大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Graham Lewis for Three Counties Action on behalf of Mr Pip Page and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Page fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was a schoolboy during the war and lived near Maidstone, Kent and in the Cardiff area. We lived near Leeds Castle during the early part of the war. There was a lot of fighting between British and German aircraft in the skies above us. One day I was out with a friend and we saw a Messerschmitt fighter plane coming down. It crashed near us in an orchard and smashed into an apple tree. We rushed to the plane. I climbed up on to a wing and saw the pilot slumped forward over the controls. I don鈥檛 know whether he was still alive or not. We were afraid to stay there because we knew that the police would be arriving quickly and one was not allowed to go close to shot-down planes. The police and the military wanted to get there first to deal with any casualties and to obtain any useful information or equipment. There was also the danger of the aircraft exploding, but I do not remember us knowing anything about this.

I saw many dogfights between British and German fighter aircraft. When a pilot was coming down in a parachute our fighters flew around it to protect the pilot from being attacked.

Later I was evacuated to Caerphilly near Cardiff in South Wales. I went to the technical college there. We moved to the town of Ystrad Mynach where we were billeted with the chief engineer of a colliery. He took us one day to see the 鈥淏evin Boys鈥� at the colliery. Men could work in the mines instead of going into the armed forces; they were called 鈥淏evin Boys鈥� after the minister of labour, Ernest Bevin. By and large, I enjoyed being evacuated. At school we had to study Welsh. There was an examination in Welsh soon after we arrived and I was obliged to take it. All I could do was to write my name on the exam paper and I was given 1 per cent for that.

One day on the mountainside at Ystrad Mynach we built a dam in a small stream. Some time later a policeman came to the house to say that all the nearby allotments had been flooded and if we knew anything about the dam which had caused this we had better go up the mountain quickly and remove it.

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