大象传媒

I was just seven when war broke out and can recall shopping with my mother for blackout material to pin on to light wooden frames which exactly fitted our window spaces. We also bought sticky tape for our windows to prevent flying glass in the event of bomb blast. Not that we thought sleepy Skegness would be high on Hitler's hit-list!

Soon the resort was transformed into a military camp. The laughter of holiday makers, the bells on the donkeys were overnight exhanged for the sound of hobnails and gunfire. The Army requisitioned many of the large seafront hotels and there were troops training all along the promenade. Butlins Holiday Camp was converted into H.M.S. Royal Arthur, our golden sands became a potential battlefield of tank traps and minefields, and every vantage point had its sand-bag gun emplacement or concrete pill box. There remained but one narrow corridor to the sea - left so the lifeboat could be launched.

Gibraltar Point, now a nature reserve, was a training ground for gun crews. My friends and I would cycle there to watch the artillery and though told many times to "Clear off" we simply ran away and sneaked back.

Food rationing meant that we were nearly always hungry. We never starved but our diet was meagre and monotonous. Bread and dripping was about the only snack available; a few broken biscuits a delight. Fortunately, there were always fish and chips and a fairly adequate supply of seasonal vegetables. Living in an agricultural area, a short train ride from Grimsby, did have its advantages!

My father joined the R.A.F. soon after the outbreak of war. The pay wasn't good and it was a constant struggle for my mother to make ends meet. My grandma, a widow, kept a small boarding house in the High Street and would take in "visitors" during the summer and "commercials" (commercial travellers who came by train) in a winter. This income soon dried up in those early war time days.

All the cinemas closed and the radio became our principal source of entertainment though there were occasional whist drives. One advantage of the lack of organised entertainment was that people read. I devoured everything from the Just William adventures to the tales of Sherlock Holmes. Visiting the local library became an almost daily activity. Often, I was late home from school because I had nipped in for a few minutes which soon became an hour or more as I sorted through the increasingly dog-eared stock of books.

The capacious basement of High Street's Hercock's banana store became our air raid shelter where we huddled together under the blankets in the freezing cold until the all clear sounded. Mostly, they were false alarms but, though it had no obvious strategic value, Skegness was bombed.

On one occasion, some houses, the pier and the indoor swimming baths were hit and, I believe, one or two people were killed. On another occasion, when the cinemas had re-opened, a lone bomber dropped its load before heading out to sea. It was Saturday afternoon and I had cajoled my mother into letting me attend as it was a children's programme. She made me promise to run home immediately if the siren went.

I was sitting in the front stalls, engrossed in the film, when there was a loud explosion nearby followed immediately by a second that rocked the cinema. The lights went out, the air filled with dust, and there was a great deal of shouting but no panic. Fortunately, the usherettes shone their torches and I quickly scrambled towards an emergency exit. The nearest appeared to be blocked by some rubble but some beefy sailors soon had it open and I escaped into the daylight. There seemed to be glass everywhere; it was impossible to walk without crunching it underfoot like potato crisps. Most nearby premises had lost their windows and I noticed one bomb had struck a bank before a second caught the front of the Tower cinema.

As I ran down the High Street, I met my anxious mother running towards me. She was obviously relieved to see that I was unhurt but I thought I would get into trouble because she later told me that all she could get out of me was that the siren hadn't gone off!

Covered in a thick layer of dust from head to toe, she whisked me to my grandmother's where I was stripped and given a hot bath in a tin tub in front of the kitchen fire. No one in the cinema suffered more than a few cuts and bruises but the proprietor of a cafe opposite was killed by flying glass.

My second encounter with the German luftwaffe came when I was playing football in a field near the gas works in Alexander Road. We heard a low flying plane and, as identifying aircraft was a pastime of many small boys, we stopped and stared. We often observed our own aircraft skimming the roof tops but this one was clearly an enemy. We could see the black crosses, even the front gunner, and we watched open-mouthed and spellbound as a bomb tumbled out. But, when we heard machine gun fire coming towards us, we ran for our lives towards a small ditch by a hedge at the side or our field.
Fortunately, we all escaped unscathed and the bomb missed the gas works; a cabbage patch on an allotment taking the full impact!

Skegness played its part in the various efforts to prosecute the war. People took their old metal to a collection point between Lumley Road and High Street, and supported the various fund raising efforts like Warship Day and Spitfire Day. The gardens along the promenade, once resplendent with roses and bedding plants, were given over to onions and cabbages as part of the Dig for Victory campaign.

I lived with my mother in Briar Close but we slept at my grandmother's. Eventually, we were issued with a Morrison shelter; a great steel table with removable steel-grill sides in which we crept whenever the siren went. This ugly beast was erected in my grandmother's kitchen and its top was soon adapted by me as a penny football pitch.
There were few toys to be had and this was a popular game, played with eleven pennies a side and a farthing as a ball.

A friend and I also devised a couple of cricket games. One was played outdoors with a minature, home-made wooden bat, three match sticks and a marble; the other involved dice and counters plus a large sheet of paper marked out with fielding positions.

I kept up with the war through a large wall map of Europe on which a series of pin flags marked the German advance and our retreat. I soon tired of recording all our losses but perked up when Montogmery gave Rommel a bloody nose in North Africa.

Our primary school was some distance from home but off we would go every day with our gas masks round our necks. Brick bomb shelters were built in the school playground, the windows were taped and many of the outer walls were reinforced with sandbags.

When I "went up" to Skegness Grammar School, there were a few uniforms available but their strict dress code soon had to be relaxed as supplies dwindled. Our headmaster was extremely patriotic and we were all made to learn extracts from Winston Churchill's speeches. I can still remember..."The gratitude of every home in our island..."

There were some evacuees in the town but I only met one or two of them as most were of primary school age. However, a Dutch girl who spoke some English joined our class. She was called Nadine, very bright but, hardly surprising, had difficulty understanding Shakespeare's English. I was asked to help. She was always reluctant to talk about how she came to be in Skegness and what had happened to her parents. Then, one day shortly after her country had been liberated, she simply disappeared. I was told she had gone back to Holland but I was quite upset as we had become good friends. She had written her address in the back of my "rough book" but the cover had detached and been lost.

One day, when cycling near Seacroft Golf Course, I saw a plane drop thousands of paper strips, black on one side but bright metallic on the other. My friends and I cycled furiously to were they had fallen but were disappointed with what we had found. Years later, I discovered they were called "window" and had been used to fool the German radar; perhaps they first tried them out in Lincolnshire?

As night fell, we became quite accustomed to seeing dozens of our bombers cross the coast. Then, in June 1944, my mother called me away from my homework and into the garden. This wasn't just a few wings going over, it was an armada. They kept coming for hours and, what made it even more dramatic, were the planes towing gliders.
"Hitler's going to cop it tonight", we thought. And he did. The next day we heard the announcement of the Second Front. Our troops had landed in Normandy.

At last, I could begin to move those German swastika
map-pins back towards Berlin!

ends
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