大象传媒

A Boy in Dorset

WW2 was declared three weeks before my seventh birthday, while I was on holiday at my Grannie鈥檚 in Somerset.

Home at that time was in the city of Southampton where my father was a bank clerk, and my next recollections are of him having volunteered for the navy to pre-empt call-up, and of the first bombing raids on the town. When the sirens went, mother and I would huddle in the cupboard under the stairs, but an alternative was soon offered us.

Father鈥檚 sister and her husband owned a hotel on the Dorset coast and held the lease of an unoccupied cottage by Poole Harbour, on Studland heath, so we hastily left Southampton for a safer if more primitive life in what, for England, amounted to the back of beyond. Oil lamps, (no electricity), and water raised from a well by a hand pump in the kitchen. A couple of miles of completely unmade sandy track led to the road to Studland village, where a bus route linked with Swanage and Bournemouth.
An ancient carrier鈥檚 canvas-hooded truck with wooden seats along each side, like an army lorry, took the half-dozen children from the heath to the two-classroom village school in Studland each day.

Remote as we were, we did not escape the fringes of the war.
Many actions in the Battle of Britain took place in the summer skies above us. The vapour trails of squadrons of bombers or escorting fighters crossed overhead, dispersed by attacking Hurricanes and Spitfires; the rattle of machine guns sounding clear through the still air.
A Heinkel 111 was shot down and belly-landed almost intact in a field in front of Westfield farmhouse by the Studland-Swanage road. All we locals went to gawp at it, black and evil tangible evidence of the war , brought right up close to us.

There was a military firing range somewhere on the heath to the west of us, and a small searchlight unit set up a few hundred yards to east of the house. Poole, and the Navy cordite factory at Holton Heath, across the harbour, were periodic targets for bombers and the searchlight made frequent contributions to the responses.
Occasionally, we would wake to find a battery of 25lb-ers in the field next to the cottage; part of some exercise that would move on to the ranges behind us.

Perhaps as the result of deliberately-lit decoys, the heath itself was set ablaze by incendiary attacks more than once. As the heath was composed of deep layers of peat covered by heather and gorse, I have memories of nights lit by long walls of flame and days subdued under dense clouds of smoke as the fires burned unrestricted. Each such fire continued for days or weeks because the peat would go on burning under the burnt-out surface, to break out again somewhere else. On one night, the fires came so close to the dense gorse thickets behind the cottage that my mother and I had to leave, wade the intervening stream, and take refuge with the searchlight crew that were our friendly neighbours.

After the fires had passed, the children from the family in a row of cottages half a mile away, our only other neighbours, and I would roam the warm and smoking earth collecting the tail fins of 2鈥� incendiary bombs amid the blackened, sooty stems of the burned gorse and the fibrous ash of the peat.
Meanwhile, the ranges were expanding and attracting more military activity. An increasing amount of ordnance was being expended in the area and was a natural magnet for youngsters with no other diversions. Collections were being built up and one day, when I was away with my mother shopping, the local kids apparently and unaccountably tried to break up a 3鈥� mortar shell. One died, another was crippled for life. I was surprised by this tragedy as I thought we all would have known better than attempt such a thing, but I have always been aware that I might well have been with them at the time but for the shopping trip.

That was perhaps a deciding event in a process that was becoming inevitable as military activities built up. Southern Command issued notices of requisition and the remaining few families on the heaths between Wareham, Corfe Castle and Studland were evicted to other requisitioned or empty premises in or nearer the village. We were found accommodation, first in the wooden construction living quarters of the hotel鈥檚 riding school and stables, then in half of a large, unoccupied, holiday home in the village itself. By this time, the military zone had been extended to include Studland beaches and the hotel, so we shared the latest house with my displaced aunt and her companion, while a succession of troops enjoyed the amenities of the hotel鈥檚 spacious rooms.

Diversions were devised for the lads of the village too young to serve in the Home Guard but desperate to feel included. I moved from Sea Cadet Corps to Red Cross cadets to a morse code class run by a villager too old to serve. We practised with an Aldis lamp sending and receiving between two parties but our enthusiasm never really recovered from the night we had set up in a lane behind the church and suffered an attack by PC House thrashing about with his truncheon at what seemed to be a party of German paratroops. Our mentor, Wilfred, was much abashed and gave up the project, but it gave me a new respect for the stolid village bobby.

My father and uncle, meanwhile, were seen only on their brief periods of leave. I think at this time my father was in a depot ship in the Mediterranean before moving to a corvette on North Atlantic escort duty, while my uncle was having a very good war based on shore in Beirut living quite a high life, courtesy of wealthy local merchants. I have photos of him in a Packard convertible he had been given there, looking like a yachtsman on shore in Monte Carlo!

The war progressed and the various regiments seen about the village gave way to something very new and exotic 鈥� Americans! Not just at the hotel but billeted in the village itself, and seemingly all around us. Proud of their uniforms, they brought a need for coat hangers that we collected from friends and relatives to exchange for Coca Cola, comics and Hershey bars.

By 1944 the war was definitely gearing up and showing increasing evidence of the tidal wave that was building. Studland Bay has over three miles of beach (on which an anti-invasion device for flooding the inshore waters with burning oil, blacking out the sun, had been installed and tested from time to time under the supervision of a Mr Hollis). These beaches were ideal for invasion exercises, too, and a fortified observation bunker 鈥擣ort Henry- had been constructed at one end, to be used by some very famous figures indeed, whom we saw in the village in those times. Montgomery, Churchill and even KG VI, (in army uniform, of course).

The flanking ridge of Ballard Down had some old and no doubt obsolete tanks parked on it to provide target practice for the cannon of Tempests and Typhoons, while an RAF Rescue launch sat at Swanage pier with its engines ticking over.
One day I idly watched a Typhoon enter its usual dive but was galvanised into excitement when, instead of the expected roll of cannon fire, a trail of smoke arrowed down from each wing! The tank-busting rockets had arrived!

This became a routine, but one day I thought the aircraft was diving more steeply than usual. It pulled out but then rolled over and plunged into the water. I jumped on my bicycle and dashed to a better vantage point but was enormously impressed to note that just a minute and a half later, that launch was circling the spot off Old Harry Rocks where the plane had gone in. All credit to them, weeks of routine had not blunted their reactions; they were poised to go on the instant, and they went.

Sadly, I do not think they recovered the pilot alive, but I saw a piece of the wing with the RAF roundel washed up on the beach later. That was not the only thing I saw washed up: on another occasion I saw a headless corpse hung on the anti-invasion scaffolding obstructing Swanage beach. A scary experience for a young lad that took a while to fade. Later that evening, there was a policeman standing on the beach nearby; confirming that I had indeed seen what I thought I had seen.

By this time, I had moved on from the village school to the grammar school at Swanage, but I had a bad reputation for truancy; indeed, my most treasured school report, which I still have, said, simply, 鈥淩arely seen鈥�. It is largely due to this truancy that I saw what I saw and have these memories of the war.
It was on such a stolen day that I gained my most impressive memory of all, observed by lying on the garage roof with a view all across Studland Bay as warships gathered offshore. They fired their guns, landing craft fired streams of rockets, B26鈥檚 dropped sticks of bombs from low altitude, rocket-firing Typhoons did their thing, and the waters of the bay and the sand dunes ashore erupted in great curtains of water and sand before LST鈥檚 and amphibious tanks ran ashore in this all-live ammunition rehearsal for the D-Day to come.

In the village, we had a prior and certain knowledge that the tide of the war was turning from reactive to proactive and that the powers we now had were great beyond all belief of just a year or two earlier. An enormous juggernaut was gathering itself for the launch and no matter that in those days many villagers had not seen anything of the world farther than Bournemouth or even Swanage, we knew we were on the cusp of history.
Those were the big-picture memories; there were of course many others:
-The village hall, blacked-out and smoke filled for a village hop to big band records (Glenn Miller?) while we lads gathered outside, too young for participation, some smoking, all vicariously sharing the fleeting sense of festivity and society.
-Knowing in a vague sort of way that we were on the verge of a grown-up and very different way of life that was still to come and far from understood.
-The universal acceptance of constraints and restrictions that would be unthinkable now to generations that have never known them.

My father and my uncle both returned safely to the village, there to remain until their respective retirements. I went back to Southampton to study and qualify in my chosen career, and the village slipped quietly from an insular little community to a sort of Tresoddit in the post war escalation of seaside property values, no hint remaining on the surface of the days not that long past. It was a tranquil pool, into which a stone had fallen but from which the ripples had quite died away.

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