大象传媒

This contribution from David Durow was made to the People's War team in Wales and is added to the site with his permission.

My first wartime experience was during the blitz and Battle of Britain when I was eight. We were sitting in the back garden in Portsmouth鈥t was only a tiny garden and the Anderson shelter took up most of the space. We were sitting in the garden and we heard aircraft and looked up and saw a gigantic V formation of aircraft coming more or less straight for us, and my mother said 鈥淥h 鈥� are those Germans?鈥� My dad said dismissively, 鈥淣o, the siren hasn鈥檛 gone, they鈥檙e ours.鈥� And then a gun suddenly fired and we saw a burst of anti-aircraft fire in the middle of these aircraft and my dad promptly picked me up and threw me in the Anderson shelter, then he pushed my mother in on top of me and then he jumped in on top of us. Then of course the bombs started coming down and all Hell was playing loose. You could feel the shelter shuddering and the ground shuddered鈥t was over fairly quickly and when we came out we saw our house had been damaged. There were tiles off the roof, the windows had been blown in, the back door was off its hinges and there was dust and rubble everywhere. We couldn鈥檛 live there any more but we were very lucky. Because we were one of the first houses to be damaged we very quickly found another house to rent. Then the daylight raids continued and the worst part was the night raids. That started in the evening and we got into the routine of when the air raid siren sounded we went into the shelter and my mother used to prepare some porridge. And my dad had made a hotbox which was filled with straw, and we used to put the porridge in the pot and it used to cook itself overnight . It was lovely and hot for the next morning, because after a raid you could never be certain whether the gas the water or the electricity would be working. So at least you had a meal in those circumstances.

These raids continued night after night we were being pounded. One night it got so bad..that my father, I mean when you鈥檙e eight your dad鈥檚 a hero...you know he鈥檚 not afraid of anyone or anything. He was frightened, he was worried and he said to my mother: 鈥淲e鈥檝e got to get out鈥�. So we got out of the shelter in the middle of this air raid and we started walking out of Portsmouth. There was only one main road through Portsmouth at the time, in the centre, and as we walked more and more civilians were coming out of their houses and joining us and the whole of Portsmouth had decided they were going to evacuate. And so they started walking out and as we got to the north end of the island there was only one bridge to go across and nearby was an army barracks and they were evacuating too. All their trucks and their lorries and the men were coming out. When they saw us walking along there all these soldiers pulled us into their lorries and took us up to Portsdown Hill which was a chalk ridge which overlooked Portsmouth. And they dropped us there and we sat there for the rest of the night watching the town being bombed. And the fires and the bombing were so fierce all the water mains were being broken and fire brigades were being called in from about fifty miles around to some and support us. But they started to run out of water 鈥�.So they ran hoses all the way out to the sea and that was alright for a while, but the tide went out. So they ran out of water and it just burnt. And the result of all this bombing鈥︹�ur house miraculously wasn鈥檛 touched at all throughout the whole of the war 鈥e were very very lucky. But just round the corner St Stephens Church, where I was a choirboy, that was burnt to the ground. My school, just round the other side, that was destroyed鈥�.as a result I didn鈥檛 go to school for about two months. And in desperation my mum and some other mums in our street got together and tried to organise some lessons. So they took it in turns to put us in their front rooms鈥hich were never used in those days. Of course it was useless actually, and eventually the local authority found a hall. They organised us in there and there were about 200 of us children in ages ranging from five to 14 and three frantic teachers trying to keep order. Well, of course, that didn鈥檛 work either. Eventually they found another school for me and I went to this new school, which was an elementary school. The playground had a barrage balloon unit in it so we couldn鈥檛 use the playground to play. It was manned by WAAFs and they were billeted in two of the classrooms so they lived on site there. The only excitement we had was watching the balloon go up and down. We used to love windy days because the WAAFs would try to get it down, but this balloon would career all over the place, it used to bounce off the walls and the roofs and these WAAFs used to try to bring it down. They鈥檇 jump up and hold the guy ropes and hold it down and they used to be lifted up with it!

I was in a class of about sixty and there was one poor old boy who鈥檇 been called back I think out of retirement. And there were sixty of us mischievous little monkeys looking for trouble you see鈥ut he was very, very good and imposed discipline very rapidly. He carried a cane and he shared it with all of us so very quickly we became sixty obedient little monkeys! All we learned was our three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic. The reading, we had a shortage of books鈥o we had to each had to stand out in turn and read out of the book. For writing he used to draw lines on the board and show us copperplate writing which he had to teach us. We used to have to rule lines and write copperplate writing鈥he only thing was the wartime paper was like blotting paper and when you wrote on it it smudged and he wasn鈥檛 happy about that. For arithmetic it was adding, subtracting, multiplication and division, and there were no calculators or things like that and we all used to add up on our fingers and that鈥檚 where I learned to multiply by nine on my fingers. Then when I was 12 you could take an exam to go on to what was called secondary education which I managed to pass and the school my parents selected was the junior technical school, which had just come back from evacuation and they鈥檇 taken over some army huts and that鈥檚 the first time I encountered other subjects like maths, geography, history, even French I was taught there and I really enjoyed that. But in the wintertime the winters were a lot harder than they are now鈥nd you used to get a lot of snow and deep frosts and in the winter there was just this one little tiny stove in the middle of the hut. It looked like one of these stalag luft huts where there were escape tunnels under the concrete base鈥nd it was like that with this one stove and of course there was no fuel to heat it, so we all sat there in our overcoats and gloves and the ink used to freeze in the inkwell. That鈥檚 where my education finished鈥 had to leave school at 15 because at the end of the war all the bonuses my father had been earning in the dockyard ended, and he couldn鈥檛 afford to keep me at school.

The war had a tremendous impact on me. I鈥檝e been a fanatic about education since going to that secondary school. Because I had no qualifications when I left school the only job I could get was as a messenger boy in the Post Office and it was a 48 hour week, six days a week. And every time I went for a job which I knew I could do, I was that confident, I wasn鈥檛 allowed to do it because they said 鈥淵ou haven鈥檛 got the qualifications鈥�. And that dogged me all through my life and I was so irritated and annoyed I was determined all my three children would go to university, which they did. So I was proud of that and I was determined that once I鈥檇 retired I was going to educate myself. So I took an Open University degree and got a 2:1 which pleased me no end and I thought 鈥淭hat鈥檚 my way back against the war time鈥�. Education has really driven me.

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