大象传媒

I was eight years old at the beginning of the war and just before the war had begun, we had a film show in our local village hall (Fishtoft). It must have been the news on one of the films that I saw the British Prime Minister getting out of a plane and waving a piece of paper which I realised later he was promising peace in our time after meeting Adolf Hitler. On the same show there was a Will Hay film, now this made more sense to me as an 8 year old boy!

One Saturday afternoon we all had to go to the local school to try on our gas masks, to me a frightening experience, but as time went on I got used to wearing my gas mask.

It was about this time my father, being a farmer, had to agree to have lots of holes dug across his fields if they were above certain acreage. Well we had ever so many men come down in buses to dig these holes. As far as I remember they would be about 9 feet by 9 feet and about 3 or 4 feet deep. These men came chiefly on a Sunday and one of the bus drivers saw I had a litter of rabbits and he wanted to buy them. At first I refused but he persisted and on about the 3rd Sunday I sold them for 6pence each. My parents warned me I might not get paid, so before I would let them go, I cheekily asked him if he鈥檇 got the money and then he paid me.

We used to go round these holes at night after the men had gone and pick up any empty beer or lemonade bottles they had left behind. If you took them back to the public house you would get 2p or 3p a bottle depending on the size.

Now all these holes had been dug and you might think that was it until some government officials said while the holes would stop the enemy planes landing, if the enemy came by parachute the holes would be ready-made trenches. So the ministry decided to have them all filled in, but in every other hole put a pole. Now a lorry bought a load of poles (silver birch) for this purpose. The other holes were left for the farmers to fill in. I expect they would get paid for this. I did help to fill in some, so some of the holes must have been left for a year or two as I shouldn鈥檛 have been strong enough at the start of the war to help fill them in.

There was a lot of talk about the enemy landing by parachute and by a co-incidence my father sent one of his workmen with a scythe to open a field of corn out. This meant mowing a strip all the way round the field wide enough for 2 horses when they came to cut the field with a binder.

He hadn鈥檛 been gone long down the filed before he came back with his face as white as a sheet saying a German parachutist had landed in the wheat because he鈥檚 seen a parachute on top of the wheat. On inspection it turned out to be a parachute flare dropped by one of our planes and other things to lighten his load to help him get back to his RAF base. The flare had not ignited so it was reported and two men came down. I鈥檓 not sure who they were - something to do with the ARP I think, and they went down the field and dug the flare canister up and carried it into my father鈥檚 stackyard. Later on a policeman and another man came down to see what they could do.

On being told it had been dug up and brought to the yard, one of the men said they had no bloody business doing that. Later on a RAF truck with a load of RAF men in came and they set the flare off. It made a brilliant light for 10 minutes or so. Then they loaded up the silk parachute, much to the disgust of the ladies who were there as they would have liked the silk to make clothing.

All that was left was the metal canister casing. I still have a piece of this, being a boy I collected army buttons and anything to do with the war.

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