大象传媒

Gil.s war.(1). The start

My life, and indeed that of millions of others, changed abruptly at the beginning of September 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War.
I was the youngest of eight children and my Mother had died when I was very young and we lived in the (then) small town of Hemel Hempstead, Herts. During 1939 I had been transferred from my small school in Bury Road to the brand new Secondary Modern School in Crabtree Lane. Unfortunately the 'war effort' came first so much of the interior was incomplete, there were very few teachers and our sports sessions were spent digging stones out of the ground of what should have been the sports field. And on the good side, (as it seemed then) there were no examinations to take!
No guidance was given as to future jobs or careers as the war effort was all that mattered, but it was a bit of a surprise when my Dad suddenly broke the news that (at 14) I would be leaving school the next week and would have to find a job. The choices were either to go with him in the building industry or get a job in the local factory at Apsley Mills. But I did not get on well with my Dad so I took the soft option and went to work in the factory!
I was put on 'piece work' and being the only young and active person in the envelope stock department, my wage soon exceeded that of the older men who complained to the manager, so I was put on sweeping up instead so I decided to quit the job.
The manager tried to talk me out of it, saying that if I stayed on, then when I was old enough to be called up I could be transferred to a department doing war work and thereby escape conscription. But the older men said that if I dodged conscription then people would be sending me white feathers.
So I walked out and had to eat humble pie and go and work with Dad as an apprentice carpenter and joiner.

Now it just so happened that the day before the declaration of war the town's telephone system apparently broke down, (my rather erratic Stepmother blamed it on the Germans of course, though I found it difficult to understand why the German High Command should decide that, by some devious way, it was necessary to take out the telephone system in a little town somewhere in Hertfordshire.)
However, the Scoutmaster turned up at my home the evening before war was declared and told me that the Scouts had been asked to provide messengers and that we all had to report to the Town Hall in the High Street where the Air Raid Precautions group was being hastily set up.

But there was not much call for our services that evening and I recall spending most of the time playing the board game of Monopoly (yes, it was in existence all those years ago) while sitting on the plush carpeted stairs leading up from the main hall.
Then suddenly, at about 11 am the next morning there was a flurry of activity and someone rushed down the stairs and said, 'get down to the waterworks and tell them 'Air Raid Warning Red'. I got on my bicycle, rode furiously down the High Street and along Marlowes to the waterworks, a grand Victorian structure with a tall brick chimney.
Everyone was walking around in the normal calm way and I wanted to shout out 'Air Raid Warning Red' to everyone but I hadn't the breath to do so.
I hurtled in through the open gates and saw a group of men standing in front of the main entrance so I rode up to them, skidded to a halt and shouted out my message 'Air Raid Warning Red' Their faces turned white and they all rushed back inside as I turned my bike around and headed for the gateway as fast as I could and as I got their, the air raid warning siren started up.
Instantly the whole scene changed. People started running backwards and forwards along the pavements, across the road and into any buildings, fearful that the bombs would be falling within seconds.
When I got back to the Town Hall the place was in chaos and we Scouts were told to go home straight away. When I got there I was ticked off for not being under cover by Earnie Wooton our next door neighbour who had suddenly sprouted a black painted tin hat and an armband with the words 'Air Raid Warden' on them and was running around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off.. But it was just a false alarm and the continuous, All Clear signal was sounded on the siren and we all crept back outside.
As young as I then was, I realised that things would be different from then on.

More and more people who were considered to be fit were being called up and those who for one reason or another were not considered suitable for that purpose at that time or decided to register as 'conscious objectors' for genuine or other reasons, were being 'directed' into war related work.
My eldest brother Ted was I suppose, relatively old and had only one eye as a result of a motorcycle accident so he was not required in the forces and became an active member of the St Johns Ambulance Brigade.
My next brother Arch, was either too old or, being a carpenter engaged in building repairs or being unfit or being involved with building work, had to join the Auxiliary Fire Service, while my two sisters Gert and Mabel, who were presumably engaged in office work in companies that were doing war related work, were not affected.
The first brother to be called up was Bill who went into the Royal Artillery where undoubtedly his smug, smooth talking capabilities and his passion for wearing, and swanking around in an artillery dress uniform got him a cushy office position in London. Rather incredibly he soon managed to get a discharge on medical grounds and went to work as a barman at the United States Air Force Squadron operating B17 Flying Fortresses from the nearby new Bovingdon aerodrome

The next brother to be called up was Sid. He was not passed as A1 at his medical, so was put into the air force and served on the ground staff in England for most of the time during the war..
The next one to be called up was Denys, the blue eyed boy of the family - and rightly so. He went into the Royal Signals, and was subsequently attached to an Armoured unit which landed in Normandy sometime around D Day. This left me, yours truly.

Now everyone said that the war would be over by the time I was old enough to go into the Forces (oh how I wish they had been right) so I remained in my lowly position as my Father proudly proclaimed the heroic deeds of his other sons in their safe locations when talking to dear old ladies in houses where we were doing building work.

But our main work was in converting small factories to make them suitable for war work and building surface air raid shelters. I recall that the strips of oak we used for the seats inside had not been seasoned so were dripping wet, which, apart from being uncomfortable to sit on and liable to stain clothing, were said to be liable to cause piles. Small wonder that when the workers had to go into the shelter, everyone took a cushion or mat to sit on.
The floorboards we used in the construction of a temporary canteen on the roof of a factory adjacent to Railway Terrace in Kings Langley were also so saturated that water squirted up from them when we nailed them down.

By now the air raids had started and though being 25 miles from London, we could see the sky lit up at night by the many fires caused by the raids. Sometime we spent our nights in the cellar of our home but I recall one night when sleeping upstairs, a load of incendiary bombs fell in the road outside and in the grounds of Lockers Park School on the other side of the road.
The nearest high explosive bomb came down one night in Astley Hill near where one of my friends, Eric Wade lived and just a few hundred yards from our home so I went to look at the damage. All I could see was a pile of brick rubble which was all that was left of a couple of houses and all that had been Mrs Preston's home. Mrs Preston was well known locally, she was a big jovial woman who used to stand at the gate of her home when, as kids, we ran down the hill every morning trying not to be late for school, giving us a wave and telling us to hurry up.
Now she was gone, but I never forgot her, especially many months later on one day, when in the middle of an attack, a group of German soldiers passed unsuspectingly in front of the sights of a machine gun that I was holding.

One day I spotted my friend Eric, immaculately dressed in the blue uniform of the Air Training Corps. Now I have always been fascinated by aircraft so I cycled with him one night to High Street, Watford to join the ATC. But unfortunately I had chosen the wrong night, for during a lecture on radial engines, a couple of high explosive bombs were dropped on the Brewery, virtually next door! The meeting promptly broke up, I cycled home furiously and I never went back.

So though still much too young to be called up, I joined what is now known as the Home Guard. Originally they were called 'Local Defence Volunteers' (LDV for short) and were then often called 'Look, Duck and Vanish'. We had just a few rifles but one day we were sent a couple of Sten Guns, our first automatics which had magazines that carried 9 mm bullets. These are perhaps best described as ugly, crude and not very efficient but were proudly proclaimed in the press with the rather doubtful claim that they had been invented by a Colonel S and a Mr T, with the subsequent EN standing for England.
Such was the quality of wartime propaganda
There were no instructions but we found it easy to take the first one apart but none of the others could put it together again. So I had a try and, having unknowingly fitted the heavy bolt mechanism in the wrong way and forcibly over compressed the spring to be able to click the handle back in position it was not surprising that it would not work. So someone else took over and forced the handle off with the result that the coil spring, together with several other bits of mechanism, flew up into the air and we never found them!

And then one day, completely out of the blue, I received a letter from the then Ministry of Labour, 'directing' me to do war work at Tilbury Docks in London. The letter did not say what the work would be, but I was told to take my carpenters tools and I soon found myself helping to build units for the top secret, Mulberry Harbour

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