大象传媒

Born just 2 weeks before the war started my memories are necessarily brief and fragmented. Surprisingly they are still strong and vivid. This is mainly due to the fact that wartime events were so different from my normal life as a young boy growing up in Blockley, a sleepy village on the northern flanks of the Cotswolds.

My earliest memory comes from May 1943. An American field hospital was to be built in Northwick Park, a large country estate on the edge of the village. My father took me to see the initial construction work. As an an adult I would have been horrified to see the beautiful park land so brutally destroyed. As a child I was captivated by the scale of the works as large yellow dumper trucks sped noisily about moving huge loads of soil. The parkland was never restored and the hospital buildings survive to this day as units on an industrial estate.

Another village memory comes from 1944, at the start of the long preparations for
D Day, when an American task force pitched camp. One of our local walks took us past the spot where the camp had been set up. I can recall little about the soldiers themselves. What I do remember is stopping by a mobile field kitchen. The counter was high above my head. The American manning the kitchen offered me a cream cracker with butter on. Although we sometimes had butter from local farms the combination was an unimaginable luxury. Just past the camp we passed our air raid defences, a solitary 'ack ack' gun sitting outside a flimsy wooden shed. My interest in this only related to it being a complicated piece of machinery, a big toy. Why it was there; why there were troops in the village; why a huge blast screen had been erected outside the main entrance of my school concerned me not.

Other wartime memories come from London. I had an aunt who lived just off the Portobello Road. The birth of my sister in 1943 and problems with my mother's health resulted in my making at least two visits to London. I cannot recall anything specific from the first visit. However it did make some impression because on a later visit, probably from early 1945, I do remember noticing that there were more gaps in the row of houses than before. I was gradually waking up to the consequences of war.

In 1945 I recall picking up some conversation on a bus which seemed to relate to the complete destruction of an area one quarter of a mile wide somewhere in London. I discovered recently that in March 1945 134 people died in Stepney, East London from a V2 rocket attack. It might have been this tragedy that they were talking about. As
I started to make the uncomfortable connections, London became rather more menacing. A siren going off one night had me getting out of my bed in panic and scurrying into the kitchen to get some comfort from Auntie Chris and Uncle Percy.

Other memories were simply vignettes of life in wartime London. A very obvious change in my aunt's street from an earlier visit was the appearance of air-raid shelters. They were simple brick buildings with concrete roofs built in a row down the centre of the street and close enough together for us to jump from one to the other. How we got up on top I cannot recall. On this visit the water supply failed briefly and I was sent to join a queue and get water from a stand pipe in the street. Since I could not have brought much back I suspect that it was a good excuse to get me from under my aunt's feet. On my return to breakfast I remember commenting on how blue the milk looked. I was told it had probably been watered down.

On the 1945 visit I visited Hyde Park Corner with my father. I was most impressed by the barrage balloons floating above our heads. However I recall that we had to pick our way carefully across the open space through the obstacles created by the retaining cables and their huge steel and concrete mounts. On the road fringing the park I saw a red London bus towing a trailer with cylinders on it. My father told me that the bus was running on gas.

In Blockley, by contrast, the war seemed far away. One cold winter night just before Christmas, possibly in 1944, the village children were taken to a party in the local POW camp. This camp housed prisoners mainly from the North African campaigns. The party was held in a large hut, brightly lit and full of Christmas decorations. To us it was a wonderland. We were all seated at long trestle tables and plied with food. All I can remember was the ice cream scooped out of large metal tins. It was something I had never tasted. After the meal we were all given presents. These were ingenious toys made from scrap wood and strip metal salvaged from tin cans and colourfully painted.

A final late memory, which I can't date, has the village full of American troops driving down the street in their jeeps and handing out chewing gum to the children. 鈥淣ever鈥� said our parents, 鈥渘ever, ever get into a jeep with an American.鈥� But of course we did.

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