大象传媒

This story was submitted to the Peoples War Site by staff at Warrington Library on behalf of Elizabeth Smith and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

On and off I鈥檝e tried to make sense of the Second World War for my lifetime. As a child, too young to know any thing of the real horrors but aware of the rationing of sweets and the shoddiness of any thing with a utility mark on it.

The pace of life of course was slower. People who came to the farm at bagging or any other eating times would enjoy the hospitality on offer and inevitably the talk would get around to the war. As a child I grew to enjoy these times, sitting riveted as the grown ups exchanged experiences. As kids we assumed that nobody bothered about us in adult company as long as we were quiet and polite. They told stories that made every one laugh, they told us of extra ordinary coincidences, amazing happenings in far off places, strong friendships, just like the aural traditions of folk tales. It is no wonder that we grew up thinking that it had all been a marvellous and romantic adventure to be acted out in our endless games in the long hot summer holidays.

It is only after many years that I have begun to understand that these reminiscences were our grown ups way of coping with the stresses of a life that was not of their choosing. When people with common bonds, in our case to do with agriculture, got together they opened up their own Pandora鈥檚 box. I also came to realise that the grown ups protected us children from the horrors of it all. Some kind of unspoken pact.

Doris who helped out with the cooking and cleaning was a trainee confectioner and therefore ended up in Bourton -on-the- Water in a huge transit camp cooking for 鈥渢he lads鈥�. The wooden huts they lived in were very cold in the winter months, so cold that their shoes froze to the floor and she put on all the clothes she had to get into bed. Out of the many thousands of troops that passed through the canteen in her four years she only ever saw one man she knew from home. He embarrassed her by yelling 鈥淗urray for Preesall, hiya Doris. 鈥� A loud resounding cheer went up from the men in the building. Doris endured ribald comments for ages.

He completely caught her off guard but they had a very quick exchange of village news as he collected his food and she doled out spuds without halting. It was many years latter when she said that she had tears running down her cheeks until the last man was fed that day. The sight of someone she knew slightly had unleashed her dreadful homesickness. Her homesickness never went away but that was the only time it slipped out. She never saw him again nor any one else from home.

Fred drove for a local delivery company. He was an amasingly cheerful and funny bloke. He told us about how during the war he got fed up of walking and volunteered to do some driving work. After the fourth lorry trip he had his hand through the cab window when something cold touched it and a voice quietly said 鈥淗ello Tommy for you the war is over.鈥� He looked down the barrel of a machine gun and into the grinning face of the first German he had ever seen. The German was right he spent the rest of the war in prison camps.

We thought this was a huge joke and laughed along with Fred. It was another ten years before we learned that he had been retreating to Dunkirk and the driving job was to take wounded soldiers and civilians to a convent. He had given up his place in the boat queue to do one more run when the Germans took the convent. He had lost many good pals struggling with hunger and fear on his way back across France and Belgium. He had witnessed firsthand the plight of the civilians caught in the conflict. He did not tell us this. It is reputed that he still suffers from recurring nightmares. We could not understand why he always refused to take part in the Remembrance Sunday Parades. None of the people we knew who had been in the services did.

Even though working in agriculture exempted men from enlistment they still somehow did their bit as members of the home guard or fire fighters. An elderly cousin of my mothers one evening began to reminisce about the night shifts he had spent manning an observation and listening post. Sat in a concrete pillbox disguised as a haystack deep in the Forest of Bowland. They identified aircraft by silhouette if low flighing and the night were clear or by the engine noises otherwise.

They calculated numbers of aircraft and what make they were distinguishing enemy from friendly. They then radioed the information in. I should have asked him more about how he was trained to rebuild damaged radios and use the listening equipment. He went somewhere south he said on a residential. They worked in shifts through the night completing a four on four off routine and going to do the milking and feeding before getting heads down in the afternoons. He had three brothers who were serving soldiers. All had run the family farm sharing the work before the war.

One of my uncles was a volunteer fire fighter before the war. He was sent with the rest of his team to Manchester to work on the raging fires at Salford Docks and the surrounding bombed houses. They reported to the fire station where the blackened bodies of firemen lay on the floor. The stench of smoke and burnt things was over whelming. Tom, very shocked thought they were corpses they seemed so still. Three days latter he also so exhausted lay down on the same floor in his smoked blackened clothes and slept like the dead. He did not tell us about this until rooting around in the garage for tools we found his fire mans axe.

This prompted some stories of burning grain ships that they couldn鈥檛 extinguish and how the rats ran across his feet before a warehouse wall collapsed and how his mother couldn鈥檛 quit hide the look of shock she felt when he returned home with a hairless, blistered face and hands so black they took days to come clean. My father told me how Tom worked on the farm until his smoke damaged chest had cleared again and then he went back to the fires. He always had a wheezy chest.

My sister just remembers the prisoner of war. He carved her pecking hens and acrobats that swung between little poles when you squeezed them. He stayed with the family after the war finished and was well respected. I think my aunt who never married had a crush on him. She always went a bit whimsical about him if the war was mentioned. He was a butcher鈥檚 son from near Hanover and served in the German Army from being sixteen. I think he was twenty-eight when he went back home. My father was amazed at his physical strength and standards of personal hygiene. He completed the estuary swim between Knott 鈥� End and Fleetwood easily.

When the youngest brother, Alan was demobbed they thought it was best that Fritz went back to the camp over night and that he be kept out of the way as he worked on the farm. Alan had been in North Africa and had followed the D- Day landing troops across France into Germany. He had not been home for nearly five years. Fritz had been in North Africa and had also been badly wounded at the walls of Stalingrad. Mum said Alan was much changed, very quiet, sat by the fire in a rocking chair for hours on end and preferred to take his meals in his room. Sometimes he appeared to be weeping and he was often startled by banging doors. The family did not know how to deal with him.

One wet afternoon they found Alan and Fritz drinking tea and pouring over the atlas. Both had fought at El Alamain and had at times been just a handful of miles apart. Both Alan and Fritz thought that Rommel was some kind of hero. Alan鈥檚 emotional state improved from then onwards. He twitched less and started to talk. He didn鈥檛 leave the farm for six months. He worked along side the POW in the fields and went back to breaking in the huge Clydesdale horses that Grandfather bred. Fritz moved back into the farmhouse.

Alan very rarely mentioned his time as a desert rat and would leave the room if documentaries or war films came on TV. I once had one of those trivial conversations with him about how some things can turn your stomach but others aren鈥檛 bothered. (His was eggs and tomato sauce). He went on to say that whilst he was in Germany they came to a deserted farm. In the shippon a cow was having difficulty calving. He rolled up his sleeves and helped her. His colleagues, some of the toughest Glaswegians imaginable got upset and had to leave to vomit. He also saw no sense in attending Remembrance Services.

There are some letters the POW wrote to Grandfather on his arrival back home in Hanover which have a desperate and defeated tone to them.

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