大象传媒

This story was e-mail to Southern Counties Radio by Adrian:

"I was 5 years old at the outbreak of the war and we were living in Wolverhampton, and I can clearly remember listening to the wireless with my mother when Mr. Chamberlain announced that we were at war with Germany, and my mother was crying. Shortly afterwards I was helping mother to fit heavy dark blankets to the windows.

Very soon after the declaration of war my father decided that Wolverhampton was going to be dangerous and he got a job as assistant aircraft inspector with Vickers at Weybridge, Surrey, so we moved into a large house at West Weybridge.

To me it seemed like the following week that the R.A.F requisitioned our house to accomodate the R.A.F. staff of a balloon site. We had two balloon sites, site 19 at the New Haw end and site 20 at the West Weybridge end, so we all lived together with lots of airmen. My father never seemed to be home as he was always at the airfield and when he did come home it was in a big Humber shooting brake with a big gas balloon on the roof of the car which held the fuel. He was always working as he was in charge of a crew repairing Spitfires, Hurricanes and Wellington Bombers to get them airworthy in the shortest possible time using bits of other damaged aircraft which would never fly again.

One Saturday dad took me to the aerodrome and to keep me amused while he was working on another aircraft he put me in a Wellington Bomber and I played at being pilot and aircrew. I can remember the smells and the feeling of the size of the plane to this day.

The harsh reality of war and its horrors came to me one day just at the start of the blitz. My mother had taken my brother and myself to Addlestone for our haircut. We were returning home at about 5 p.m., just as Vickers workers were changing shifts. We were walking down the straight road and about opposite site 19. I was fascinated by the mass of workers emerging from the railway bridge, some walking, most on bicycles. Suddenly there was a loud noise and a shout from the sentry at Site 19. He ran across to us and threw us in the ditch on the other side of the road. As this was happening a German Messershmit fighter plane flew very low down the road towards the workers and started firing his guns. The workers were diving left and right and those in the middle seemed to jump ten feet in the air. There were bodies and bicycles scattered all over the place. By that time I realised the the sentry had thown us into a bed of stinging nerttles and that was concerning me most of all. But this episode did not stop the boyhood dreams of the glory of battle.

Our home life was very soon adjusted to living with lots of airmen. Mother was a true treasure to the men, mending and adjusting the fitting of their uniforms and giving them cooking tips, and of course a good listener and comforter to the myriad of emotional problems the chaps had. She was also a wonderful organiser and hostess to the maddest parties. We had as many footprints and spills on the ceiling as we had on the floor in our sitting room, and Victor Sylvester was played to bits on the gramaphone.

I seemed to be adopted by the chaps of site 19. I was their runner with messages and instructions from the telephone to the chap on the winch and dozens of other chores. I became so involved that my mother made me an R.A.F. uniform complete with a forage cap and badge, R.A.F. buttons and belt and I had to polish the brass on the uniform like the other men. When it was pay day I had to parade with the crew and when my name was called I had to smartly march up to the table, salute and receive my pay packet of a three penny piece.

We had a large brick and concret air raid shelter which we shared with our neighbours. Many exciting things happen in air raids during the blitz. When air raids were on it was very dangerous to venture outside as the shrapnel from our ack ack guns and bullets rained down on us. It was fascinating to watch the search lights moving across the sky and see the explosions of our shells. We were on one of the German flight paths and many of the bombers dropped their bombs early rather than face the barrage, so the scream of bombs became a normal thing.

0ne daylight raid a German bomber stayed back and watched the flight path our returning fighters took through the balloon barrage. I saw this bomber following the fighters in and no matter how loud I shouted I could not stop the bomber coming in and dropping his bombs on the big assembly hanger of Vickers. Many hundreds of workers lost their lives that day.

When I was 7 or 8 years old it used to be my Saturday job to walk down into New Haw and do the shopping for mother. I would go down to the village armed with the shopping list, various ration books and a wicker basket and money, get to the village and queue at Cockerells, the butcher, for the meat and many times the butcher gave me meat he had available and not what mother wanted. Then to the grocers to try and get what mother wanted making sure I did not use too many coupons, and the same with the greengrocer and eventually wander home like any other seven year old, my attention being easily diverted. There are two occasions that stick in my memory from these shopping trips. Once was crossing the New Haw canal bridge when I spotted a strange lump in the canal. I called the lock keeper and we fished out a dead body, my first dead person and I was rapidly shoved away. The second was that mother and father loved their toast and marmalade for breakfast. Mother had carefully saved enough coupons to get this precious pot of marmalade. I returned home and proudly showed her my purchase and promptly dropped it on the tiled scullery floor, smashing it to pieces. Mother was furious and I got a spanking. I remember it to this day.

For us the war was fairly quiet with hardly any air raids so my brother and I and our friend Buster Bartlett used to wander all over the countryside, birds nesting, making camps, fishing in the canal and investigating everything. We were always late home. One day our wanderings had taken us to the railway footbridge at Weybridge. After carefully placing a halfpenny piece on the sidings line we lived in hope that when we returned a goods train would have gone over the coin and made it into a penny. On the footpath by the bridge we noticed that ther was a gap in the fence with a barbed wire entanglement behind the fence into some woods. After a bit of roaming we came across a gun emplacement above the home banking of Brooklands race track. Of course we had to investigate. Inside, apart from ammunition ther were big tins of fruit, corned beef and treacle. This was too much for us and we took a tin of each for the camp we had at the bottom of the garden. Next problem was how to open the tins. The treacle was easy as we had only to prise to lid off. This done we sampled the contents then went off to do other things. My very little sister came into our camp(which she was not allowed to do) and took our tin of treacle to our neighbour's little boy whom she was playing with at the time and promptly poured the treacle all over him. Big trouble. Our visits to the gun site was stopped.

One Christmas day the usual R.A.F. party was held in our house and site 20 were also invited. This party was bigger than normal as the Wing Commander was to visit. He had already visited 18 sites and was pretty well oiled and had the party spirit. He made a jovial entrance to our house, took off his grand cap of blue and gold (scrambled egg) and threw it on the floor saying to my brother "here, jump on this". My brother did, result - one crushed cap and a lot of red faces.

During the war a lot of Polish airmen escaped the horrors of the Nazis and joined our forces and were hellbent on revenge and sometimes completely unruly. Somehow mother and father adopted a man called Johnnie Cashuski, a very well bred Polish Aristocrat who had stolen a German aircraft and flown to Britian. He arrived at our house with nothing but the clothes he stood up in and his violin. He was a very quiet and polite man and very kind to us kids, but somehow we were a little frightened of him. When the house was quiet and most people were in bed he used to walk up and down the sitting room playing the most beautiful music, some sad, some patriotic. He stayed with us until after the war and emigrated to Canada never to be heard of again.

Towards the end of the war, along came doodle bugs in vast numbers, flying with a harsh rumbling sound, then the engine would stop and the bomb would crash to the ground with a dreadful explosion. For a while our defences could do nothing about them. Soon the ack ack got the master of them and the Hurricanes and Spitfires would either shoot them down or fly alongside them wing tip to wing tip and lift the doodle bug off course and away from London. At the bottom of our garden there was a large oak tree and I used to climb this tree to the top where I had a comfortable perch and used to watch the aircraft coming and going from Vickers and watch the battles with the doodle bugs. One day mother was in the garden and I was up in the tree when a doodle bug was flying straight at me and the engine stopped. Mother screamed at me to get down. Terrified I launched myself into space and damaged my ankle. The doodle bug missed and exploded somewhere about 2 miles away.

V.E. day came at last. We had an enormous bonfire and a great big party for the whole street. There were lights everywhere which was very strange to me as for most of my life when it got dark it was dark and to see streetlights and house lights, the shouting and cheering was exciting and wonderful.

The war was over and everybody had to get back to normality or what was dreamed of as normality. The balloon sites disappeared, the servicemen returned home. In many cases they had changed and were strangers to their families. Rationing became harder, the attitude to work was lack lustre and the government and politicians were out of their depth. The next two years at home were harder than the war.

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