大象传媒

From the Blitz to the Cambridgeshire Fens 1940 鈥� 1945
by Roy Barnes (my elder brother)
Part 1

Just before my eighth birthday in September 1939, my mother, ten-month old brother and I were evacuated from South London to Yeovil in Somerset, but nothing was happening. London wasn鈥檛 being bombed, so we went back home again.

But a year later, London was most definitely being bombed and we were evacuated again.

We had had an Anderson Shelter put up in our backyard. This was hardly more than a hole in the ground with a semi-circle of corrugated iron over the top. We started using it when the raids on London got heavier 鈥� that is my mother, my brother and I started using it: my father wouldn鈥檛 get out of his bed. When the Germans bombed us in daylight, we would ignore the Anderson Shelter and go and stand on the flat roof above the scullery at the back of the house to watch the dog fights and cheer the Spitfires and the Hurricanes. The aerial battles were no more than a kind of sporting encounter, which we were bound to win, but as the bombs began to fall in and around our street, my mother decided she鈥檇 take the children to the Anderson Shelter, no matter what Henry decided.

I don鈥檛 normally have a visual memory, but there is one picture embedded in my memory like a black and white print. We鈥檙e going down the stairs on the way from the flat to the Anderson Shelter and reach the back landing, me first, mum close behind carrying Tony, and I look out of the window 鈥� a bomb is falling straight towards us. My mother shouts to get downstairs 鈥� I leap a whole flight of stairs and turn at the foot. My mother throws the baby towards me and I catch him and run through the back door and leap into the Anderson Shelter, dropping the baby as I hit the floor. Then I hear the crunch and my mother appears at the entrance to the shelter and as she falls through, the debris starts raining down and she yells and lies still. A brick has hit her ankle and that鈥檚 the only injury. Our lucky day. The bomb had gone over our house and demolished the middle of the terrace on the other side of the street.

The near miss was the second shock my mother had had that week. We were walking along the Walworth Road and suddenly she stopped and gasped. She was looking at a newsagent鈥檚 placard on the pavement outside the shop. 鈥淗MS Afridi sunk at Narvik鈥�. My Uncle Harry鈥檚 ship, her young brother, and not knowing if he was dead or alive, wounded or whole. After these two events, Henry gave up being a conscientious objector, volunteered for the RAF, expressing a desire to bomb the Germans, and Mary, her two boys, her sister, Vi, and her three daughters were evacuated to the wilds of the Cambridgeshire Fens.

About forty years after the end of the war I went back to the part of London where I used to live as a child and walked down Manor Place from Walworth Road, past the pubs, the municipal swimming pool, the fishmongers round the corner and turned into 鈥� There was nothing at all recognisable where Paisley Road should be. I walked a little way back to where I鈥檇 seen two policemen standing and asked for directions to Paisley Road.

鈥淧aisley Road?鈥� one policeman asked the other.

鈥淣ever heard of it. There鈥檚 Paisley Estate. No Paisley Road, mate.鈥�

Hitler had succeeded in completely destroying that little piece of my past.

So, at the end of September, 1940, we were whisked away to Walpole Highway, a very undistinguished little village, 6 miles from King鈥檚 Lynn on the road to Wisbech, a momentous journey that was to take me away from the life I had led for the first nine years of my life, the back-streets of Southwark to an entirely different life in the fens of Cambridgeshire for the next five. I know what that journey must have been like, for I have seen many photographs of London children wearing their cardboard gas-mask cases around their necks and clutching their pitifully small parcels of belongings, standing in queues waiting for trains at London termini, but I don鈥檛 remember wearing a gas-mask or carrying a cardboard box with one in. I remember my baby brother having to be put in a kind of rubber breathing bag, as he was too small to wear a mask.

I can remember standing outside the Walpole Highway blacksmith鈥檚 shop in a huddle of people that drizzly dark night, waiting for something to happen, and eventually going down an alley beside the blacksmith鈥檚 to a cottage that adjoined his house, all seven of us together. The cottage had three rooms, two downstairs, one upstairs. The front door opened directly into the living-room where there was a kitchen range. No gas, no electricity, no running water, no toilet, no bathroom, just a pantry in the corner under the staircase and a seat over a hole in the ground in an outside shed for a loo. There was a paraffin lamp alight on the kitchen table. My aunt and her three daughters slept in the downstairs bedroom, which you entered through the door from the living-room and we slept upstairs in a room that was barely large enough to contain a bed. To reach our room we had to go through my aunt鈥檚 room to get to the door to the staircase that took us up to our rooms.

And it was cold in those bedrooms. In winter there were icicles on the insides of the windows. The only room that was permanently heated was the kitchen, where the kitchen range was never allowed to go out; even in the hottest summer it was needed for cooking. There were fireplaces in both bedrooms, but in the 4陆 years we occupied that old cottage, I saw a fire only once, in the grate of the downstairs bedroom. This had become my mother鈥檚 bedroom after my aunt was provided with a small flat of her own above one of the village stores, and my mother took over the bottom room with the big double bed for herself. What luxury! But she had a fire only because she was desperately ill. My brother and I never had a fire in our bedroom. I developed a knack of taking all the top clothes, pullover, shirt, vest, off in one rapid movement and sloughing trousers, pants and socks in a second, leaping into pyjamas and between ice-cold sheets, which felt like freezing water where we shivered until our bodies warmed them.

We children were all young enough to adapt to our new circumstances relatively easily, but I now wonder about our mothers. Children see their own world with their parents in charge. How can they see the fears, the worries, the discomforts and hardships of the grown-ups? Children accept what they have and, unlike their mothers and fathers, perhaps fortunately, have nothing very much to compare what they have with anything different. What you don鈥檛 know you can鈥檛 miss. But our mothers. Here they were crowded together in an old, damp, cramped near-derelict cottage with no amenities at all, and no husbands to do the heavy work and keep them company. In London they had not had much, but at least there they had had gas-lights on the walls of their flats, a bathroom with a gas geyser over the bath, running cold water, a flushing lavatory, gas-fires, easy to light. Here they had nothing except their children and the discomfort, the worry, the strangeness of being among people they could hardly understand, dumped in the middle of nowhere. The two sisters, my mother just thirty years old and my aunt twenty-seven, had each other and they and their children were safe from the bombing, which must have been their only consolation.

One morning, seared into my memory, my mother could not get out of bed. She could hardly speak. She whispered that I must get the doctor. I ran the whole way to the doctor鈥檚 surgery in Terrington St John, a village about 2陆 miles away, rang the bell and was kept waiting on the doorstep by a maid until the doctor himself came, listened to what I had to say and decided to turn out. He had a car and petrol and I watched him get in and drive off. What astounds me at this distance, more than the inhumanity, is that I accepted his action as perfectly normal. He was gentry and I was poverty. After all, on a Friday afternoon, when we queued up outside the farmer鈥檚 kitchen to collect our wages from his wife through the high window, we had to doff our caps and tug our forelocks and say, 鈥淭hank you, ma鈥檃m,鈥� or we didn鈥檛 get paid. Everybody had to show respect to their betters. This was 1941, not 1841, but the rigid class system was still firmly Victorian. My brother remembers playing with his youngest cousin and four of the village children outside the shop next to the Methodist Chapel. Mrs Squire Pearson drove past in her pony and trap and the two village girls stopped playing and curtsied, the two boys stood to attention and saluted. My brother and cousin went on playing. Next day, they were both called out in front of the school at Assembly and roundly told off for not respecting their betters. It was a very different world we Londoners had moved into.

My mother had pleurisy and was near death for several days. I was ten, my brother two and my father away. Ollie Goward, the blacksmith, and his wife were bricks. It seemed quite natural to me to try to take over my mother鈥檚 duties. How quickly children had to grow up in those days. Ollie sent a telegram to my father鈥檚 RAF unit at Barrow-in-Furness and he was given compassionate leave, so he joined us for a while, slept in the same bed as his sick wife and became quite popular in the Bell, the pub over the road from the blacksmith鈥檚 shop. He probably told them his Max Miller jokes.

From 1940 to 1943, when I was there, Walpole Highway Elementary School was a thriving community under the direction of Mr Compton, the Headmaster, and his wife. There was a single long classroom for ages 7 鈥� 11 with Mr Compton teaching the older children at one end and Mrs Compton with the younger ones at the other. She took the end which in winter had a blazing coal fire. She was a fat, jolly lady and used to lead the whole school from the piano in morning assembly hymns and Friday afternoon sing-songs. I learnt all the old English folksongs and popular hymns off by heart from her and have never forgotten them. She provided our greatest entertainment, however, when she was giving us dictation and spelling exercises that were supposed to take all our attention by positioning herself by the guard in front of the fire and gently, just as if no-one would notice, lifting the back of her skirt up to warm her backside. Nudge, giggle, grin and splutter 鈥� what a laugh! She must have realised, but she never let on.

The infants had a little room to themselves and were taught by Mrs Mason. My brother joined the infants soon after his fourth birthday. He hated every minute. I had to take him 鈥� usually drag him 鈥� to school. His favourite trick was to run into the middle of the road and lie down on the white line kicking his feet and screaming his head off. I was strong enough to pick him up and squeeze him very hard round his ribs and carry him to school. I couldn鈥檛 leave him until classes started, or he would run off home. Many times Mrs Mason would come into my class and stand at the door and Mr Compton would nod at me and I would go with her to find out what he鈥檇 been up to. I had to tell him off and threaten him and if he didn鈥檛 shut up I would have to take him home. He told me that Mrs Mason was always smacking him, and I told him to hit her back and he said he tried to, but she grabbed his hands, so I said, 鈥淲ell, kick her then鈥�, which one day he managed to do, thus causing multiple ructions for both of us. I think these days we might well have been excluded, but things settled down and we both grew into decent, well-behaved sort of chaps. Our cousins attended the same school, and Barbara, who was slightly older than Tony but in the same class, remembers a telegram being delivered to Mrs Mason with the news that her husband, who was in the RAF, had been killed in action.

I could, on the whole, put up with my brother鈥檚 behaviour at school, but one thing rankled with me for a long time. One of my chief opponents in the regular Locals v. Londoners fights was Swailey Buckley, a gypsy whose family lived in a caravan on a field opposite the school, surrounded by the skeletons of old cars. One of the older Buckley bothers, who I imagine must have been a sadistic observer of the scraps of the juniors, had the bright idea of setting up a proper boxing match between the scrappers 鈥� London v. The Rest. They put up a boxing-ring in one of Beeber鈥檚 fields, with proper flooring, posts and ropes, and we were issued with boxing gloves. We were more or less matched up according to size, age and weight, but we had no-one to represent us at the infant level. My little brother had run away without anyone noticing. I finally found him squatting under a hedge and he wouldn鈥檛 budge. No appeal to family honour, letting the side down, being a coward had any effect. Shame-faced I had to return to the Buckleys and concede that bout without a contest. I have no memory of how the battle ended, but I think it must have gone all right for us, as we were more or less accepted in the village after that. People can get used to anything eventually, if they have to.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have spent the last five years of my childhood in an old English village just before the new industrial age, urbanisation and Americanisation were about to destroy English rural life for ever. It was a close-knit community, dependent almost wholly on animal and human muscle power. No-one drove a car or a tractor. Only people performing essential functions, like doctors, were allowed petrol. You walked or went by bike. Farmers went by horse and cart. There were two buses a day through the village in each direction along the Lynn to Wisbech road, one in the morning and one in the evening. On Saturday there was sometimes an additional relief bus to take the shoppers home. Our treat about once a month was to go with our mother to Wisbech, where she would do some shopping, buy us a fish and chips lunch and take us to the pictures in the sixpenny seats 鈥� a main film, a B film and a Path茅 News report, all about the war. My favourite filmstars were Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, although my enthusiasm for him diminished somewhat when someone told me he had to stand on a box to look as tall as her.

We had everything we needed for life in the village itself, a butcher鈥檚 a baker鈥檚, two general stores, a fish shop and the Bell Inn. Opposite the Blacksmith鈥檚 shop was Ward鈥檚 dairy, where they brought the cows in for milking each day and tipped the pails into 100 gallon urns, which were taken round the village on a pony cart and the milk was dealt out to customers at their garden gate in small metal beakers poured into your own jug, often still hot. The first day I ever went into a milking shed, the cowman, sitting on a three-legged stool, his head pushed hard into the cow鈥檚 side above the udder, turned and directed a teat in my direction, delivering a stream of hot milk into my left eye and burning it. Much merriment all round.

School used to come to an end during all the hectic periods of harvesting. The Norfolk County Council accepted the inevitable and designated holidays for fruit-picking. (Although Wisbech is in Cambridgeshire, Walpole Highway is just in Norfolk.) My brother and I spent many days with my mother picking strawberries along seemingly endless rows that went on and on beyond the horizon. At least my mother and I did the picking. We used to fill a chip and lay it across the row and at the end of the day gather them up, have them weighed and recorded by the foreman and tip them into trays, which would be carted away to the railway for delivery to Chivers for jam making. My brother used to lie between the rows near one of the chips and quietly eat the strawberries until I saw him and dragged him away. We picked strawberries, gooseberries, peas, apples, plums and pears for different farmers in the village. There were two main ones, Beeber, and the Squire Pearson, who was very fond of us touching our caps and calling him 鈥榮ir鈥�. I can鈥檛 remember the women having to curtsey, which was something my mother probably wouldn鈥檛 have done anyway. She had a firm belief in us being as good as the next man, the pride of the poor, I think, rather than any abstract belief in the equality of man.

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