大象传媒

I was born in November 1930 so when war was declared I was nearly 9 years old; when the war ended in 1945 I was well on the way to 15, so the conflict coincided with the change from child to young adult. This was something the Channel 4 programme 鈥�1940s House鈥� missed as far as the young boy in the programme was concerned.
We lived in Gateshead in Tyneside at the start of the War. Because of the heavy industries in the area everyone thought it would be a target. Local councils had already started evacuating schoolchildren from towns to the country, and my brother and I found ourselves in Marton in Cleveland, a country village, but close to Middlesbrough, with targets like the ICI Chemical works. We were placed with a well off couple who had a wonderful house, with a downstairs loo and a small putting green on the lawn, which seemed to be the height of luxury to two working class boys. In that house we listened to Chamberlain鈥檚 famous announcement, declaring war on Hitler but, within days, my mother decided that we needed to move further inland to escape the bombers, so our parents took us away and we moved to Leamington Spa, near Coventry, and then to Lillington, even nearer. Here we were to experience the effects of enemy action to a greater extent than we ever would have in our hometown.
For a young boy this was perhaps the most interesting period, with the stationing of foreign troops - Belgians, Czechs etc around the place - and aircraft recognition being a hobby of most kids, I was most expert at this and was disappointed to find that a regular army sergeant could not tell the difference between a Spitfire and a Hurricane when I spotted the plane in the sky. We had a few air raid warnings and sporadic anti-aircraft fire at first, and it seemed we had been wise to come inland. However one night there was a heavier raid and some high explosive bombs were dropped in the centre of Leamington, near the Town Hall, one by Queen Victoria鈥檚 statue (it left it undamaged, but moved it about an inch). The other was more serious and demolished Lipton鈥檚 grocer鈥檚 shop across the road. There was talk of fatalities, and raids became more frequent. I was surprised one day, while playing in the garden, to hear an unfamiliar drone of a large plane circling around. There had been no warning siren sound so no one was paying much attention. I recognized it from my charts and books as a Junkers B52, a distinctive 3-engined transport plane used for paratroops. I went indoors and shouted, 鈥榯here鈥檚 an enemy bomber flying around鈥� but no one believed me, as there had been no warning; then I heard a burst of machine-gun fire and the plane disappeared from the area. I heard a rumour later that the gunfire had been directed at people queuing for the cinema. I never knew precisely what happened to that plane; I heard it had been shot down eventually - I still don鈥檛 know how this slow old plane got so far inland and what the crew were thinking. It would have been easy meat for any fighter that spotted it. I also remember seeing a Messerschmitt 110 after it had been forced to crash land, with lots of bullet holes in it. This was my first close encounter with enemy equipment.
Our stay in the Midlands came to an end not long after the night in November of the Blitz on Coventry. I had cycled around Coventry during the day, little knowing it would never be the same again. In the evening we heard the sirens, and assumed it would be a 鈥渘ormal鈥� raid. Our shelter was a mattress against the inside wall and the sofa upturned with the base to the window to protect us from glass injuries caused by blast. The noise of explosions, gunfire and bombs mixed, seemed to go on forever. It did not seem to be near us, except for one huge blast that blew open the French window in the back room where my father was sitting.
Morning came, and we had survived, knowing that something fearsome had happened but not knowing what. My brother and I walked round the streets at the back where the blast had come from. When we saw the devastation we were amazed, our experience of a bomb was localized damage - we had never seen anything like this, whole streets with walls blown through, leaving open shells. The enormous blast had been a parachute mine, which had landed on some open ground at the back of the houses. The smallness of the crater showed how effective a weapon it was, with little of the explosive force being absorbed by the ground.

It was not long after that my mother and father separated and we, the kids, returned to the Northeast to see out the remainder of the war with our grandparents in comparative tranquillity; the expected heavy bombing never materialised there were only a few raids after which we youngsters would search the streets for pieces of shrapnel and occasionally the fin from an incendiary bomb. German bombers flew over in droves, but they were heading for Merseyside to hit the Atlantic ports.

One of my strongest memories was of visiting a German U-Boat moored at Newcastle Quayside. It had been captured on the surface, unable to dive. It was refitted as a RN boat in Scotland, and then sailed to London and up the Thames to Westminster to boost morale. It was moored briefly en route at various ports, which is how I got to visit it. There is a Path茅 newsreel at the time showing the journey up the Thames.

Peter Elliott

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