大象传媒

TIN HATS AND TOY GUNS

CHAPTER THREE
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Bomb disposal ( ME ! Ha )

Soon after coming out of our tin hotel 'Anderson shelter', Christmas 1940, sleepy, dirty and covered in dust, it dawned on me that it was Christmas day !
A cold, bright morning but with the smell
of burning wood drifting over from Manchester.
Christmas dinner was what I really was looking forward to. Grandad, being a gamekeeper, had got some rabbits.
He often went down to the woods and came back with a couple. Sometimes, he would drop on off at the cottage of an old lady who lived alone at the edge of the village.
Back to Christmas dinner....
Rabbit with Yorkshire pudding, lots of wonderful gravy and roast potatoes, and SPROUTS . All through the war there seemed to be lots of sprouts !
A bottle of Elderflower champagne, grandmothers speciality. They kept dozens of bottles of that wonderful nectar on stone shelves under the stairs.
Sometimes, a bottle would explode ! There was always a slight aroma of elder flowers about the cottage.
Plates were cleared away and in came the Christmas pudding... Real Christmas pudding ! and some sort of white sauce that had a faint smell of saccharine, a wartime sweetening agent.
Dad had come home from the hospital where he worked.
There had been some firebombs in the grounds. We all crowded round the old wireless for details. It took some moments to 'warm up'.
We were told that London had been bombed and Manchester too. But no details.
The bomb that had landed close to us had made a big crater in a field nearby.
THE SAME FIELD THAT A BOMB FROM A ZEPPELIN HAD LANDED IN, IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR !
It was one of five that had straggled the railway line out of Manchester.
Two were very close to the line, landing where the M62 is now.
We discovered much later, that an ammunition train had been in a siding just outside Manchester !
Had the German airmen seen it ? or, much more sinister, had they been told about it ?
If they had hit it, a lot of Manchester docks would have disappeared.
The bombing continued most nights.
We did not go to the shelters much.We lived a bit further out of Manchester.
We slept under the stairs most nights.
One good thing that came out of the air raids was the rule that, if the raid lasted for more than one hour, we kids got the morning off school !
We used to watch the clock very carefully.
Sometimes, the sirens were a false alarm and the 'all clear' would sound within the hour.
There was much grumbling at school on the mornings after that happened.
" Why couldn't the Germans send just one little plane over us ?".
I spent a lot of time collecting shrapnel from the streets. Shrapnel was little bits of steel that came out of the sky every time an anti aircraft shell exploded.
There was a lot of it and it was good for swapping at school. I had a good stock of old Beano's and Dandy's because of my shrapnel collecting. A couple of big lumps were worth a comic.
My big contribution to the war effort was being in a stirrup pump team at school.
Each junior school had a couple of teams. A stirrup pump was a sort of steel pump with a wooden handle. You put it into a bucket of water and pumped like the devil !
Number one of the team had to run up and down, bringing buckets of water, Number two pumped like mad. Number three was the showing off job. So I took it.
The idea was that you crouched down in a very dramatic fashion and moved into a blazing incendiary bomb.
The bomb was SUPPOSED to be drowned and go out ! WE practiced in the school yard and I liked making a big drama as I dashed up to my 'bomb'. I hoped I impressed the girls . I think that they really thought that I was a lousy actor.
And, our stage was not very realistic.
I had seen quite a few of the firebombs actually burning. They were dazzling.
They burnt with a very intense white flame and threw out nasty little bits of blazing magnesium.
Our school firebomb were wire containers full of burning paraffin soaked rags.
That spoiled my act because the wind seemed to always be blowing the smoke into my face, so I was overcome with fits of coughing .
One day, we were shown a picture of a new German incendiary bomb. It was a bit longer than the usual ones.
The reason was that they had put an explosive charge in it !
Designed to blow ME to bits after it had been burning for one minute !
Looking back, I don't think that the Germans were out to get me personally, but that's how I saw it at the time.
I kept my number three place in the team but I tried to work fast.
There were, of course, many unexploded bombs. The army guys had the unenviable job of digging them out and defusing them.
They got right in close to the big bombs and proceeded to hit them with hammers.
The idea the Germans had was that an unexploded bomb could cause disruption over a large area.
No one knew when they were going to explode and factories, railway yards and such had to be shut down until the overworked, mad soldiers could come along with their hammers !
We were told of course, that they didn't explode because the European slave workers who made them had sabotaged them .
I don't think that the forced labour gangs from all over Europe would have lived very long if they had been caught messing about with uncle Adolf's new toys.
I remembered my little German Jewish friend.
We carried our gas masks everywhere we went.
Or, we were supposed to.
I had discovered that my gas mask case was useful for all sorts of things.
One day, to my absolute horror, Mr Bullock gathered us all together in the school hall and announced that we were going to have gas mask practice !
" Put on your gas masks", he said, smiling.
At once, all the girls did so and stood there making their rude little noises.
So did a few of the boys.
Mr Bullock frowned. " Come here Long ", he said quietly.
'Oh no', I thought. Slowly, I walked p onto the stage followed by the sympathetic eyes of the other children.
" Open your gas mask case", I was ordered.
All that could be heard was the girls making rude noises. " Take them off", shouted Mr Bullock.
Little red faces appeared from behind steamy gas masks and the room became silent.
" Put it on the table", said Mr Bullock quietly.
Gently, I put the little cardboard box on the table. I had drawn Spitfires all over the outside of the box.
Mr Bullock proceeded to gently open the grubby box .He looked as though HE was handling an unexploded bomb !
He put his hand inside and drew out a screwed up Beano, Bits of half carved planes, some string, several lumps of rusty shrapnel and n old tennis ball. Last of all, a dried up bit of bread.
He looked disappointed as he walked slowly over to the cupboard where his canes were.
I knew what he was going to say next.
" This will hurt me more than it hurts you Long ". I don't know why he always said that. I doubted that it did ?
" I am doing Long a good turn", he told the little upturned faces."We must ALWAYS carry our gas masks".
I held out my hand without being told to and received a very sharp, whistling blow to my fingertips.
I dare not alter the expression on my face
in front of my mates!
I was allowed to return to my place, but without my treasured possessions.
Maybe Mr Bullock read the Beano, or swapped shrapnel?
At playtime, I had a little crowd round me
all wanting to look at my red fingertips.
Douglas Allen gave me a few lumps of his shrapnel and Edith Strickland gave me one of her immaculate Beano's.
It was called ' the wartime spirit !
I used to go to Douglas Allens house after school for an hour or so, because my mum was at the factory making 'shell caps'.
It was arranged that I had a meal there.
It was almost always ' mash and egg', because Mr Allen had some hens and my dad grew potatoes. About as many as Dick Dalby the farmer, I think.
A lot of people during the war had ' Near misses'.
My dad had his one night as he was cycling to work at the hospital.
He always carried his tin hat and gas mask slung over his shoulder as he cycled the four miles or so each night.
On this occasion, a raid started as he still had about four miles to go.
The bombing started almost at once and he paused to put on his tin hat because, as usual, the guns were blasting away and quite a lot of people were injured by the falling shrapnel.
Opposite Philips Park road, there used to be a machine gun post. The idea was that some poor unfortunate home guard could stand inside it and get a few shots off at a German tank coming down the road, before they were blown to oblivion.
It happened that someone was sheltering in the brick machine gun post and, as my dad came cycling past, he called out " Come inside you silly beggar, you'll get hit wi shrapnel ". My dad looked over to the entrance and saw the dim glow of a fag just inside.
" Can't mate, I'm on duty at the hospital. I've got my tin hat on ".
He cycled on for another hundred yards or so ( or should that be metres ?).
Suddenly, he was chucked off his bike. There was what he described as ' a damn big bang '. He picked himself up and looked back.
The corner of Philips Park Road was a huge smoking hole !
The machine gun post had got the full blast of what turned out later to be a land mine . The chap with the fag had just disappeared !
If that bomb had not been on a parachute, or if my dad had taken shelter, I would have been one of many without a father.
Uncle Jim, a firefighter, lived not far away. He tried to open the door one night to get his bike from the shed. The door opened outwards. It was stuck, so he spent some time banging it and kicking it. Finally, he gave up and went out of the front door and round the garden path.
The reason the door was stuck was , there was a bomb sticking out of the concrete.
There was another ( quite big ) unexploded bomb nearby.
It had landed in soft sand. The army lads tried digging a hole down to it, but it kept sinking. Because it was not near any houses, they finally gave up on it.
Now, there ARE houses ! I don't suppose anyone knows about that lump of rusty iron dropped by uncle Adolf all those years ago.
So, we kept getting bombed. It was a lot worse in London and Coventry, and many other places got their share.
But, I am telling about MY little war.
We got used to feeling our way around in the blackout and we got used to our rations, But, I never quite got used to the excitement and wondering what was going to happen next.
Many of us kids were allocated public air raid shelters to look after.
On Saturday afternoons, we would go to our shelters and sweep them clean.
Mr Bullock used to drive round sometimes in his little Morris eight and inspect our work.
I used to wonder where he got the petrol from ?
Now, it was 1941 ! I was nearly ten !
One evening, we were all sitting around in our little lounge, I was playing with Douglas Allen and mum was sitting listening to the wireless and knitting one of her long khaki scarves that were, no doubt, gratefully received by the cold lads on the gun sites ?
I was contented. A meal of egg and mash at Douglas's home and we had bits of 'meccano' all over the floor.
Suddenly, it started to go dark !
Mum glanced at the window and, without a word, she grabbed us lads and pushed us under the stairs.
"Whats the matter" I protested.
" Be quiet", she whispered " A parachute has come down in the garden".
If I had been a 21st century kid, I would have said " cool".

But, in 1941 cool meant something different. The 21st century was miles away, and 'if I survived' I wold be very old by then ! I didn't say anything.
It seemed quite normal to me that a parachutist should float down among dads potatoes ! 'A German '? most likely, although the sirens hadn't sounded.
Now, where were the Home Guard ?
The amazing thing was mums protective instincts. She had grabbed dads potato digging spade and crept back into the lounge !
We, overcome with curiosity, followed her.
Something WAS flapping against the window !
A parachute ! We all crouched on the floor.
Any moment, the door would be kicked open by a jackboot and a German would burst in, festooned with hand grenades and clutching a Schmeisser machine gun !
Wait a minute, something was wrong. I looked more closely at the parachute flapping against the window.
It was silver! I recognised it very well.
It was a flying pig!
"It isn't a parachute mum" I was just as exited, " Its a barrage balloon".
Mum was not convinced. But, before she could stop me, I had pulled the front door open .
The front of the house and all the garden were festooned in silver rubbery material.
I had seen one in flames. I think it had been struck by lightening ?
It came slowly out of the sky trailing a long dirty black cloud of smoke behind it and glowing redly with the heat of the burning gas.
But, I never even gave a thought to the fact that , this one contained the same gas and that it was draped over our chimney.
This was adventure. Suppose they didn't come for it ? We would own a barrage balloon !
It was a bit like Christmas coming ....
How many Beano's could I swap for a barrage balloon ? Hundreds.
By now, some of our neighbours had started to appear. Mrs Deakin was in tears.
Mr Deakin, also with no regard for the gas, lit his pipe and pushed his cap to the back of his head. " By heck", he muttered ,
" We used to ave em oer't trenches ".
Mr and Mrs Allen came round the corner and dropped their shopping bags and stared open mouthed.
I suddenly felt quite protective about OUR barrage balloon.
I must, at this point. confess to my crime.
Mums sewing scissors were lying beside her knitting box and a chunk of barrage balloon was flapping loosely.
I cut it off and took it indoors.
A few more bits disappeared in the same way into other kids houses .
I didn't know what to do with my lump of barrage balloon until, one day, I had a brainwave.
I carefully sewed it into the shape of a little flying pig and stuffed it.
I hung it on a bit of string above my little yellow bed.
I had my own barrage balloon !
Someone went off to the ' Hare and Hounds, where they had a telephone and the army were informed.
They had some difficulty finding no21 Bull Hill Crescent, but eventually they arrived with a big camouflaged Bedford lorry and half a dozen soldiers.
They began to stuff the balloon into the back of the lorry.
The sergeant roared at a couple of young soldiers who were smoking.
Eventually, our balloon was stored away without an explosion.
The soldiers were invited in for a cup of tea. An offer which they gratefully accepted.
The sergeant grinned at me.
" You'll be telling your mates all about this ?". He brought something from under his coat and held it out to me.
It was a lump of 'Bakelite', "here", he said. " I shouldn't give you this really. It's the gas filling valve from the balloon".
Gratefully, I held out my hand and thanked him.
I didn't mention the bit of silver material under the stairs.
While they were drinking their tea, Dad came cycling round the corner.
He had been at the first aid post and knew nothing of what had happened.
The first thing he saw was an army lorry outside our house and his ruined garden, plus a house full of soldiers drinking tea !
My mum rushed across to him.
" Oh", she sobbed." I thought it was a German parachutist", Dad looked baffled. He knew nothing of what had happened.
The sergeant explained. " You had a barrage balloon came down in your garden".
he said, " I wondered why your wife was holding a spade". He grinned down at me.
" You've got a couple of hero's here Mr Long. I bet young Arnold would have been a match for any German".
I can't say how proud I felt.
Dad grinned. "He'd probably try to swap a Beano for the German's gun".
We laughed and hugged each other.
Perhaps I would have ?.

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