大象传媒

Richard Whitmore, the writer and broadcaster of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, was six years old when World War Two broke out. Throughout the war he lived with his parents, Tom and Roma Whitmore and a baby brother, Mark, in West Hill, Hitchin. He writes:

I still have the bullet that once bore my name. In fact, Corporal Bates, my Royal Air Force drill instructor back in 1952, wouldn't have been too pleased to hear me refer to it as a bullet. "That is a round, lad. A round. The bullet is the nasty little bit that flies out the end and kills you. Let's have a look. Ah! Snub-nose, nine- millimetre. Nasty bit of work. Send yer brains out the back of yer 'ead with no trouble that would."

The 'round' - one of six that went with a revolver that belonged to my father during the war. I came across it by chance one day, poking about in places where I shouldn't have been. A fascinating discovery for a small boy. After that, I made numerous forbidden sorties into my parents' bedroom to take the revolver out of the dressing table drawer and play war games with it. Clicking it open. Snapping it shut. Spinning the empty chamber. Mercifully, I don't remember ever trying to load it. But once, from the bedroom window, I spotted the elderly figure of Mrs Stokes from Number 53, plodding up the road with a brown paper carrier bag full of groceries. Got to stop the Jerries reaching our house! K-peew! K-peew! Gotcha! K-peew! Mrs Stokes did stop.

"Don't you dare point that thing at me you naughty boy! I'll tell your father!"

Luckily, she didn't. Indeed, it was many years before I mentioned this escapade to my father. By then, I was in my forties and he was quite an old man. Now, I had always assumed that the weapon had been issued to him at the outbreak of war, when he was put in charge of the Royal Observer Corps lookout post at Offley. So you can imagine my feelings when he told me, almost casually, that he had bought the revolver privately. And if the Nazis had ever conquered England he was going to use it to kill his family.

Before I could register my indignation, he added: "We knew all about them, you see. The selective breeding. The slave labour. The experiments and gas-chambers in the concentration camps. I couldn't have let them take you away to that."

He told me he'd even had to work out the order in which we were to be dispatched. Me first, then my baby brother, then my mother. That left three rounds. "A couple for the first two buggers through the front door; the last one for myself." Well, that was his plan. I told him I could not believe he would ever have been able to do such a thing if that time had come. Immediately, I regretted saying it, because his face clouded over, I think because I'd reminded him of the mental torment he went through when deciding whether or not to go out and buy the weapon.

Then I remembered how, as a child, I had been shocked to see to see my father crying. Really crying. On his lap was a newspaper containing photographs of British servicemen being fished out of the sea during the great retreat from Dunkirk. You see, for Dad and all those others who had been fortunate enough to survive the earlier hell of warfare in France and Belgium, it was happening all over again.

"You were far too young to understand what it was like in 1940," he said. "They were just across the channel, only 25 miles away and they were bombing our cities to pieces. You cannot begin to imagine how we felt." Then, as though ticking off his careless teenage son for some misdemeanour, he almost snapped at me: "And don't you ever forget this, boy. We all just sat back and let that bloody little tyrant come to power. A few short years. That's all it took. Don't ever forget that, boy. Don't ever forget."

We never spoke of it again after that. Dad had returned the revolver to the gunsmith in 1945. Then, in 1995, as we were celebrating fifty years of peace in Europe, my mother died and it fell to me to empty the family house. That was when I came across my bullet and its five companions. Still in Dad's dressing table drawer, rolling around in a keepsake tin among pieces of broken jewellery and the little silver ornaments from their wedding cake. A father's memento from that most terrible period in our history. Don't ever forget.
漏 Copyright Richard Whitmore 2005

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