大象传媒

Home was a fairly large house, rented by my Mum and Dad in Freshfield on the coast of Lancashire, where the sand dunes looked over the Mersey estuary, and where, during the war, the convoys could be seen sailing in and out of the docks.
When war began my father was still at home, working as the manager of a printing company in Liverpool for five and a half days a week. Sunday was therefore a valued day of rest. So it was that on one of those days he settled down after his roast lunch, and a drink or two, to his afternoon nap, my Mother in the next chair to his, happy that I was harmlessly playing together with my friend Gerald in the open ground behind the house.
There had been an excavation in this field and Gerald and I decided to see how far we could tunnel into the sandy earth at the side. Gerald was a faster tunneller than me and he was soon so far in that only his feet were visible.
I was only in to my waist, but struggling a bit until I pulled myself out for a breather just as the two holes collapsed, completely burying Gerald. I had narrowly escaped the same fate. There was a moment of panic before I ran as fast as my little legs could take me to fetch my Mum and Dad. Awakened from a deep slumber it was some time before my father roused himself, so it was my mother who reached the scene first. By the time Dad arrived she had managed to furiously dig down to Gerald's head, trying to restore his breathing, so they completed the recovery and thankfully were able to administer artificial respiration. Next morning we were pleased to find out that, after a good night's sleep, Gerald was fully recovered, and we were both alive!
Not long after this incident my father went away. As a member of the Reserve he volunteered very early. Initially he was at various parts of the UK, but later in Europe. Sometimes he would come home on leave. It was good to see him, but I carried on, going to school or with friends, so these were not particularly memorable occasions. When he was away, and particularly during school holidays, life was carefree, although sometimes foolhardy. As a small boy of seven or eight during the war this was a time full of excitement.
The local golf course, where my father had been a member, was taken over to become Woodvale airfield. Planes were always taking off and landing, and I soon learned to identify all the types of aircraft. Somehow I had managed to obtain numerous black bakerlite models, which were used in those days for identification training. As it was a fighter airfield the planes were usually Spitfies, Huricanes and, later, Typhoons with the Overlord striped markings on the underside of the wings. But sometimes there was the excitement of spotting a Beaufighter or a Blenheim bomber.
Later in the war, one of my pals told me of a "secret" aeroplane at the airfield that was constructed entirely of wood, so I was thrilled one day to identify this twin engined plane swooping overhead as a Mosquito.
There was an efficient inteligence network among the lads of the neighbourhood. I had heard that a Wellington bomber had crashed. It had been returning from a raid over Germany and had made an emergency landing, but, the airfield not being large enough for planes of this size, it had overshot the runway, skidded over the railway line between Liverpool and Southport, and come to a halt next to the pine wood that grew on the other side. This was something to be investigated, and was only about a mile away, so we dashed off to find that it was outside the security fence and unguarded. We had never had the opportunity to get so close to an aircraft before, so we were soon clambering over it, careless of any danger or wrongdoing.
Another time, much later, a further chance came in a similar area when a Mosquito had run off the runway, but this time it had somersaulted over onto its back. We had heard that the pilot had tragically been trapped underneath and the story was that he had gone mad with the fear that the fuel would ignite before he could be rescued. This was one time when I believe we became aware of the horror of the war. However this did not prevent us from stealing large pieces of perspex windscreen to carve into rings for us and friends.
It was late in 1940 when I had to go into hospital for the second time in my life. The first time had been just before the war, when I nearly lost an eye when another boy threw a stone at me. On this occasion I was swinging through the branches of a large tree in the front garden when a rotten branch broke. I landed on my back several feet below and was knocked temporarily unconscious. Two weeks later I was in a semi-coma with cerebro spinal meningitis and rushed into Liverpool Infirmary. I was saved by a very new drug, at that time, called M & B. I remember the air raids during this time, when I was too ill to go to the shelters with the walking sick. My bed was pushed into the corridor, away from the windows, in dim lighting, while the ghostly figure of a nurse stood by me.
At home we suffered the blitz like many others, being close to Liverpool and some bombs fell on the area. But many more fell in the pine woods towards the seashore. When stray incendiaries exploded in the trees they caused such a fire that, possibly, the German aircrews thought they must have been targetting Liverpool docks. We spent many nights in our makeshift shelter under the stairs. We would emerge, when we dared, to look over towards the city with it's beams of searchlights and flashes of anti aircraft fire. The night when Tate and Lyle's sugar factory and Bryant and Mays matches were hit the whole sky was alight like daylight with the glow reflected from the underside of the clouds. During one summer holiday I heard that my school had been hit. I hurried down there to find, disappointedly, that the bomb had not exploded and there were unexploded bomb signs preventing close access.
Collecting souvenirs was a constant occupation, which enabled me to create a museum in our empty garage. I put a notice on the gate inviting the public to come in and view. I do not think anyone did, but I spent hours on the beach, picking up buoys, which had come adrift, pretending them to be mines. A brilliant source of bits and pieces for my collection was the scorched pine woods after a raid. It was at the edge of these when I was scavenging that there was an enormous explosion that knocked me off my feet. I was frightened on this occasion and later discovered that a soldier had been blown up in the trees, trying to defuse a large bomb. This did not deter me though when I was hunting among the debris and charred remains in the woods after a raid. There were peices of shrapnel and tail fins of incendiaries, one of which I picked up to find the unexploded bomb attached. It was about eighteen inches long, with a flat nose. This was a great find, which had to be explored. To do this I decided to take the bomb apart by unscrewing the nosecap, which turned out to be difficult. So, in order to loosen it, I hit it against a tree several times, which must have had some effect (but luckilly, not the one that might have happened), and I eventually got inside it and took out some of the works. I never took it home because, belatedly, I got frightened about what my mother would say when I returned with a complete bomb.
Surprisingly, I survived the war, but I feel it must have been with some relief that, in 1945, my parents packed me off, out of the way, to boarding school. Now, at the age of seventy two, I remember those carefree times as some of the best of my life.

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