大象传媒

大象传媒 - WW2

Apart from the final year, when I was a boarder at Midhurst Grammar School, I spent the war years living in Fareham on the south coast and attending Price's School. Although Portsmouth and Southampton, on each side, were hard hit, Fareham escaped the worst of the bombing. Consequently, I did not experience the more frightening aspects of war and there was even an element of excitement in the frequent air raid warnings and the dog fights overhead, particularly during the Battle of Britain. This, combined with the foolhardiness of youth, probably explains why none of us at Price's seemed to realise the seriousness of the situation or the very real dangers which threatened us..

I do remember listening to Churchill's speeches on the radio with my family and being uplifted by his immortal oratory. I recollect quite clearly that it never occurred to me for one moment that Britain would not win the war. I was of course familiar with stories glorifying the British Empire and maps on classroom walls with vast areas of the world shown in a pinkish red to depict 'the empire on which the sun never sets'. The invincibility of Britain was further reinforced by a hazy knowledge of Agincourt, Waterloo and Trafalgar, and poems like The Charge of the Light Brigade. What chance did an upstart like Hitler have against a nation such as ours? In the long run, none we thought.

Our errand boy was the original Pike in Dad's Army. Being unfit for service, he became a member of the Fareham home guard. On one occasion he ran back to HQ in a panic, furiously pursued by a German airman who had baled out and wanted to surrender. Then there was the Titchfield home guard, which started with one WW1 Lee Enfield rifle that was kept locked up in a cupboard in the parish hall to which they each had a key.

At Lee-on-Solent the beach was protected by rolls of barbed wire, with big signs warning of mines. The local youngsters soon found a way through the wire and since no one was ever blown up I think the notices were just propaganda. A friend and I, who used to frequent the beach, dug caves into the cliff in case the Germans attacked Lee airfield or machine gunned the beach, as they did Fareham West Street. Along the top of the cliffs was a row of sand bagged gun emplacements, with guns pointing out to sea. Very impressive, until you got up close and saw the guns were made of wood! The biggest fright we had was when they blew up Lee pier to prevent its use by an invading force. Later, we saw the first mulberry harbours in the Solent, though we did not know what they were.

At the beginning of the war my father - an ex-sergeant, Royal Marines - built an air raid shelter for the family before any of the standard shelters became available. We dug out one of the rose beds and built up the walls with potato sacks filled with the soil from the digging. We had a ready supply of sacks from father's greengrocers shop.
For the roof we used sheets of corrugated iron reinforced with old bed frames and coverd the whole with clods of earth. The inside was lined with old sheets. This shelter served us quite well until we were later issued with a Morrison shelter. I clearly remember standing on top of this shelter and watching the Stuka dive bombers attacking Grange airfield. By then, my father had been called up and was small arms instuctor at Browndown. I learnt later that he had been firing at the Stukas from the top of the tower with an old WW1 Lewis gun.

On a number of occasions I made myself late for school by stopping to watch the vapour trails left by the dogfights during the Battle of Britain. I remember being indignant when I got into trouble, not only for being late, but also for not taking shelter during a raid. Another incident was when one boy brought a small unexploded incendiary bomb to school - we all had collections of shrapnel and other wartime debris which we showed each other. The bomb was, of course, quickly confiscated, the school closed and the bomb squad summoned. After that we redoubled our efforts in scouring the countryside, hoping to find another bomb which we could take to school and thus get another day off. School experience also brought into question the effectiveness of blast walls. At Midhurst Grammar School, as part of the victory celebrations, we found that half a dozen schoolboys could easily push over the blast walls protecting the windows of the boarding house.

I also have the war to thank, indirectly, for the loss of a front tooth. Because of the shortage of nuts and bolts, the bicycle which I rode to school had the front mudguard held on by a piece of wire. When this gave way one day I was thrown over the handle bars and hit the road with sufficient force to break the tooth clean off.

My wife,Norma, also has clear recollections of the war, as her family, then living in Portsmouth, was bombed out. The resultant trauma makes her reluctant to think or talk about the war years, so her memories are very different from mine. As a small child she remembers sheltering in fear under the kitchen table during the pounding which Portsmouth as a naval base received. She also remembers her mother throwing herself on top of her children when the bombs were falling really close. When they were bombed out and went to a public shelter, she remembers her brother in one of his father's long overcoats carrying the cage with their canary which had lost all its feathers in the blast. She also remembers her mother, who had only the clothes she stood up in, giving her only pair of slippers to a woman who was barefoot - a true act of Christain charity. When they were able to return to the ruins of their home they found that looters had stripped it of any thing not destroyed by the bomb. Later, they were all evacuated to Wickham.

Norma's father was on the Russian convoys, but the only thing she really remembers is that he fell into a hold and was hospitallised for a year. He was a quiet man and never said much at all about his WW2 experiences, but then it was only much latter that I learnt he had won a DSM at Zebruggee in WW1.

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