大象传媒

I had a good war, but then I was born nearly three months after the outbreak, so I was in no position to take an active part in it. My mother always joked that, as I was a "war baby", I had the government utility mark - CC41 - stamped on the back of my neck!

We lived near Farnham, Surrey, so were not unduly troubled by German aircraft. However, there was an air raid siren close to the bottom of the garden, so we were kept in noisy touch every time there was an alert. When the siren did sound at night, which was not infrequent, I would appear at the top of the stairs in my blue corduroy siren suit, just like Winston Churchill's, complete with a red plaster Churchillian V-sign on my chest, having woken and dressed by myself, and waited to be collected by my mother and taken down to the blacked-out dining room. The windows were covered in black material, and the glass taped up, and there was a stout table in the middle of the room should we have to take cover.

My father, too old to start flying in the RAF, had joined the service on the outbreak of war, and spent the years at the RAF base at Andover, supervising the procurement and distribution of Spitfire spares, amongst others. He rose to the giddy height of Wing Commander, but never flew anything more threatening than a desk. He claimed. of course, that without him and his spares, we could never have won the war.

At home, my mother had two daughters and me, the youngest sibling, to look after. She also took in a delightful German Jewish couple who had managed to escape from the Nazi advance. Mr and Mrs Chotson (I hope I have spelt their name correctly!) helped my mother to look after me, teaching me a few German words and how to make a "tank" out of an empty cotton reel, a section of a candle, an elastic band and two match sticks. We would have races on the dining room table. My sisters, being older than me, were mostly away at school.

The family car was a tiny Fiat 500, and, my mother tells me, we packed her, a cousin, us three children and luggage for five into it for a holiday in the west country. All the road signs and village name-posts had been removed to confuse invading Germans; they certainly confused the two adults in the car, for apparently they circled Stonehenge at least twice.

We also had a Canadian Air Force officer and his wife billeted on us for a period - "Hoop" and Margot Hoover. Like the Chotsons before them, they were very kind and friendly to me. "Hoop" (a strange nickname, the origin of which I never knew)even making two superb, immaculate (though non-flying) models of a Mosquito and a Horsa glider.

I had learned to identify British fighters, bombers and gliders, and the difference in sound between synchronised British engines and the pulsating, unsynchronised German engines. It must have been D-Day, 1944, for I remember the sky full of aircraft, including, I believe, towed gliders, and, my mother tells me, listening to the 大象传媒 News that evening to hear how many of them managed to return. "I counted them all out....! (no, not really!). There was a major excitement one day when a German aeroplane crashed just a couple of miles from our house, but security was so effective that we never discovered what type it was and whether the pilot escaped.

I do remember a seemingly endless line of military vehicles, including tanks, stationary on the Hog's Back, in preparation for D-Day.

We kept two goats and a number of chickens, and were never short of milk and eggs. In fact, when the war was over and we no longer had goats, I had to drink cow's milk, and took an instant dislike to it which stayed with me for many decades. The adults would talk nostalgically about bananas and pineapples, but the nearest we got to them was plaster model bananas hanging on greengrocers' rails for decoration. When they eventually became available after the war, the anticipation was not fulfilled, and I find bananas very boring. I wonder how many other war babies found the same degree of disappointment after the war was over?

There was one of the famous "British Restaurants" in a Nissan hut on Farnham's Gostrey Meadow where we could eat the equally famous "Woolton Pie", named after the then Minister of Food, Lord Woolton. My mother was a good cook, and made the limited food that was available for the duration of the war very appetising. I particularly liked the Ministry-issue orange juice, and the "Radio" malt and rose-hip syrup which seemed to be staples of a young child's diet during the war.

The family dog was a yellow Labrador called Dinah. She was a great favourite with Canadian soldiers who were billeted not far from us. In the evening, they would drive past the bottom of our garden in their army lorry, give Dinah a loud whistle, and take her down to The Cricketers pub for a pint or two of beer. She was quite sozzled by the time she was brought home. One night, unfortunately, the goats got out onto the road and were chased by the Canadians in their lorry. One of the goats was pregnant, and the chase induced the premature, stilbirth of the kids. I shall never forget the sight of the pathetic pink lifeless bodies of the kids on the lawn. This was a dark blemish on the otherwise happy experiences we had with our war-time neighbours and refugees.

Relating these experiences to my wife, she recalls that her father, a Shropshire farmer, was in the Home Guard and used to do night patrols on the A5, stopping cars for security checks only to discover illicit liaisons in the cars! One was normally quite safe in the complete blackout during the war (the slotted grilles on car headlights were virtually useless), but to be caught by one of the Home Guard in a compromising situation was extremely embarrassing. Farmers knew most of the county, and who should be with whom in a car, but it did not always turn out like that. Still, "mum" was the word!

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