大象传媒

At the outbreak of war I was nine years old and living in rural Suffolk on the coast. My father was a Prison Officer working at the newly opened Holleslay Bay Borstal Colony (it is now a prison and has been in the news recently as the place where Jeffrey Archer was imprisoned). The area was classified as safe in 1939, and crowds of evacuees from London's East End descended on the village. The village school had to be shared between us, the evacuees attending in the mornings and the village children in the afternoons. This was the time of the Phoney War when nothing seemed to happen, and many of the children drifted back to London in the first few months. By Christmas the school was fully integrated and we made some good friends among the evacuees who stayed. Country life was very strange to them and it was an intriguing experience for children of both groups to explore each other's lives.

In May 1940 everything changed when Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. People living on the East Anglian coast realised just how near to home the war had come and everyone was saying fearfully 'It'll be our turn next.' The evacuees in the area were moved away speedily to safer places and civilians were advised to leave whenever possible.

On 3 June 1940, my mother and I went to stay with an aunt in the Midlands. I will never forget that day; my mother was crying all the way to the station. She was a stoical lady and I had never before seen her in tears. I didn't quite understand what was happening and I was very upset. On the train from London to the Midlands, about a dozen or so soldiers walked through the carriages and further along the train. Everyone became silent. As young as I was, I remember how exhausted they all looked and their uniforms were stained and in tatters. Some were wearing an assortment of odd clothes. When they had gone past, people were saying 'Poor chaps, they must have come from Dunkirk.' Childlike, I asked 'How do you know?', and a gentleman said 'See the red badge on their shoulders with the letters BEF; that stands for British Expeditionary Force, the Dunkirk Army.' Even to this day I can still see the look of exhaustion and despair on their faces, one of my most vivid memories of the early part of the war.

I returned home to Suffolk early in 1942 and found everything had changed. This area was now like the front line. The beaches were tank-trapped and mined and the sands, where we had played, were out of bounds. Airfields had been built and there was a battery of ack-ack guns in the field behind our houses, causing some very noisy nights. We had frequent hit-and-run raids from German fighters, which machine-gunned everything in sight, but fortunately, as this was a country district, there were few casualties. Life on the land went on, but much of the work was being done by the Land Girls, who had taken over from those men that had been called up.

In later years we realised that much of the security in this area was related to the RAF station at Bawdsey Manor, about four miles down the road from us. Even before the war this had been a top-security establishment. It later transpired that Bawdsey Manor was the power-house behind the development of Radar, which had such important implications, not only in the defeat of the Luftwaffe, but in worldwide communications since. This was all very hush-hush at the time, of course, and all sorts of rumours were rife about magic rays that could bring down enemy planes. They weren't far wrong!

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