大象传媒

The grey flotilla sailed on a grey sea. Battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers, destroyers and frigates spread out before us. Ready to face the menace of U boats they set out on an unknown voyage. As we watched we could hear the crash of waves against their bows, taste the salt upon our lips and feel the cold wind in our faces.

They were our pride and joy. Each vessel constructed lovingly to a scale of forty feet to the inch, carefully sanded and meticulously painted in battleship grey. It was Tony, a couple of years older than me, who had been the instigator in the construction of our naval convoy. It was he who bought the detailed plans from which we worked, found the "hard to come by" balsa wood for their construction and encouraged me to complete the vessels in their every small detail.

As they sailed line astern across the grey army blanket spread on the dining room table, we heard in those far off 1940's the familiar undulating wail of the air raid siren signalling yet again the approach of enemy aircraft in the night sky. So accustomed were we to the almost nightly interruption that we scarcely looked up from our labours on the newest additions to our fleet. As I watched my companion across the table applying himself intently to the task at hand, the dull, intermittant thuds of anti aircraft fire began but the distant sound at first went unnoticed by us.

After a while we became aware of the droning of aircraft engines. One became adept at identifying friend or foe. Our cat had been named "Dorny" after the German Dornier bomber whose engines had a distinctive wurr-wurr sound similar to the purring of a cat. We believed that, on this occasion, these were enemy bombers, partly because of the increasing crescendo of anti aircraft fire. Then we heard the all too familiar whistle of a falling bomb, the momentary silence and then the explosion causing the house to shudder. We judged it to be some way off and continued with our modelling.

At this point my mother appeared in the doorway, visibly distressed and, much to our chagrin, ordered us into the air raid shelter. Just as we were protesting, Tony's father arrived and offered to escort us all to his home. We gathered our modelling materials, donned our coats and made our way into the darkened street.

It had been some years since we had last seen a fireworks display but we were not deprived in that respect. Pencils of white light swung across the night sky until one of them located an enemy aircraft. Other searchlights moved to join it and soon the many beams intersected to illuminate the bomber lumbering across the night sky with its deadly load. Almosr immediately the anti aircraft fire became so rapid as to create a continuous cacophony of sound. The shell bursts, which looked for all the world like firework rockets, exploded high above our un protected heads putting us in danger of falling shrapnel.

For we two boys it was an exciting experience. We were aware that our parents were afraid but we could not understand why. Our short lives had been so dominated by the war that we could hardly remember how it was in peacetime. All too soon for us children we reached the safety of Tony's house, cocoa and sympathy.

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