大象传媒

I was born on 11 March 1930 and lived at The Vicarage, Flamstead, St Albans, Hertfordshire where my father, The Revd Cecil Russell, MBE, AKC Hons DD was Vicar 1937-1957. I was at Lea House, a preparatory school in Harpenden, until 1943. I often cycled the five miles, including stretches of the A5 and A6 (I would not do that today).

I can just remember that, at the time of Munich in 1938, the Red Cross organized First Aid classes in the village hall. The test of good bandaging for a broken jaw was that the patient could not talk. The candidate for this was Bob Peeling, our Virger, as he was the most talkative person in the village.

The family was on holiday at Sheringham, on the Norfolk coast, in August 1939 and I remember people talking about the threat of war. In the first days of that September we had two Green Line coachloads of evacuees from London. They clutched their little suitcases and had luggage labels with their names tied to their lapels. Homes were allocated and off they went. The village nurse, Nurse Halsey, said that within ten days there was not a clean head left among the village children. The evacuees mostly drifted back to London during the war.

The outbreak of war, on 3 September, was exactly as in the film "Mrs Miniver" (with Greer Garson). We were in church when Bob Peeling took the message from Chamberlain's broadcast up to my father in his pew. My father said nothing until he finished the service; and as we came out of church the village policeman was winding our village siren. We all trooped into the Vicarage cellars for safety, until the alarm was found to be false. Before the siren, P.C. Middleditch was meant to left off a maroon in his garden but this was more likely to remove his helmet than inform the far-flung village.

The phoney war was followed by the invasion of France and the Low Countries, with Dunkirk being a great worry. As a village, the first action was to form a platoon of the LDV, quickly renamed by Churchill as the Home Guard. My father, and me, went off with Major Douglas Anstruther, a First War officer in the Remount Corps (said to be the lowest form of cavalry life). He lived at Redbourn, the next village, and became the local commander. He was a colourful character who, according to Sgt Wilson (also the dispenser in Redbourn's chemist's shop), paid for his hang-over medicine with a length of linoleum and a bust of Shakespeare. Major Anstruther's sister, as Jan Struther, wrote "Mrs Miniver" and some quite good hymns.

One foggy night in those early days of the Home Guard, my father was patrolling on our parish boundary when he was challenged by Douglas Anstruther: 'Who the the bxxxxx hxx are you?' 'Only the bxxxxx parson' replied my father, and 'Who the bxxxxx hxxx are you?'

Vicar and Major made a survey of all guns in the parish as no rifles had been issued. On finding an (?) 8-bore shotgun at Gaddesden Row (each cartridge had just three balls of shot), that was, in theory, our anti-tank gun. Rifles came through, and a Browning machine gun. I was the messenger boy for our platoon, and loved it all, but went too far in rushing round the village in a wheeled basket, clicking the unloaded Browning. Lt Douglas Winter rightly took me to task. Later we had a Northover projector, which was a drainpipe which fired a tin of explosive.

Earlier we made our own bombs, Molotov cocktails, which were bottles (we slashed them with a glass-cutter) containing old oil with wadding tied round the base. One lit the waddding and threw the flaming bottle- or that was the theory. We also had bottles like small ginger beer ones, which were meant to light on impact. These we kept in boxes in one of the Vicarage wells. As we suffered from village boys scrumping the Vicarage apples, we put up sighs BOMB DUMP to try and deter them. Later we had grenade throwing practice with Mills bombs in a disused quarry.

The Vicarage stables were the Home Guard HQ, with two men sleeping in the old saddle (tack) room, relying on the Vicarage telephone and me (aged ten), but the platoon HQ later moved up into the centre of the village. A shed was built by the cross-roads, opposite 'The Three Blackbirds' pub, and this was lined with sandbags to be the village strong point. Mr Pearce, a local farmer, was the pigeons officer. I was mentioned in dispatches for giving an account of a balloon or similar, which I saw going over. (Our stables were later used by soldiers for occasional bivouacs.)

More exciting was when the Russell family(our parents, 17- year -old sister Mary before she went into the WRNS, me and the dog) went off in our Vauxhall Ten to admire the camouflaging of Vauxhall Motors in Luton (where several men from the village worked). Ten minutes after we left, a German bomber dropped a bomb where our car had been: so much for the camouflage,we were lucky. Coming up the hill into the village, we realized that there was a dogfight overhead so Mary and I rushed up the church tower and felt we were in the middle of the fun.

The tower was manned by the Home Guard as a lookout point. My mother, who had a puckish sense of humour, found some rotten bits of lobster which was spread out on a tomb slab at the foot of the tower which looked like phosphorescent skeleton at night: the gallant guard did not come down till daybreak. There was an Observer Corps look-out place at the Cheverells Green end of Friendless Lane, one field in on the northern side.

Fortunately for me, the moving of the Home Guard from the Vicarage coincided with the formation of a village fire brigade. A very good friend of the family, John Robinson Davies who lived in College Farm opposite, took on this unit first as AFS and then it became part of the NFS. We came under the Markyate & Flamstead FB, run by the Nelsey family in Markyate. I remember completing my AFS entry form in the College Farm kitchen; my job was to go round on my bicycle to call out the small group of firemen. Once I did this when a farmer member was helping a cow to calve and it was agreeed that this kind of farming incident had priority over a mere fire.

Our first pump was a 2-man manual, rather like a see-saw, with only two lengths of small-bore hose. We used John Davies's Armstrong Siddeley, and had one of the church handbells in lieu of a real bell. Later we had a little builder's truck and a Coventry Climax pump. This was kept at the Vicarage.

We never had any fires of our own because the two that occurred were taken out of our hands by the Markyate brigade who got there first. One was a shed fire and the other when an incendiary bomb hit a rick belonging to an unpopular lady farmer: they let it burn. While one could eventually extinguish a rick fire, the old drill was to try and do this with the minimum of water to save the hay; but hay which had the smell of smoke was no good for farmstock.

My special opportunity came when I would walk down the hill to the A5 and get picked up by the smart red Markyate fire engine when it went over to Harpenden for fire practice. I was allowed to ring the bell: heaven for a 10-year-old.

The village took an enthusiastic part in raising money during War Weapons Weeks. Progress was recorded on a notice-board outside the Vicarage. Aluminium pans and churchyard railings were volunteered for melting down.

John Davies, a very good businessman, was enlisted by Lord Beaverbrook to join his Ministry of Aircraft Production. I went into John's office one day, and was sat down and asked if I would like a wing of Spitfire or Hurricanes! I believe he was really in charge of glider production and he asked my mother, over a glass of Vicarage sherry, for names for new gliders. She suggested Hengist and Horsa and so they got these names (the latter alluding, perhaps, to the towrope).

My mother was frustrated that she was not contributing to the war effort so off she went, with her Red Cross nursing certificate, to help at a first aid post in Bermondsey. It was a far cry from a country Vicarage to the East End of London by the docks; and this was a risky place to be. A landmine hit their ambulance station one night destroying the vehicles and killing some drivers. My mother had to admit she could drive, but only an ancient Austin 7 which my father had bought for 拢12 10s 0d. Despite this disclaimer, they had her learning to drive a Bedford 3-ton lorry but it was said that even the trams got out of her way when they saw her coming.

When I arrived at Marlborough College in 1943, I was proudly wearing my NFS badge, but the school banned the wearing of badges (some of these were giveaways by Bubble Gum). I objected as I was entitled to wear my NFS badge by right, and got away with it; and have the badge still.

Boarding school took me away from village wartime activities. We were surrounded by airfields preparing for D-Day, including a base for gliders. A field of American WACO gliders was accessible from the perimeter and we looted what we could. Some boys took ammunition back into school, and one in my house tried hitting a mortot bomb fuse with a hammer; he was lucky to lose only the end of a finger. When another house was searched for ammunition, a school chaplain found 500 rounds of US 0.5m tracer bullets. The boy was expelled forthwith.

It was compulsory, when 14, to join the Combined Cadet Corps which included sea and air cadets. It left some 500 army cadets for Field Day and the column, led by Brasser (the excellent school band) and the Union Flag, marched through the town with someone taking the salute. We once had the Boys' Band of the Royal Marines. In their smart white helmets, the boys looked like a lot of mushrooms.

We celebrated VE-day at Marlborough by going out on our bicycles into the lovely countryside and, on returning, were encouraged to listen to the weather forecast for the first time for six years, as they had been banned. I was at home, and read in the newspaper in St Albans of the dropping of the first atom bomb. VJ-day was celebrated in Flamstead by an historical pageant, quickly organized and written by my mother.

It may be shameful but I enjoyed my war, despite seeing the sky lit up when London's Docks were hit 27 miles away. At times like that, provincial fire engines were called in towards London so, for instance, Markyate would cover St Albans. Our little pump was not called forward. I well remember my father, on my saying that we had had a quiet week in the war, putting me in my place for ignoring the 2,000+ killed in Coventry in one night.

I knew "Jane's Fighting Ships" by heart: my sister had got hold of any old copy. After secret work, of which we never knew anything, she was ill from working underground so had a 'sea posting'. This was at the end of Southend-on-Sea's pier, assembling convoys to go up the East coast and running the gauntlet of the German E-boats. A CPO kept the train running on the pier for the Wrens. When bored, they read "King's Regulations" which recorded that having buttons on upside-down was a sign of mutiny, so the girls cut off their buttons and put them back upside-down, but either no one noticed or this frivolity was ignored.

It is not wideley known that the Amiralty formed the WRNS in the First World War and the girls had the same status as the sailors; and they went into the last war with that status. When the army formed the ATS and the Air Force the WAAF, on the eve of the war, they were merely auxiliaries and only received Royal, and equal, status later.

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