´óÏó´«Ã½

I was 10 when war started. I lived in a small hamlet in Scotland called Dullatur, between Edinburgh and Glasgow. My father went off to the war, to join a company of the Royal Army Service Corps and fortunately got commissioned immediately because he’d been in his school’s training corps. My mother and nanny organised the evacuation of the house. We all travelled down to Winchester to stay with my aunt then we moved to Chideock, in Dorset. I was sent off to school in Oxford a week early because of the war which really annoyed me for a very long time!

I didn’t experience much of the war until the Battle of Britain. At that time we didn’t go down to the shelters and I remember lying in bed in my dormitory, in Oxford, listening to German bombers circling the city hearing the desynchronised engines that went ‘burgh’, ‘burgh’, ‘burgh’ ‘burgh’. It was a very distinctive sound, not like the synchronised engines of our Lancaster bombers and very disconcerting. Despite all this bomber activity Oxford itself was never bombed but it was still an experience I’ll never forget. In an attempt to stop too many fragments off glass flying about if a bomb hit us the school handy man applied a rubber solution to the windows of the school, of which there was a very large number. I doubt whether it would have been very effective!

I spent most of my time in Oxford at school but of course I spent the holidays in Chideock. One day while at Chideock we went down to the sea at Seatown, a small hamlet nearby and through binoculars I watched small figures descending from a damaged German aircraft, then the air sea rescue boats came out from Weymouth to pick the crew up. The area by the sea was fortified to an extent but I doubt whether it would have stopped a serious attack. In that area the local farmers were members of a fairly active Home Guard and there were a number of pill boxes constructed around the village. The Home Guard were armed with American rifles with red bands to clearly identify them because they were 300 not 303 calibre and the consequences of loading the wrong ammunition could be quite serious for the person trying to fire it!

During the bombing raids of 1942 we might have expected to have been evacuated but we weren’t even though part of the school was hit by a time bomb which of course didn’t explode immediately! It was suggested that the boys should do something about it; an idea that was turned down rather firmly shortly before it exploded! Coincidently one of the Royal Engineers who looked at the bomb and decided to do nothing about it was my sister’s, godmother’s brother! However, the headmaster’s classroom was badly damaged; a sad loss but it could have been a great deal worse. It could have destroyed the Henry VI Chapel or any of the other extremely historic college buildings. Luckily enough pieces of the damaged room were recovered to allow some reconstruction.

Later on there was the excitement of the flying bombs which came over with a fair degree of regularity. If we were in our buildings and if the warning bells sounded we were instructed to go out into the corridors and lie down. I don’t suppose that would actually have been much use if we had been hit! Fortunately the school was never hit by a flying bomb. However, some friends of mine were rowing peacefully up river one day when a flying bomb fell about 100 yards away from them. They were lucky. It made a loud noise and a large hole but didn’t damage them.

I was consistently useless at cricket but I did once play in a cricket match which was interrupted by a flying bomb! It went over heads and we all duly fell on our faces until the danger had passed then got up and continued playing the game!

VE Day was quite something. The entire school moved out into the main road and celebrated by throwing toilet paper around and dancing. Then we went out on to the river to continue the celebrations by getting extremely wet! This was much to the displeasure of our house master who had to pay the bill for all our wet clothes to be laundered and the punts to be emptied of water! Not exactly rioting or total breakdown of order but it was certainly a happy, cheerful occasion.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.