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I was born in the Suffolk house where we lived after World War Two. I was too young to see active service until sometime after that war had ended. Therefore all of my memories of the war period are based on the happenings in and around East Suffolk, Hamlet of Clopton Corner and the Neighbouring Debach airfield.
One of the three runways at Debach was clearly visible from my bedroom window, as were many of the other elements of the airfield. It was one of last, if not the last, to be built for the Americans to use for their Flying Fortress aircraft which meant, in one sense, I only had a short ‘war’.
We had a double fronted house with a double fronted shop and a garage attached. Over the shop and the garage were bedrooms, thus making the house quite large and the long upstairs passage running along the back of the house made an ideal play area on wet days. With so many rooms we were in a prime position to accommodate evacuees and later any of the workmen who came to build, equip and use the airfield.
Where the shop joined the house there were two steps, the ceiling above those steps was no problem for me and my friends, however there were a good number of taller people coming and going during those war years, to which it proved problematic. The yell, the crash and the swear words were not uncommon as that low beam claimed yet another victim.
First there were the Irish as they built the infrastructure, then the African Americans who came to equip the place ready for action. After that the aircrews arrived (as I recall all white Americans) and finally we had the German Prisoner of War base opposite our house.
With this variety of people, my life became a series of short memorable incidents rather than one long saga!

The day a dumper full of wet cement broke down outside our house; Father had it laid in our drive with pot holes in it. He said the slope would be slippery if it was levelled and smoothed off and I suppose the theory was heading in the right direction. However it was the slope that was not that great and the potholes that were!

Some of the Irishmen that were building the airfield used to lodge in our house. On one occasion, one of them parked his dumper a bit too close to the garage doors and scraped a line of green paint off. It was way above my young head, as these machines had their cargo body mounted on large wheels that were normally at the back of the tractor. In this case the tractor was driven backwards.

On another occasion a military vehicle went past the drinks van as he was unpacking his wares in our shop, this van body had no sides or back, there were just corner posts supporting the roof. The military truck hit the van with such force that it ended up in our back garden!

Father had chiming clocks all the way up the stairs in the hall where the telephone stood on a shelf. It seemed that whenever anyone wanted to use the phone the clocks would chime. This particularly annoyed my cousin whose American boyfriend would always ring her before midday.
The braided cord on that telephone hung down in a loop below the shelf, a loop just right to hang a little boy. One day when I was running along the passage, I went too close to the wall in order to avoid one of the residents. My head went through the loop and the phone crashed to the floor, mother hollered at me which caused me to cry and father to swear, so mother hollered at father too, for swearing in front of me.

Watching the machines of the day was of great fascination to my friends and I, they were huge, much larger than anything we had seen before. The dumpers were basically the familiar tractor, but these were driven backward and had this huge wheelbarrow body on top of the bit where the driver usually sat which meant that the driver had to sit on top of the tank that was above the engine. Being able to sit on that seat made me feel like a real ‘King of a Castle Building Machine’.
The tractors were dwarfed however, alongside the tanks with their bulldozer blades for levelling the banks that lay alongside several of our narrow lanes. I remember standing for ages watching one dig around the base of a particularly large tree, eventually it pushed over a tree that had stood on the corner of the road opposite our house for several decades. We boys had to then look elsewhere for acorns to sell for pig feed.
These tanks paled to insignificance beside the Gyro-tillers, which were huge horizontal rotovators that were used to level the ditches in order for the airfield roadways to be concreted over. I think I was more terrified than exhilarated when I got a chance to sit on one of these monsters.
The driver held on to me as he churned his way up the side of the field. We bounced and bumped over everything in our path until it was levelled, I was sure I was going to fall into those huge tines as they massacred everything they came near.

When the Irishmen left and the construction of the hangars began we were treated to the sight of African Americans. I had never seen a coloured man before. I remember sneaking up to one and rubbing my had down his arm and trying to rum away before he caught me as he was a big powerful man, bigger than my father as his grasp was stronger than my fathers, and quicker.
Fortunately for me he had a sense of humour, he looked at my had and asked me if I expected it to be black, I had no reply, I couldn’t speak as I was trying desperately hard not to cry, he then laughed so loud I nearly jumped in the air. After that he was one of the men who came to spend some of his leave lodging in our house as well as visiting our shop to buy things for his pals.
When the construction had finished, several of these coloured Americans came into the shop to say goodbye. My mother, though frightfully Victorian, was not really being prejudice when she said ‘They are so nice and polite, but I hope they do not want to shake hands with me’, it was a good many years before I understood the reason for her remark.

The next phase bought the white Americans, who were the air and ground crews and with them came the B17 Flying Fortress whose sheer size was the talk of the county. My mother told the people at work about these huge aircraft that had arrived on our doorstep, one of mothers colleagues said ‘Wait until you see the Flying Fortress, they are really big.’ The next day she had to admit that mother had actually seen the flying fortress.
The arrival of these aircrafts brought mixed emotions for all of us. On the one hand our parents were saying that they would help Britain win the war and on the other hand having war machines on our doorstep meant that we were on the frontlines on the nights when the German bombers decided to attack the airfields of Britain.
This was our first real involvement in the war, we had seen dog fights and aircrafts shot down with a few bits of aircraft falling into our village. Now the majority of the bits were not so much falling but thrown at us.
Unfortunately as we were inside the airfield perimeter we were not entitled to an Anderson air raid shelter, consequently our protection was the three feet square sliding leaf, solid oak dining table. That was unless there was a direct need for us outside helping someone with their bomb damage.
As a youngster I did not mind cuddling up to mum under the table as mayhem reigned in the skies above our heads, however even though I was there, I very much doubt I could, in my wildest imagination, accurately portray my mother’s feelings on those nights.

On one occasion we had some evacuees from London and the night following their arrival our house was in the front line. The children cried and screamed until the early hours of the morning when the German bombers went home.
The next morning this woman, with her three children clutching her skirts, yelled down the phone that she wanted to ‘get out of the house and the county!’ She told us that, thus far, she had not seen a bomb drop anywhere near her home or her family.

My father was the local ARP warden, so it was not just our house that he had to go out to when the call came. I was barely old enough to carry a bucket of water, but I tried to help and not get in the way as we put the incendiaries that tumbled down our roof.
We boys would go and see how else we could help; it was mainly small things like helping to carry personal belongings away from the fires as the firemen drenched the houses in an attempt to save enough house for the residents to move back into.
Sometimes we got in the way and got drenched as well. On one particularly bright moonlit night we were walking home and looking up at the aircraft overhead when I missed my footing and ended up head first in a ditch that had an awful; lot of very cold, dirty water in it.
My mother, who must have worried at my late night wanderings, scolded me pretty thoroughly when I arrived home covered in a stinky muddy slime. In general mother had little time to tell me off, as she had to care for me, keep down a job in the local council offices, run the post office that was part of our shop and look after my father. The latter could be no mean feat when he had a particularly bad evening and night as an ARP warden.

Another night my friend and I were walking through our stack yard when we saw a shiny brown boot in a small straw stack, and my friend said that his father would like that, especially if it as a pair, but as he grabbed hold of it a German rolled out of the straw. We never found out if he was dead or alive but I don’t think either of us had ever run so fast in our lives, we did not stop until we could shelter in the trees of Stechels lane, almost a mile away.

My father had some horses that worked on the roads; they were all cart horses and mostly Suffolk breed. With the tanks there was a greater need of concrete road building.
One morning I woke up to see one had died in the night, it had gone to sleep standing up but the wall of the makeshift stable was not strong enough to have one ton of horse fall against it. The result was that the horse lay on the broken wall at the bottom of our garden.
It was not uncommon for us children to ride on the horses in those days. Their backs were too wide for us to straddle so we would sit side saddle on whatever harness was arranged around the horses body, sometimes this was a nice comfortable upholstered saddle but mostly it was a Hessian sack folded on top of the chains that lay in the groves of the saddle. These were extremely hard if the horse decided to have a little gallop!
One day while I was riding a horse, an aircraft flew low overhead and, instinctively I looked up without thinking that the horse might be frightened. I was thrown about six inches in the air, just enough for the sack to become dislodged and to fall onto the shafts of the cart we were pulling. When my posterior landed it was directly on the chains which were now moving quite a bit, consequently the bruise on my behind kept me from sitting properly at the tea-table for almost a week.

The Americans held parties for the children at Christmas time, and several of us got presents. We were picked up in trucks and brought home at the end of the evening, some of the presents were very nice, but the only problem was that we were rather overcrowded in the trucks. I recall one boy had a very lifelike model of a B17, but in the process of getting off the truck someone put their foot in it.

At the end of the war we had German Prisoner of War billeted opposite our house and like a lot of other children one of these germens made me a ‘Pecking Chicken’. I watched in fascination as he whittled away with his penknife but I didn’t realise he made it for me until he finished it and handed it to me.
This little episode did nothing to clarify the reason for war in my young mind. Could it be that my own Spitfire pilot cousin was possibly responsible for shooting this nice man out of the sky?

Enough is enough.
The past cannot be changed, recalling it can only change the future.

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