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(personal) Hitler cover

HITLER V. A BRIGHTON SCHOOLBOY

oldbrightonboy

1. Declaration of war

2. Home Front

3. Schoolboy’s war

4. Scouting

5. War’s end

Hitler v me 3

Part 3
Schoolboy’s War

Part 3A

Things were to change when we returned to school and entered the fourth form after the summer vacation and within a day or two of war having been declared. Previously we had worked a five-and-a-half-day week with sports on Wednesday afternoons and study on Saturday mornings. Now we were to drop the Saturday mornings and before long there was to be another change; we were to host evacuees.
For much of the war Varndean School for Boys shared its school with Raines Foundation School, a school of similar calibre from Surrey. This meant we, Varndean, attended school in the mornings and they in the afternoons. It was in some respects a strange arrangement as Varndean had a contingent of its own boys evacuated to Yorkshire. Nevertheless, sharing worked quite well provided one had somewhere to go to in the afternoons to work on ones own. I did almost all my revision for Schools Certificate on the table in front of the window at home. I was keen to pass well but I was aware that military service awaited me and I could not see beyond that time. The prospect of military service was one I welcomed rather than dreaded. It was all rather exciting. There was much talk of the effect that a reduction in our school attendance might have on our examination results. I have often wondered if the examination board made allowances for war conditions, air raids and so on by marking generously. We will never know.
When we entered the third form at Varndean, which was the point of entry to the school, we embarked on either French or German as a foreign language and the following year we started the alternative language. I had landed German in the third form. We saw nothing odd about learning the language of the enemy. In the earlier years of the war we had no real animosity for the Germans. Indeed, we had something of an admiration for them. We recognised them as a highly trained and competent enemy. When they were caught up in the war with Russia we almost felt sorry for them as they froze in the ice. Even the attacks on our merchant shipping we tended to understand although we were worried as they came close to success. We were unaware at this time of the concentration camps and the Holocaust.
School continued together with our other activities. One cannot really separate school from home or scouts or any other activities in which one was involved. Out of school I became a bit of an ice hockey ‘groupie’, a term which was not invented for another 30 or 40 years. During those wartime years virtually all the Brighton, (or was it Sussex?), Tigers ice hockey team were serving Canadian soldiers who came and went as their regiments were moved around. They were large, muscular men who appeared cubic in their pads. Once or twice I borrowed a stick and knocked about with the juniors and bounced off the outsize Canadians. I tried hard but I would never make a hockey player. I got a black eye during a feeble fist fight outside the Black Horse in North Road after one skating session.
Air-raid shelters were dug into the chalk behind the school. In the earlier years, patient teachers made attempts to teach in the shelters but generally we were left to read or work through an exercise sitting on continuous slat seating either side of the walk-way, books on our knees in the dim electric light. In winter we were cold. Then, as time went by and until the Allies invaded Normandy in 1944, air-raids became part of everyday life. At school they were fitted into our normal school alarm system and became so ‘usual’ that we all ignored the ‘general alert’ which was in force much of the time and classes continued regardless. We were often surprised when the ‘all clear’ sounded having forgotten that there was a ‘warning’ in progress. Imminent danger, ‘aircraft overhead’, was a series of short blasts on the public alarm, controlled by Brighton ARP, which was echoed on the school bell. There was an instant clatter of desk seats as everyone slid under their desks. More often than not we resumed our seats within a short time and classes continued. Perhaps we had abandoned general air-raid warnings by 1944 when Doodlebugs, of which more anon, started to arrive. Doodlebugs sounded like a deep-throated, badly tuned, 250cc motorcycle engine. I later had a 350cc BSA which was disparagingly likened by friends to a doodlebug. It, the noise, could not be confused with any other engine noise at that time. Their appearance was distinctive too. From a distance they looked hump-backed. I don't remember seeing many by night but I have an impression of flames coming from their exhaust pipes.
Although the day-time we spent in school was reduced in order to accommodate Raines Foundation we were in school during some evenings and nights on duty Fire Watching. At 16, I think it was, one could take part. They paid us a few shillings a shift, too. Fire watching became a sort of rite of passage. One member of staff and four boys. Our quarters were the headmaster's study and the school office. It was pretty much a dusk to dawn job. We learned to find our way across the school fields at dusk and dawn.
Had there been a fire we would have set-to with stirrup-pump and sand but our main duty was to spot fires before they took hold. On at least one occasion incendiary bombs landed in the ploughed-up playing field next to Balfour Road but I think the school survived unscathed even if, occasionally, we heard the rattle of shrapnel from small fragments of expended Ack- Ack shell as they landed on the roof of the school. This was a sound with which we were familiar at home.
Almost everyone from childhood up was taught to fight fires. Conscientious homes and all public buildings were equipped with two red buckets and a stirrup-pump. One bucket contained sand and the other water. As scouts, of which more anon, we were taught to use sand on the burning bomb and water on adjacent fire. I extracted an unexploded incendiary bomb in mint condition from a ploughed field. I cleaned it and with the aid of the vice in our garden shed unscrewed the nose cap and removed the magnesium powder which I assumed was the primer. We valued such souvenirs. I wonder what I did with the magnesium?
Before fire watching pupils’ visits to the headmaster’s study had been formal, sometimes painful experiences. His cane was half concealed behind a filing cabinet as a subtle reminder. Other visits were to have our reports signed. During our initial tour of duty as fire watchers we studied and sometimes handled the items on his shelves which we had glanced at when making our formal visits. The ornaments and a photograph of HM in the khaki uniform of an army officer sitting outside a tent in front of pyramids during the First World War sat on one shelf. We toasted bread on the protective bars of his electric fire which we laid on its back on the floor.
When not on watch we could sleep on camp beds in the study or, if more hardy, in the assembly hall but it was unheated as fuel oil was in short supply. The hall was not blacked-out so one was completely in the dark and, in the winter, cold. (Cold was a feature of the war. Occasionally, when fuel was not available we wore over coats in class, collars turned up and gloves on). John Burgess liked to sleep on the piano at the stage end, far from the study. I preferred the hall because some boys smoked in the study and it was stuffy. John had a fine tenor/baritone voice which when he sang pieces from The Messiah in the dark empty hall had fine resonance.
We collected the keys from the staff members in the office where they camped out and patrolled the school in the dark. The height of the barriers between boys and adults was lowered during the war and they did not return to their pre-war height. In the morning boys who lived locally ran home for breakfast and were back again for roll-call. Boys who lived too far away waited for school to start.

‘Open the second front’ became our call as Russia fought the German invasion. No one knows how many million Russians died fighting the Germans on the Eastern Front but there was pressure on the Allies to open a second front by invading Europe through France. We attempted to send convoys of military aid and food to Russia through the North Atlantic. There were tales of sailor’s hands frozen to metal ships’ railings and if a man went overboard he was dead from exposure before the ship could slow down to retrieve him.
We boys were supportive of uncle Joe Stalin who was seen on newsreels smiling and shaking hands with Churchill. We read Left News and Soviet Weekly and, like most of the general public, we were left rather than right footed. ‘Lives there a man with soul so dead who wasn’t in the 30s Red?’ Our war was against nazis and fascists and the communists were the natural enemy of both. Communism, which we saw as uniting 'the people', had to be the answer. Had I been invited to join the Communist Party I would almost certainly have accepted but Reds were not lurking under our beds and no invitation was offered. I knew one or two people who were said to be communists but they made no attempt to convert me. Alf read The Daily Chronicle which was regarded as left of centre, and although he and I did not discuss politics I suspect he voted Labour. During the war we had a coalition government and there were no elections. Alf more than once remarked that communism was really application of the principles contained in the Sermon on the Mount. He believed that politics and religion should not be discussed - it could spell the end of a friendship, he said. I was not aware of any political pressure at school. In the fifth form I read Shaw's Intelligent woman's guide to socialism — I was very taken by Shaw - and similar Fabian books and we debated among ourselves but I was, between 15 and 18, a rather apolitical youth. The boys who took politics seriously were generally more thoughtful. We knew little of social pressures. I remember one intelligent friend arguing that the British Empire would disintegrate after the war but as we had always seen one third of the map of the world coloured British Imperial Pink most of us refused to contemplate such heresy.

Agricultural service camps were a much enjoyed feature of war-time school days but one had to be a certain age, probably sixteen, before one could take part. As my birthday occurred on 24th August it was not until 1943 that I was accepted and went under canvas on Mayfield village green. We were restricted to three or possibly four weeks' service.
The school staff ran the camp and boys and staff dug the loos which was a trench dug deep in the clay at the foot of the hill enclosed in canvas screens. Seats were basic boards with holes at intervals. It was all very communal but women staff had separate provisions, probably in the adjoining village school. Not that there were many women.
The farms we served were some distance from Mayfield so we cycled off with our packed lunches in satchels. Bungehurst, Great Baynden and Trogers were three of many farms we served. Sometimes it was picking potatoes as they were sprayed out by the spinner drawn behind a tractor. The scramble was to pick up the potatoes before the tractor returned to spray out more which with their earth would cover up the previous outcasts. At the best of times it was a strenuous, dirty, demanding job. A race against the machine. If the soil was heavy and/or wet or both it was even less attractive. We would return to camp wet, cold and exhausted.
Hoeing was less demanding but boring and unattractive and if the surrounding plants were tall and wet one might be soaked in the first few minutes. The larger farms tended to have the more tedious jobs and required larger teams. Many boys liked the company of their mates but I preferred to work on my own or with just one or two people and volunteered accordingly.
At Mark Cross Farm I helped deliver the milk around the lanes in addition to the usual farm chores. My job was to run to the doorstep with the bottles and back to the van which set off almost before I returned. The van was driven by the farmer who kept to the centre of the country lanes. When I commented on this trait he told me that sometime earlier he had run into a child who had dashed out of a side lane and under his wheels.
I graduated to milking. There were only two or three milk-cows and they were tolerant creatures, most of the time, and except when I was clumsy they responded to the 'to squeeze and stretch' technique I had been taught during my brief period of instruction. One learned on the job. Just occasionally a cow put its foot in my bucket, stamped on my foot or swished its tail in my eye but generally we had a reasonable, mutual understanding of each other’s role.
One of my jobs at Mark Cross Farm was feeding the livestock with a coarse chocolate which came in hessian sacks into which it had been poured while still molten. I had to break off chunks with a hammer applied through the sack. It was sweet and tasty enough and some found its way back to camp in my satchel. It was very popular, chocolate and all sweet things were in very short supply. At home we would eat our week's sweets ration in a few minutes. The cattle chocolate was eaten complete with the fuzz from the sack which had set in the chocolate when it cooled and gave it a sort of ‘suede’ look.
Harvesting has always been a community activity. During the war in our part of the world and on farms the size we worked on, motorised reapers cut the corn and spewed out ‘shocks’ tied up with binder twine. These had to be ‘stooked’, stood upright in groups of six or eight. Ideally, stooking was teamwork for three or four people, each picking up two shocks, jamming their heads together and pushing their cut off stalks hard into the stubble, all at the same time. Provided their heads were jammed hard together and their feet well engaged they would stand until sufficiently dry and weather permitted them to be taken to the place where the corn stack would be constructed. When that time came the shocks were loaded with prongs (pitch forks) onto the cart, usually horse drawn. We boys laid on the shocks on the carts for the journey to the site of the stack so that we could assist with the unloading from cart to stack. The farm workers did the stacking, taking the shocks from us and placing them in what would be their resting place until they were ready for and taken to thresher, sometimes, months later. From time to time they would petulantly and blatantly pick up a stook which had not been deposited precisely where they would have liked it to land from our prong, and give it a shake before snuggling it down in its resting place. I sometimes felt they resented our presence.
There was little enough poetry in us but we looked with satisfaction at the yellowy brown field dotted with stooks in a regular pattern ready for carting.
Harvesting involved dispossessing rabbits. Inevitably there were numerous rabbits in the corn fields which tended to move to the centre of the field away from the grim reaper which went round and round in ever decreasing circles. Eventually they had to make a run for it across the stubble where everyone stood, stick in hand. There was a glut of rabbits so we boys were invited to take them back to the camp. To my surprise I was the only person in the camp able, (or willing), to paunch and skin a rabbit. I must have skinned and prepared between 10 and 20 of the still warm animals.
Come threshing time I tended to be the lad invited to rake cavins. 'Cavins' were the chaff which fell under the thresher and if not cleared would jam the belt of the thresher. Raking them was a hot, dusty job for a small, skinny lad and I met that specification. I had strong survival instincts, (I was a coward), so I kept my head down and well away from the moving parts of the deafening machine. The dust got in my eyes and ears and up my nose until I could hardly breathe. The dust mixed with one's sweat and formed a sort of paste. In the hair it formed a crust. No doubt raking cavins disappeared from the farming job-list long since. The skinny lad being replaced by a mechanical extractor.

(The COD does not recognise ‘cavins’ but that was how it was spoke in the summer of ‘43)

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