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I was a child at the outbreak of war, and like many other boys found the news about the war something of a game. Even when my home town was bombed, because we were not directly involved or hurt, it just added to the excitement.

I was once involved in a serious air raid when visiting family in Middlesboro, but was startled by the anxiety of the adults, whereas I had the sense of invulnerability that so often is attached to children, and therefore found it 'real' and exciting. Yet there are two incidents which I still marvel at. The first gives me some optimism about human nature and the second still makes me feel uneasy.

The first event happened around 1944. I was playing in our small living room as it was raining outside. It boom, brrreeee, ratatat, ratatat as in my imagination I was shooting up 'Gerries' in my Spitfire.

My father angrily asked, 'What are you making such a noise for?'

'I'm killing Gerries Dad.'

'Hm,' replied my father. 'You must remember that there are good and bad Germans as there are good and bad English. We're not fighting the Germans; we're fighting the Nazis, they are the ones who are evil.'

This still seems an incredibly civilised and humane thing to say, but I believe it was more typical than the propaganda of the day would suggest - that decent, working class but politically interested men could differentiate between the enemy and the civilian population and still see the Germans as human.

The second, far less sanguine experience was in early 1945.

I was at the cinema, the pictures, and as usual quite enjoyed the Pathé News because it was mainly about soldiers, the navy and our great Spitfires, and I always looked forward to seeing the RAF.

On this occasion it was the first time the newsreels showed the liberation of the concentration camps. In this case, it was Belsen.

The first thing that amazed us was that we saw naked bodies, piles of them, even their genitals. It is almost impossible to understand in those times how rarely one saw human flesh revealed, let alone full frontal nudity. It was stark, harrowing and was beyond rational description.

But is was not the dead bodies that alarmed the nine-year-old boy, nor the first sight of adult genitalia; it was the reaction of the audience. There I was, sat amongst townspeople who I had known all my life. In a tradition where 'pit talk' were carefully hidden from women and children, now men and women (the latter was even more extraordinary) stood up and yelled and screamed obscenities.

'Do it to them... bastards... bastards... fxxxx bastards… kill them, kill them!' People screamed and keened with grief and rage, grief and rage, with tears and spittle running down their cheeks.

These were the same people who had sat quietly through news of the sinking of the Hood, of the Blitz, of the horrors of the Burma war, etc, etc.

I was so distressed by the adults' response that I was torn from looking at the screen and sat down and cried with fear at the transformation of decent ordinary people, transformed into raving would-be killers.

As an adult, I have often thought about these two events and learned much from them, and perhaps it would be wrong to add any adult reflections, but when one considers the history of the times, remembering that Britain had an endemic mild anti-Semitism, the horror that those adults saw blotted everything out. All they saw was the brutality perpetrated against fellow human beings and they could not tolerate the thought that it was other human beings who were responsible.

Colin Pritchard
Late of Castleford, Yorkshire, now Southampton

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