大象传媒

From late 1940 I lived with my mother in a small village called Eversley, on the Hampshire/Berkshire border, to which we moved from the family home in West Wickham, near Croydon. My father, who had flown De Havilland 9As at the end of the First War, was in the RAFVR and was called up at the start of the War; being too old then to fly, he served as a codes and ciphers officer and in late 1939 was posted to Cairo six months before my fifth birthday.

This story will be in two strands; one is my own recollection of growing up as an air-minded child surrounded by the excitement of military hardware passing my front door or overhead every day, and the other follows my father through the War, much of which he spent in Stalag Luft 3 in what is now Poland, but was then part of the Third Reich.

Spindle Cottage, which my mother had leased from a naval officer whose wife had moved to Portsmouth where he was based, dated from the early eighteenth century and had an outside earth closet. Hot water was provided by boiling a large kettle on the wood or coal fired kitchen range and bathing was done in a large galvanised bath in the scullery. The cottage had the advantage for me of being on a road that saw a lot of military traffic, so from about the age of six I became an expert at tank recognition. As the war progressed the Matildas, Valentines and Crusaders passing the door of Spindle Cottage gave way to Churchills and US-built Grants, Lees and Shermans with prominent white stars on their sides. When I re-visited Eversley in about 1995 the kerb outside our cottage still showed the regular chips to its edge caused by the steel tracks of a Churchill that took it a bit close on the way down to the invasion ports. There were Daimler scout cars, Beaverettes, Bren carriers and 25-pounder guns towed by Quad tractors, which had a distinctive gearbox whine as they passed us in regular convoys; later on, tanks with mysterious concertina-like skirts and tall vertical exhaust pipes, amphibious jeeps and DUKWs in the convoys made it pretty clear that we were seeing the build-up to the invasion.

Our house was a hundred yards from a bridge over the Blackwater river, and the bridge was believed by the locals to be mined; cylindrical concrete tank stoppers, maybe a couple of feet in diameter and three feet high, were beside the bridge, ready to be lifted into place to block the crossing in case of invasion. Later in the war, every Tuesday there were Army exercises around the bridge that involved a lot of Thunderflashes and smoke grenades, with troops crawling round in the undergrowth with camouflage draped over their helmets. Finding a dud Thunderflash was always an exciting moment for the local boys, as the magnesium powder could be removed and lit, with a spectacular but non-explosive flash resulting. We could also get a good result after removing the diamond-shaped flakes of cordite from discarded blank rifle rounds and lighting the pile. Black bakelite caps from the practice grenades, along with white tapes that were also part of the igniting system, were also sought-after collectibles. One day the man who ran Bonney鈥檚 the grocers, opposite our house, and who was also in the Home Guard, discovered me in the garden shed having just put a recently-found 20mm cannon shell, complete with cartridge, in the vice; I forget what my plan had been, but it was thwarted. 鈥榃indow鈥�, - strips of aluminium foil dropped from aircraft to confuse radar, - was also collected; there were two types, one plain metal and another that for some reason was anodised matt black on one side. Maybe one was Allied and the other German. Occasionally we found a complete roll that had not been chopped into quarter-wavelength reflectors, and this made splendid decorative chains for Christmas.

Opposite our cottage was the village post office, manned by Miss Andrews; In the evenings we could hear the regular thump-thump as she hand-franked the day鈥檚 mail on the counter. One day in 1941 she came to our door with a telegram; it told my mother that my father was missing in action and that we would be informed by the Air Ministry as soon as there was further news. Eventually there was and he spent the next four years of the War in German prison camps. His wartime activities are covered in the second part of this.

It was probably in 1943 that we had a short holiday with relatives in Newcastle-under-Lyme and I remember large numbers of Canadian troops based nearby. For local small boys their special appeal was that they smoked Sweet Caporal cigarettes and on the back of the packets were a series of aircraft recognition silhouettes; these were highly collectable and the cry 鈥淕ot any Sweet Caps鈥� followed any soldier with a 鈥楥anada鈥� shoulder flash. We were after the packets rather than their contents and much enthusiastic swapping took place in order to get a complete set of silhouettes. With a father in the Air Force it was probably inevitable that aviation was my main interest, and like several friends I could not only recognise a vast range of aircraft visually, but also a lot of them by sound. One of my possessions was a cardboard device that one held at arm鈥檚 length, consisting of two arms pivotted together at the bottom. A list of aircraft types was printed up one side and when you had identified a type and moved the cardboard arms so they appeared to touch its wingtips you could read off its altitude on a scale.

I used to go off for walks by the Blackwater and was once found by my mother sharing a baked bean lunch from a Canadian soldier鈥檚 mess-tin. On another occasion I met some Italian prisoners of war (distinguished by having large white circular patches sewn on the back of their overalls as aiming marks in case of escape); they were clearing mud from the river. By then my father was also a POW and I explained to them that he had been captured in Crete, which they understood. My mother was rather affected when I told her about this particular meeting, I think.

To supplement my father鈥檚 RAF pay and to pay my school fees my mother, who had been a teacher before I was born, did some coaching at home, but cooking and looking after a small boy in the absence of a father must have been pretty demanding. I don鈥檛 remember ever being hungry but I do recall my mother making 鈥檓arzipan鈥� for Christmas cakes from glucose powder, almond essence and soya flour; it tasted pretty good to me, and for some time after the War I thought this was what it was supposed to taste like.

My daily walk to school, about a mile and a half, took me past a military convalescent home, where wounded soldiers, dressed in bright blue pyjama jackets and red ties were wheeled in invalid chairs or hobbled on crutches.

By the age of about six or seven I had a bike, with wood blocks screwed each side of the pedals so I could reach them; my mother and I would go for long bike rides and one of the best used to be to Hazeley Heath. This was an area of sand pits and heathland that was used for tank recovery practice. Several old tanks lay there and while my mother gathered blackberries I would explore the interiors of these; in one, a Matilda, I found the turret traversing crank and managed to get the turret to rotate. One day a German PzKw III was lying there, probably captured during the campaign in the Western Desert. Another ride took us to a Bofors anti-aircraft gun site at Sandhurst, where I was allowed to sit on one of the gun鈥檚 seats and operate the elevation and shown how the gun was fired. In the saddle bags of our bikes we would carry a Kilner jar of full cream milk; the rough roads, coupled with a bit of shaking while we stopped for a picnic, produced a small amount of butter which supplemented our ration.

The other regular cycling destination was Hartfordbridge Flats, where in 1942 a new airfield was being built, re-named Blackbushe near the end of the War. The first day we went there my mother picked blackberries while I wandered about on the airfield (nobody seemed to mind reasonably-behaved small boys then); it was the sight and the smell of rows of camouflaged Hotspur training gliders and Whitley bombers, used as tugs, that got me hooked on aircraft for life. The smell of warm aircraft, with their doped ply and fabric, and the aromatic fumes of 鈥榩roper鈥� high octane aviation fuel (probably 130 octane then) cast a spell that brought me and my long-suffering mother back to that airfield as often as I could persuade her to pedal there, and kept me involved with aviation in various forms ever since.

Although there were Dutch and Free French squadrons based there later in the War, I can only recall meeting British personnel on the airfield. Seeing that I was fascinated by the aircraft there, they often helped me into cockpits and I have a vivid memory of the long belts of .50 calibre machine gun ammunition running in tracks along the inside of the fuselage of a Mitchell in which I sat; the cockpit of a Mosquito into which I climbed seemed pretty cramped, even to a nine year old. Bostons were regulars too, and later on Warwicks, equipped with air-sea rescue lifeboats slung under the fuselage. Other special excitement came when I was lifted up to look into the waist gunner鈥檚 window of a B-17 Flying Fortress and when I noticed a Liberator fitted with an anti-submarine Leigh light under one wing. Stirlings and Lancasters visited and there were various USAAF Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Cessna Cranes and Bobcats. On being allowed into a troop-carrying C-47 Dakota I remember being amazed at the sight of piles of comics on the seats along the fuselage sides, and realising that this was the preferred reading matter of grown-up soldiers, or at least American ones. For me I was usually buried in borrowed copies of Aeromodeller or Aircraft of the Fighting Powers and occasionally I managed to acquire the odd copy of the official publication Aircraft Recognition, which was supplied to the forces; when I won a prize for English at school in about 1942 I can remember my disappointment at getting a copy of Peter Pan; what I really wanted was R.A. Saville-Sneath鈥檚 Penguin book, Aircraft Recognition, Part 1!

The A30 ran through Blackbushe and when aircraft needed to taxi from the dispersal areas on the opposite side of the road from the airfield, traffic was stopped; waiting at the front of the queue, we could feel the prop wash of the bombers as they passed a few feet away. On one visit there were troops guarding an area of woods on the Hartley Wintney side of the airfield and I was shooed away from a large crater with wisps of smoke where a Boston had crashed just short of the runway. With Farnborough a few miles away there were a lot of strange aircraft flying around, but the first jet-propelled one I saw, a Meteor, was another milestone.

In 1944 we had a summer holiday at Cringleford near Norwich and during the train journey there the corridor was packed with US 8th Air Force men; I remember looking up at the 鈥榳inged eight-ball鈥� shoulder patches and even then trying to imagine what these people had been doing a few hours before. While on top of the steps of a playground slide (no 鈥榗hild safe鈥� soft rubber matting to insulate slide users from the reality of gravity in those days!) a Liberator flew over very low, trailing smoke and with flaps and undercarriage down, probably hoping to make it safely into Horsham St. Faith.

The same year, walking home from school, I saw huge formations of Horsa and Hadrian gliders, towed by Dakotas and Albemarles and Stirlings; they stretched almost from one horizon to the other. Whether they were going to Arnhem, the Rhine crossing or indeed D-Day I don鈥檛 now remember.

The radio played a major part in our lives. As well as the 大象传媒, I listened to William Joyce (鈥楲ord Haw-Haw) broadcasting propaganda from Germany and remember the distinctive gloating drawl in which he pronounced 鈥済ross registered tons鈥� when reporting the day鈥檚 tonnage of Allied ships sunk by U-boats. Though my mother and I enjoyed classical music, I did occasionally listen to Glenn Miller, probably on AFN, and the Home Service played songs like Johnny鈥檚 Got a Zero and Coming Home on a Wing and a Prayer. I was never an ITMA fan, but Much Binding featured in our listening, and there were separate comedy programmes for the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as the Johhny Cannuck Review when Canadian troops arrived. Tuning the radio dial to all sorts of foreign language stations brought in the dum-dum-dum-DUM call sign of the 大象传媒鈥檚 broadcasts to occupied Europe and with my schoolboy French I tried to puzzle out why mysterious messages that apparently had nothing to do with the War were sometimes being transmitted and repeated. Towards the end of the War news on the Home Service had more and more details of Soviet advances and the names of generals like Koniev, Zhukov, Rokosovsky and Timoshenko became familiar; stirring Soviet tunes like The Song of the Plains, sung by the Red Army Choir, used to follow these broadcasts.

We were allowed to send parcels to my father in prison camp, but the packing had to be done by the International Red Cross and we took a bus to Farnham Castle, the local centre for this; my contribution to one was a laboriously knitted orange and green housewife (pronounced 鈥榟uzzif鈥�) in which to keep darning needles and wool. I still have them all his PoW letters to my mother and me and occasionally he asked for chocolate and artist鈥檚 materials, though at the time we had no idea of the uses to which the latter were put. That came out after the War.

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