大象传媒

A bunch of scruffy eight year old kids perch on a five bar gate: from their vantage position they can see several hundred yards to the bend in the road where an army convoy is approaching. They fidget and chatter and laugh as children do and as the motorcycle heading the convoy approaches their excitement mounts. As the vehicles pass, the boys enjoy showing off their greater knowledge of the various military hardware but the girls are not impressed; they are too busy waving wildly to the soldiers who grin broadly and return their waves, probably thinking of the children they have left behind in their own towns and villages.

When the lone despatch rider bringin up the rear of the convoy comes into view, the children know that the episode which has created such excitement is over; they disconsolately clamber down from the gate and return to their play.

I was one of those children and this is one of the many vivid memories I have of my wartime child hood, when our sleepy village, like so may others, was turned upside down; when a searchlight sat uneasily among the swings, the seesaw and the cricket pavilion on our playing fields; when camouflaged tents and anti-aircraft guns occupied fields where sheep and cattle would otherwise have grazed.

There were times when we were frightened. We knew that men from our village had been killed or were missing because their names were read out in church on Sunday but I am sure that we were unaware of the gravity of the situation and of the awful events taking place in occupied Europe and elsewhere in the world.

We were very young and to a great extent had been sheltered from the real horror of war and to us it was, incongruously, all just a big adventure.

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