大象传媒

In September 1939 my mother was appointed headmistress of Beausale school. We moved into the schoolhouse a few days after the war had started.

In a village, particularly at that time, the village school was very much at the centre of village life. One of my first war recollections was of a host of bewildered evacuees arriving and of them being billeted out with various families in the village. We were all issued with gasmasks, we had to have a gasmask practice, all sat round in the playground and we children didn鈥檛 like the rubbery smell of them.

From Beausale we could hear the planes going over for the terrible raid on Coventry, you could tell whether they were ours or German by the note of the engines which on the German planes were unsynchronised and would make a throbbing noise. We could hear the bombing, and see the glow of the fires. We found a lot of shrapnel and the tails of incendiary bombs in the playground in the days following the raids.

My father was in the RASC, and there was great excitement when he turned up with another soldier in a Bren gun carrier- a sort of little tank. They had been posted up to country house not too far from Beausale, which, as so many were, had been taken over by the army. When they got there, the division had moved, so taking advantage of the confusion he decided to spend a night at home. That was the last I saw of him for several years. He was then in North Africa and the invasion of Sicily.

My mother was trained in first aid, the schoolhouse was designated a first aid post, advertised by a cast aluminium plate screwed to the front gate. Our car was one of the few still running in the village and was often used as an ambulance. From what I remember, most of the casualties were from accidents on farms and smallholdings. In one instance it even carried a corpse. Being only a mile and a half from Honiley aerodrome, a great attraction to us boys, we used to cycle up to look at the planes, some of which were quite close to the road, when at their dispersal points. We could recognise all the different types of aircraft, and watched with great interest the bombers towing the big Horsa gliders, practising for the invasion.

Villagers were asked if they could act as hosts to members of commonwealth aircrew, to give them a break from forces life. We had two young Canadian lads who came for tea on their off duty weekends, there is a photograph of me with them at the bottom of Mill Street, with the castle in the background. Tragically they did not return from a raid over Germany, I hope we gave them a little pleasure during their short lives. My mother corresponded with their parents for some time afterwards.

There was some excitement when a bomb disposal squad started probing with long rods in a field opposite the house. It turned out that they were looking for unexploded shells from a large anti-aircraft gun, reputedly at Tile Hill. Us lads were watching and
asked the soldiers what happened if they hit the shells with the rods, and they said that it would just blow them out of the hole and they would have to climb back in. It would have been all the same if the shells had hit the village houses, but then I expect that it would have been blamed on the Germans.

Amongst the bits of shrapnel and other souvenirs that us lads used to collect were strips of silver foil, called window, which the RAF practiced dropping in the area. It was used to confuse the radar on raids over Germany.

Schoolchildren were organised to collect rosehips, salvage and aluminium for the war effort. Wartime was in some ways an exciting time for us lads, but then we were shielded from the real horrors of war.

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