大象传媒

I鈥檓 Mark Weston, and this is the story of my granddad, Ken Martin.

I was sitting round the radio a Sunday morning on the 3rd of September 1939. It was 11am and the whole of the family was anxiously listening. I heard Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister at the time, announced that Germany had refused to withdraw her troops from Poland and that a state of war existed between Britain and Germany.

Immediately, the air-raid sirens started to sound the warning signal- a sort of high-pitched wailing, loud and frightening- and I have never forgot it since. Everyone rushed out into the street, half-expecting total destruction to rain down from the sky. Nothing did happen, not yet anyway.

Things remained pretty quiet for some time after and people got on with their regular lives .I had passed an exam called the 鈥�11+鈥� earlier in the year, and was due to begin High School for the September term (the high school is now 6th Form College in North Shields). The government had decided there should be no large meetings with lots of people there- like schools, football matches, etc- so we went on lots of day trips to the Fish Quay, the Dove Marine Laboratory and the beach. We had to carry our gasmasks with us everywhere too; they were kept in cardboard boxes and hung round our necks on string.

In 1940, we were given the option to be evacuated, my parents decided that I should, and my classmates and me were sent to Hexham. When we arrived there, most people had families already arranged but I had to wait overnight to go to a family. I stayed with a family called Rutherford; they had a son who I became very friendly with even though he was older than me. He showed me all of Hexham and the surrounding river and also told me how to make a good catapult! I learned later that he joined the RAF (his ambition) but was killed in training.

For schooling at Hexham, we went in the afternoons to Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, the local children would go in the morning, which I didn鈥檛 like because we had to wake up and wait for the afternoon whilst they could go in the morning and relax afterwards.

I enjoyed my time in the countryside, and we revelled in the open air. At night we would watch the searchlights sweeping the sky over Newcastle looking for German bombers. Apart from the increase in soldiers in the village, you wouldn鈥檛 really be able to guess that there was a war on!

After about a year possibly, pupils began to drift back home to Tynemouth, Tyne & Wear and eventually most of the school was back home and =full time schooling began. Things had been relatively quiet and the government had relaxed its rules regarding people congregating. After having been evacuated to avoid the bombing (which never occurred) we were now back on Tyneside just in time to meet the bombing which now started.

Air raids were mainly at night and the wailing of the dreaded sirens alerted the public. If it was after bedtime, parents used to rouse their children, throw some extra clothing over their night attire and make their way to the air raid shelter, which had been installed by the authorities. If your house had a garden you had an 鈥淎nderson shelter鈥� made of corrugated steel and sunk into the ground, whereas if you lived in terraced housing with a yard, you had a brick built structure with a concrete roof in the yard. Some householders, meanwhile, opted for the 鈥淢orrison Shelter鈥� which was somewhat like a metal cage and was built under the dining room table.

We, who lived in a terrace, had a brick shelter in the yard, so when the sirens went we made our way to it and sat there by the light of a candle till the raid was over. It was cold, damp and miserable! Outside, meanwhile, you would hear the bombers draining overhead and the shrieking of the bombs as they came down, followed by a loud 鈥渃rump鈥� as the bombs exploded. The defences of course, were not idle and searchlights swept the sky searching for the raiders whilst the sound of anti-aircraft fire added to the din. I remember the largest gun in the area was at Willington Square, North Shields and people cheered up when that fired as it indicated they must have someone in their sights! Later in the war a rocket battery was installed on land in the east of Broadway near the railway line where it passes Tynemouth Park and when that went off in unison you certainly knew about it!

During the raids there was the continuous splatter of shrapnel coming down and hitting roofs and streets. These were jagged pieces of metal, usually 4 or 5 inches long resulting from the shells bursting above and it was a schoolboy pastime to go around the next morning collecting souvenir to show your friends (a bit like collecting conkers in more peaceful time)

The nearest bombing to us in Percy Main, where I had then lived, was a stick of bombs straddling the streets 鈥� one landed in each street adjoining our house and from and from a line between them, one must have passed immediately over our roof before hitting the ground. My father who was an Air Raid Warden, went to the scene of one explosion 鈥� it was a house we had lived in previously and found it flattened. He knew the people who lived there and he found them shouting beneath the debris for help. He assured them by shouting that assistance was forthcoming and he and a team began to tackle the fallen masonry in an attempt to reach them. Suddenly, however the wreckage sagged again and the shouting stopped. The team reached the family within minutes but they were all dead by then. My father would not believe it and never got over it, so near but do far!

On a lighter note 鈥� we as schoolchildren were given the morning following a raid off school if the air raid happened after midnight or if it had been an evening raid and the all clear siren did not sound till after midnight.
Can you imagine the scene during all the banging and clattering of explosions, anxiously watching the clock to see if the pointers were getting near?

Little things come to mind whilst im writing this like while a bomber crashed at hollywell dean and my friends and I cycled through to see it.
I was amble to collect some machine gun bullets as souvenirs and brought them home with some triumph. This was to be short lived however as someone set the word around that the police were searching houses for items of that nature. I quickly ran to the fields behind where Percy main bus carriage stands and buried my prizes in the mood by the side of the burn, which ran there then. There are no fields there now and so no burn either so sometimes in future years an archaeologist might dig the bullets up, stroke his chin and say 鈥渁 bit of a mystery this鈥� but I know and now you know.

To keep the morale of the people up, open-air dances were held on Front Street Tyne mouth and on the tennis courts in Tyne Mouth Park. Cinemas continued to show films, usually changing the pictures twice a week. If an air raid occurred during the show an announcement was made on the screen, inviting people to leave if they so desired. Most people became so blas茅 that they opted to stay and get their moneys worth.

Whenever you left the house after dark everywhere was in inky darkness, no streetlights, no head lights on the few cars and busses on the streets. A few people carried torches but were not allowed to keep them on continuously just the briefest now and then.

I joined the air training corps when I was about fourteen or fifteen. This was a cadets organisation for those boys who saw their future in the air force. We had air force blue uniforms and met at Linskill School for drilling and instruction for the Morse code, air navigation and aircraft recognition. We used to have books of the aircraft from the various warring nations and we were able to identify an aircraft by the picture from the books we even had quizzes on it. We were taken away on camps at various RAF stations and usually managed a flight on a training plane. Once we went to an operational bombing airfield in Yorkshire and were allowed to chalk rude messages on some of the bombs being loaded into the bomber, which was about to set off for Germany.

The beaches were barbed wire off during the war in case of invasion. A school friend of mine went once with his brother and wriggled under the wire and onto the beach. Once there they picked up an object and examined it. It turned out to be an antipersonnel mine and it exploded. One boy lost an eye and three fingers from his hand.

Towards the end of the war when I was fifteen, I joined the air raid precautions service as a messenger boy. The idea being that if bombing had destroyed the telephone system, we messengers could cycle between ARP stations with messages a required (I was to be a hero at last) we did all sorts of training and first aid fire fighting etc but I never had an occasion to put it into practice (maybe the Germans herd that I was now in some sort of uniform and gave in)

Whilst at school we were given mock air raid drills. The bell sounded, you donned your gasmask and you filed in orderly lines to the shelter there were tunnels built into the schools playing field with subdued blue lighting, forms to sit along the walls facing each other and a pool of water on the floor it was a ghastly experience.

That鈥檚 about it then- come the end of the war there were bonfires and dancing in the streets, happiness around. Myself, I was now left school, but was not to be called up into army until year later, so I have no glowing wartime experiences to relate 鈥� merely life as it was for a schoolboy.

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