists lampooned his substantial girth in this manner. Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, was always depicted as a dwarf, but it was one of his henchmen, by name of William Joyce, referred to as Lord Haw-Haw, who captured our attention. He would broadcast on a powerful transmitter, commencing, ‘Jarmanny calling, Jarmanny calling’, and go on to detail the British cities that had been bombed — then adding an undertaking to straighten out a notorious stretch of mountainous road near us when they took over.

Wandering free and learning to goose step

We roamed far and wide without supervision, my father being on Home Guard and my mother on Red Cross duties. We learnt to goose step — ‘No! It’s Brian’s turn to be Hitler today.’ We learnt to identify the many and varied aircraft that traversed our skies. We learnt to shoot them down by the simple expedient of lying on our backs in the heather and shouting, ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh’. We tossed hand grenades, made from moist clay stacked along the banks of the canal, at the opposing gang.

We amassed collections of regimental badges, cadged from the soldiery encamped near by. We constructed flotillas of warships out of wood. Their propellers were cut from sardine tins, the propeller shafts from bicycle-wheel spokes and their propulsive power strips were made of bicycle inner tube. These fleets were subject to aerial bombardment as they sailed under the canal bridge. My high, freeboard aircraft-carrier was one of the early casualties, its flight deck split asunder to reveal a hull hollowed out with the aid of a red-hot poker.

We kept records of all sorts of military information, sometimes written in invisible ink, a copper-sulphate solution that would turn blue on being heated. Another method of record keeping was to use a code. Within these documents lay the dispositions of the army camps and the location of our armouries in the beech woods above our house. Folded inside the front covers of our notebooks were copies of basic German phrases, issued to the Home Guard — terms like kamerad and Hande hoc!, which we knew would be essential when encountering the enemy. We stared at the nuns from the town’s convent to check if they were German paratroopers in disguise.

An armoury beneath my bed

My bedroom really was an armoury for the Home Guard at one stage. Boxes of Canadian Ross rifles were stored under the bed. Their rapier-length bayonets lay in a corner, and my chest of drawers contained boxes of 12-bore ammunition, primed not with pellets but two sizeable lead balls. Lower down were cotton bandoleers of 300-calibre bullets for the Ross rifles.

Entry into the Grammar School with its chemistry lessons made us proficient in the art of making gunpowder. Sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, ground together in an old marble pestle and mortar. The key ingredients were obtained from the chemist, ‘My mother sent me to get some flowers of sulphur for my fathers boils,’ justifying the purchase. Later another of us would go in with, ‘Dad’s killed the pig and wants some saltpetre to preserve the bacon sides.’ Charcoal came from the remains of our garden fires. Fuses were saltpetre-soaked string.

One such bomb-making endeavour between Percy and me involved packing our gunpowder mixture into an old Vim tin. Try as we may we could not detonate our bomb, and in the end we threw it to the back of the shed in frustration. The mixture somehow managed to splutter into life during the night and partially burned down our shed.

Results were not spectacular until we livened up the mixture with cordite strips extracted from bullets. Reference to my father’s Home Guard manual enabled the manufacture of Molotov cocktails, although our kerosene versions didn’t really have a tank-stopping capability. The manual also detailed the abrupt and bloody way to stop traffic by stretching a wire across the road. Fortunately, we limited our experiments to my sister’s skipping rope and our bicycles.

When a few bombs did fall around the house, they were, as the propagandists had predicted, duds, or, as we preferred to say, ‘time bombs’. Interestingly, the screams they made when falling were the same as the ones we used to make when hurling stones at rival gangs. The only incendiary bomb that landed in our garden one wet night burned with all the ferocity of a Boy Scouts’ first attempt to light a camp fire under similar conditions.

Rudolf Hess in Abergavenny

The arrival of the deputy Reich fuhrer in Abergavenny was made known to us by our intelligence sources some weeks before my mother told us, in hushed tones, that Rudolf Hess was imprisoned in a section of the military hospital in which she worked. We knew too that Hess was on occasions taken for exercise on the surrounding mountains. Abruptly, our interest changed to taking long walks and just what we would do if we saw him.

We were ascending the Sugar Loaf Mountain quite early one morning when three figures approached us, the sun full on their faces. ‘It’s him. It’s Hess.’ On each side of him was a Welsh Guardsman with slung rifles. Hess was equal in height to the six-foot-plus guardsmen, bare headed, bushy eyebrows above deep-set eyes. He wore a long civilian overcoat, hands in pockets, his head bent as if deep in thought.

‘Good morning, Mr Hess,’ we called, and he nodded gravely and gave us a schoolmasterly look. We saw him three more times, each time his greeting to our good mornings was the same — a slight mouthing of ‘Guten Tag’. Each time he was guarded by a lesser unit, the men of a county regiment then the Pioneer Corps. The last time I saw him was when I was out walking on the mountain with my first girl friend. This time he was accompanied by two unarmed mental-hospital attendants. Shortly thereafter Hess made that long journey back to his homeland by way of Nuremberg and Spandau.

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