大象传媒

When the war broke out in 1939, my activities changed dramatically. Among other things we decided to keep some fowls and I constructed a couple of small pens and built two huts at the far end of the garden. I also acquired an allotment by sharing and renting a vacant plot of land on the opposite side of our road together with one of our neighbours. Fire watching became a regular night time activity, which involved staying overnight in school with another teacher and sleeping in the head's room with stirrup pumps and buckets of water at the ready. We used the head's room because the telephone was there. The staff took turns at this and we discovered that head kept a bottle of whiskey in his filing cabinet. In addition to this I became the fire party leader for Allenby Crescent and the top of Bridge Road, which meant that I had to draw up the nightly rota and keep the stirrup pump available and in working order.
As the war continued conscription was introduced and, being in the age range, I was called to Southend for a medical examination, a very perfunctory affair, and was passed as A1. Fortunately for me, teachers with science degrees were reckoned as serving in a reserved occupation and so I was not called up to serve in the forces. However, some months later I received a notice telling me to join the local Home Guard. Enclosed with the order was a form to be filled in stating any reasons why I should not, or asking for any objections I might have to joining. I completed it to the best of my ability, quoting the double lot of fire watching and my evening work in the youth club, which had been started in Park School for past scholars. As a result I was ordered to appear before the local tribunal, which considered my objections. Its members were not impressed and I was told to report for training with the platoon based at the Cooperative Milk Depot in Bridge Road, premises which had once been Seabrook's Brewery. The majority of the members of that platoon were Co-op employees. I'm afraid that I hadn't got the moral fibre to declare a conscientious objection to killing other human beings, as my father did in World War 1 and as Norman Passant, my friend at the grammar school, did. Actually, as it happened, I never had to face up to killing anyone.
A number of newcomers were drafted into the Home Guard in Grays at the same time as myself and we were issued with regulation tin helmets, gas marks of a superior type to the civilian ones, which we already possessed, and rifles. Ammunition for the rifles was issued later. There was a bit of initial 'square bashing' on one of the school playgrounds at Arthur Street and then instruction in the headquarters on the dismantling, cleaning and care of the rifle. Later we were taken to a firing range, which had been set up in a local chalk quarry, to learn how to fire the rifle and hit a target. Still later, on one occasion, we were taken to Purfleet Rifle Range, which was used normally by the army, to test our skill at hitting targets much further away. On one occasion we, that is the Co-op platoon, joined with others in a mock round up of enemy parachute troops, who were supposed to have landed in South Weald Park. We also did a lot of crawling about on the marshes and amongst the shrub growing on the rubbish tips and dust chutes by the river. I don't remember what I learned from it all! The platoon possessed a Bren gun and for some reason or other I was put in charge of the instruction re the dismantling, cleaning and reassembling of the same. In consequence I was elevated to the rank of lance corporal!! Today I would probably have difficulty in telling you which end was which.
One night a week was about the maximum one was on duty apart from those Sundays when exercises were organised. For that night duty we were given a small financial allowance, I forget how much. In any case I rarely brought any of it home as, whilst waiting for things to happen, which fortunately never did, we often played a card game called 'Brag' and I never did very well at the said game.
For some unknown reason, it may have been fear of sabotage, at one time we did sentry duty at one of the entrances to Tilbury Dock. Tents had been erected there and those not doing their turn on guard tried to get a bit of sleep in them. One night when we were on duty we heard and saw what we thought was an enemy plane flying up river towards London. The anti aircraft guns in the near neighbourhood were all firing at it without effect but it was rumoured the next day that it had finally been brought down in London. Enemy intelligence got the news, which was unfortunate since apparently no enemy plane was over the area that night. What we had seen was the first of the 'doodle bugs' or pilotless rockets, and now the Germans knew that they had got the range!
Early in the war corrugated Anderson shelters were issued to people for them to retreat into during an air raid. The idea was to half bury them in the garden, piling the excavated earth on top. The intention was to protect against bomb blast, not against direct hits, They were only issued to families with less than a certain income. Others had to construct, or have constructed, other types of shelter, usually a large hole in the ground lined with concrete. As we didn't qualify for an Anderson I had to set about preparing one for us. With help from Bill Jones I dug a large hole at the bottom end of the garden away from the house and lined it with wooden fence panelling, which I got from George Mayne, a teacher at Palmer's School. The top was covered by a number of railway sleepers which Roy Horrobin, my next door neighbour, had to spare and on top of these we piled all the excavated earth. Into this shelter we retreated when the air raid siren sounded. Down in it we had a sort of cot bed for Michael and a couple of rough bunks for Ev and myself. Rough, our dog, who had been given to us as a puppy for a wedding present by Mr. Jones, the Australian engineer lodging at Mrs. Newnham's, got so used to going down into the shelter that when he heard the siren sound he would come running home.
Later in the war Morrison Shelters became available to anyone and one was issued to us. It was built like a table with a thick sheet steel top and stout steel legs about two feet high bolted to and resting on steel bars. These shelters were intended to be sited in the houses and we constructed ours in the front room and placed a mattress in it to lie on. This type of shelter had around it a kind of thick wire caging and was really only to protect against falling and flying debris. When I was on Home Guard duty one night, there was a raid by enemy aircraft so Ev retreated into the shelter with Michael. The enemy turned out to be dropping incendiary bombs and, a short time after getting settled in the shelter, she heard a crash and got out to investigate. She found the hallway covered in plaster dust. An incendiary bomb had come through the roof, through the upstairs ceiling, through the floor of the landing and on through the plaster of the hall ceiling, finally coming to rest on the mat by the front door. She picked it up and, quickly opening the front door, threw it out on to the front lawn , where it lay when I got home a little later. Someone had passed on the news to our squad in the milk depot and I was told to get off home as quickly as possible. The fins of the bomb were very badly damaged by its passage into the house and when I gingerly opened it up the next day, having removed them, I found that in spite of all the bumps it had received the detonator had failed to go off, having been displaced in some way. I imagine that this was not an uncommon occurrence since one dropped in the same raid was found intact in the roof space of Park School nearby. I emptied out the detonator, spring, firing pin and magnesium powder and was then left with the hollow magnesium body of the bomb with its heavy solid iron base. I screwed the cap back on and fitted the body with a replacement set of iron fins, salvaged from another bomb which had fallen and burnt itself out on my allotment across the road. We kept this now harmless souvenir until some time ago when we gave it to June, our daughter-in-law, to make use of in a project that she was taking with her class at school.
{What my father fails to mention is that he had left many rounds of ammunition for his rifle on the table top cover of the Morrison shelter, in which my mother and I were sheltering! The bomb landed just two feet from these, on the other side of a single brick interior wall.}
The only other damage that our house received during the war was slight, from bomb blast and falling shrapnel from our own anti-aircraft guns. One late afternoon we were sitting having tea in the back room, with the curtains drawn as it was dusk, when there was a very loud bang in the distance and at the same time one of the large panes of glass in the French window door behind the curtain shattered and fell inwards. The bang was the sound of the explosion of a land mine, which had fallen in the old chalk pit near the town centre and the blast from the explosion, although we were far away, broke our window. On another occasion we had left one of the upper leaded light windows in the front room open during a raid and falling shrapnel from our own antiaircraft guns cracked a couple of pieces of the coloured glass. They have not yet been replaced! It was because of falling shrapnel that we were advised to get under cover or else wear a tin helmet if caught out during a raid.
This area of Essex, near the river, was designated a restricted area at one time and to get in and out one had to prove that one lived in it by showing one's identity card. Everyone in the country had been issued with one of them. So, for one period, our families could not visit us but we could visit them and we did so during holiday periods, hoping that the house would be standing when we returned. On one of our visits to Llwnypia in the Rhondda I remember standing at the window of the bedroom one night and watching the distant antiaircraft fire at enemy bombers making a raid on Swansea. On another occasion, when Ev had taken Michael to stay in Leicestershire during one period when there was intensive bombing of London, an enemy bomber jettisoned a bomb which fell in a field near there. It seemed that there was danger wherever you were, so in the end we all stayed put in Grays.
We began to get used to hearing the distinctive drone of enemy aircraft flying overhead at night and only later did we hold our breath when the engine of a passing 'doodle bug' cut out and we knew that it was on its way down. The sound of the air raid siren was commonplace and we also became acclimatised to dark streets with no lights showing anywhere because of the blackout on all house windows. In Grays we began to feel that the enemy aircraft had no designs on us but were off to London, as they were most of the time. The worst danger was from Bombs which might be jettisoned by planes turned back. Nevertheless Tilbury Dock and the oil storage tanks at Purfleet and Shell Haven were, on one occasion at least, their prime targets and those places were uncomfortably near to us. Before the war was over a number of bombs did drop in Grays and a number of houses were destroyed, but there was no great devastation. On one occasion in 1941 a row of cottages at the river end of Bridge Road was destroyed and the Congregational Church opposite was so badly damaged that it was unsafe to use it. At another time a small bomb demolished a house at the northern end of Bradleigh Avenue and on the occasion when our house was hit by the incendiary bomb the Baptist Church in Orsett Road was badly damaged by one of the same batch, which caused a fire. Apart from a lot of damage to windows broken by the explosion of the land mine, that was the sum total in Grays itself.

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