大象传媒

SIXTY YEARS AGO

Childhood Memories of World War 2

by David Andrews-Brown

During several months of preparation for D-Day, I was in my eighth year, and a veteran of air raids and rationing 鈥� at least during my holidays from prep school. In term time I was relatively isolated from such phenomena, but at home I had my own gas mask, and a heavy adult-sized steel helmet which wobbled on its adjustable kapok lining, and made it difficult for me to keep my head up straight.

Like all English boys, I knew the names of nearly every aircraft on each side of the conflict I didn鈥檛 even think of trying to understand. It was sufficient to know that we were in the right, and that we would win. Every boy knew that. And for most of the time, war was fun. During the holidays, I could join other boys in cadging chewing-gum from American soldiers, and breaking a regulation by talking with German prisoners, working under guard in the road outside our house. I could gather the strips of silver-coated material dropped by our own planes to confuse German radar, and I could look forward to receiving letters from my father, an officer in the Royal Air Force.

But when a bomb dropped one night with a piercing whistle and an explosion which shook the house, as my mother, younger brother and I were on our way downstairs to the air raid shelter 鈥� a cupboard under the stairs, chilling fear mixed uneasily with boyhood excitement. And when the next day, I had eagerly gone outside to see what damage the bomb had caused, I was simply astonished to find three nearby houses reduced to knee-high rubble; surrounding dwellings looking as if a giant had stepped on them, and an entire road of shattered windows. But fear came with the realisation that if the bombs had fallen two or three hundred yards in another direction, I might have been killed.

There was likewise a strange blend of excitement and fear in watching tracer bullets travel in straight lines across a night sky as searchlights swept the heavens for the enemy planes we could only hear.

The most chilling experience came when lying in the symbolic safety of my mother鈥檚 bed, on a night when we were all too tired to go down to the shelter, and listening to lone German aircraft, flying overhead with a sinister, regularly interrupted engine noise. Knowing the pilot up there had come to kill, and had the power to do so, engendered a fear that was too cold for tears.

Perhaps, as I lay there, I remembered an incident at the beginning of the war, when my mother, my grandmother and I were sheltering under a heavy oak table at an uncle鈥檚 house during an air raid. A bomb fell not far away in an earth-shattering explosion, and in the eerie and pregnant silence that followed, I had heard myself piping, 鈥淢ummy, am I dead?鈥�

Back in our own house, I would imagine that Adolf Hitler was hiding under my bed, and I dared not move for fear that he would realise I was there above him, and would emerge to kill me. Later, the F眉hrer entered a recurring dream in which I was lying in that same bed in a large oval room. The only sound I could hear was my own loud heartbeat as Hitler taunted me from behind a wall which I was always unsuccessful in reaching, perhaps in a futile effort to attack him.

But that element of fun returned, for example, during war games played on a common in front of our house, the Home Guard men firing at each other with chalk bullets, and arguing about who had shot whom.

I am ashamed today to recall that I laughed on learning that a large bomb, on which we encouraged to stick Victory Stamps, sold in aid of servicemen and women, was to be dropped over Germany on Hitler鈥檚 birthday.

Inevitably, war entered our games. At prep school we used to create what we called lands. These were often built at the bases of tree trunks where we laid out miniature fields planted with genuine crops of mustard and cress, which we harvested and ate at tea time on bread and thinly-spread rationed butter. Our Dinky Toy cars, lorries and buses travelled along miniature mud roads, and one boy was enterprising enough to build a canal which could hold water. But our toys also included canons and tanks and planes, and it was not long before one land declared war on another, bombing it with acorns at first, but eventually finishing off a raid with a heartless kicking of lovingly built fields and roads. And then there were tears. Needless to say, the headmaster came to know of these wars, and he settled the matter in an ingeniously instructive way. Cecil Benjamin Stafford Northcote called a meeting at which a peace treaty was formerly agreed. Then we began to realise again, albeit dimly, that war was not a game after all.

An uncle, my mother鈥檚 younger brother, lost his life in the eastern Mediterranean during that war. I cannot claim to have been deeply affected, for I recall meeting him only once. Neither can I claim to have suffered in any material way, yet I have no doubt that the absence of my father was a spiritually damaging experience, the effects of which I can detect only now.

Was it, paradoxically, a beneficial experience? Claims that the relative privation involved was good for us might be true, but knowing today something of how children fared on mainland Europe, I realise how fortunate British children were by comparison. Twice recently I have heard it said on 大象传媒 radio that we did not have sweets and chocolate during the war, but we certainly did. They were rationed, of course, but I ate my first Mars bar in 1943, and at prep school each boy was given a pint of milk a day. Once we even had oranges.

As I have said, we did not, of course, know the reasons for the war. Neither did we follow its progress with any real understanding. But our experience provided an unforgettable background against which to understand it later in reading the history of the conflict. We could then gain better insight into the phrase on posters declaring 鈥淭he walls have ears鈥�, and on others asking 鈥淚s your journey really necessary?鈥� We would also learn the story behind Lord Haw-Haw鈥檚 broadcasts from Germany. The broadcasts themselves had not frightened me, in part because my mother probably told me he was bluffing, and in part because his delivery was so counterproductively unimpressive.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I remember the two-staged ending of the war in VE Day and VJ day. I was at home for the first celebration, and I remember a street party in which adults danced the Hokey Pokey on the edge of a crater caused by a German bomb which just missed the railway bridge not far from our house. VJ Day is associated in my memory by a metal Union Jack at prep school, where the headmaster鈥檚 wife organised a victory concert in the form of an imaginary 大象传媒 radio broadcast. A song, composed for the occasion, contained the line, 鈥淭he only Jerry left is the one under the bed!鈥� Jerry, in those days, was popular name for a chamber-pot.

The war over, I remember a particular scene which poignantly underlined the end of hostilities. I was in a boat-train taking us board a ship in Southampton for a new life in South Africa. And from a window of the Southern Railway train, I could see various grey warships crowding part of the harbour, one listing heavily to port, as if leaning on a sister-ship. Somehow they were like large abandoned toys that had outlived their usefulness.

Whether it had been a game in any sense, we now knew for certain that it was over. Yet even we children were left with a strangely uncomfortable sense of having left an era in which we knew how to react, yet without this change having been replaced by any clear ideas about the future.

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