大象传媒

Some Schoolboy Memories of WW2

Living in a village on the edge of the New Forest during the 2nd World War lots of every day things have remained in my memory quite clearly.
Carrying that Gas Mask in it鈥檚 cardboard box, we were supposed to carry it at all times, can you imagine a 10 year old doing that.
Digging a large area of the school playing field and planting it with vegetables to supplement the school kitchens for those who lived too far away to go home to lunch.
The Hants and Dorset buses towing gas generators and fuelled by coke, what a smell as they passed.
Then the evacuees arrived and for a while we went to school in the afternoon and the 鈥榁acs鈥檃s we called them went in the morning.
If we were home at lunchtime and the air raid siren sounded we had to stay home until the all clear was sounded and then return to school, this often happened in 1940.
From our back garden we could see the barrage balloons over Southampton, and during one of the air raids watching the fighters shoot the balloons down in flames.
Standing by the front gate waiting to return to school we saw an aircraft turn and come straight towards us just missing the large oak tree, a Heinkel 111, one neighbor jumping into the ditch. We were told later that it crashed on the Isle of Wight
When the siren sounded and we were at school we had to leave the classroom and walk to the shelters on the far side of the playing field. What a target, 200 or so children walking in one long column across the field.
We saw dense black smoke coming from the next village, so we rushed on our bikes to find a crashed German aircraft in a field and were told there were no survivors.
The long summer holidays so that we could 鈥榟elp鈥� on the farms, and the Double British Summertime, when it was still light at 11 O/C at night.
Walking 2 miles to the airfield at Stoney Cross to watch the planes in and out, and seeing a Flying Fortress with a hole through one wing come in and land.
While they were training glider pilots we used to crawl through the gorse and get as close as we could to the perimeter fence to watch the Horsa gliders make their steep approach to land, that is until the RAF Police spotted us and chased us away.
As the war progressed the forest filling up with soldiers, both ours, Americans and Canadians, some of the roads through the forest closed to every one except school boys who new ways across fields and were able to get into the camps, and scrounge sweets and gum and seldom chased out.
By now I had started work in readiness to serve an apprenticeship in an engineering works just outside of Southampton Docks, and the days leading up to D Day the docks was alive with troops and equipment.
All of those aircraft flying over, and Dad saying 鈥渟omething big is going to happen over there to-night鈥�
There was an Old chap who used to sit in a wheel chair outside of one of the dock gates just watching the world go by, and when the trucks started to enter the docks loaded with American troops they started throwing all of their loose change to him and we collected as much as we could for him.

Then the prisoners started coming ashore on the slipway next to the place where I worked, first, ordinary German soldiers, rather scruffy and subdued, then old men and young boys, some no older than me, some with blankets wrapped around them and some with sacking wrapped around their feet.
I shall never forget!

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