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Fitting Gas Masks

The year was 1939. The place a small town on the south coast of Wales. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday morning. As was the custom in those days all roads led to the Chapel on a Sunday. It was not so on that morning for me for I had volunteered to assist in the fitting of gas masks on the children at my old primary school for boys. The children were aged 6years to 11; the gas masks were sized large, medium and small. I was directed to a classroom of 6-year-olds and instructed to issue each child with an appropriately sized rectangular cardboard box containing a gas mask and, of course, teach them how to put it on. Left to my own devices I nervously invited my first victim to approach. I looked at him. He was tiny. I logically selected a box from a pile marked small. I extracted the gas mask and endeavoured to slip it over the little chap’s face and head. I struggled — that is the operative word. The glass of the eye shields steamed up and the struggle went on to no avail. I persisted to the great discomfort of my brave little victim who suffered in silence but on the verge of tears. No one had told me that the size of a child’s head is disproportionately larger than can be expected from his height. I was saved and my little chap rescued when the headmaster looked in, summed up the situation and instructed "Forget the small, use the medium or large’. From then on everything went smoothly until sometime later a teacher came in and told me to lead the children into the assembly hall as quickly as possible. There a radio was switched on and we listened to the making of history as the voice of the Prime Minister informed us that our country was now at war with Germany.

I have since thought how awful it must have been for my parent’s generation. It had been a mere 20 years since the end of the last Great War.

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