大象传媒

Many of the more lasting of my WWII recollections are associated with the arrival in our town of large numbers of US servicemen in preparation for the D-day invasion. After school, we would climb up the railway embankment where the arriving troop trains would slowly chuff their way up the steep incline to Swindon Old Town station. Enthusiastic waving and cheering and shouts of 鈥淕ot any gum, Chum鈥� at the GI鈥檚 leaning out the train windows would usually produce the desired results, the much-treasured chewing gum, by this time a schoolyard currency; an occasional candy bar, a pack or two of cigarettes, and once in a while a pack of condoms. While we immediately wolfed down the candy, and occasionally experimented with the cigarettes, the condoms were a mystery to our eleven-year-old minds. We quickly found out you could blow them up to a truly impressive size, but why GIs were issued with balloons, we could never quite figure out.

In the town, any vacant buildings, mainly church halls, were used as temporary shelters for the US troops. At lunch break we would congregate around these buildings to fraternize with the new arrivals. Several of my friends and I carried in our school bags autograph books in which we persuaded the GIs to make entries. The usual thing was 鈥淭o a nice English kid, (signed) Mike 鈥︹��. Some six or seven years later while I was at home on leave from the Navy, my mother produced my autograph book which, upon perusal, revealed three separate entries by Joe DiMaggio, all spelled differently. I don鈥檛 know to this day whether I met the real Joe, but the GIs were obviously anxious to impress us.

Not more than a mile from our house was a dump where much of the trash from the nearby US Army Air Force hospital was disposed of. We went there, despite dire warnings from our parents, to scavenge for rubber IV tubing 鈥� unsurpassed for making slingshots 鈥� odds and ends of uniforms and webbing equipment, and anything else that looked useful. We once spent an entire afternoon searching for the matching flying boot to one found that morning, blissfully unaware that the boot we were looking for had probably been shot off, together with its owner鈥檚 leg, on a bombing raid over Germany.

漏 2005, Geoffrey J. H. Brown. All rights reserved.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.