大象传媒

I am a 'war baby', born almost half way through WW2 in the dark days of July 1942, when this country stood alone and was critically near to losing the war. My parents and grandparents had moved in the late 1930s to the (then) small rural village of Park Street, just south of St. Albans. But many things changed after September 1939: the car, a lovely black Standard 10 with a rear boot door that opened out flat to carry luggage, spent the next seven years in our wooden garage; and my father, a printer in London by trade, being deemed not fit enough for the armed forces spent Mondays to Saturdays working in a munitions factory near Ruislip, cycling each way at the weekend with dimmed lights in the wartime blackout.

WAR ON THE HOME FRONT

War on the home front invovled my grandfather, James V. Smith, a WW1 veteran and later chairman of the St. ALbans Rural District Counil, as the local Air Raid Warden, and he had a tough brick Air Raid Post bomb shelter built in his one acre garden as his centre of operations, from which he did night patrols when raids were expected. I currently live in the same house, and we have recently (2005) put a false roof on this shelter to keep out the rain. It kept out the bombs, but not the wet, as the reinforced concrete roof was laid in three parts! As Warden he served the local community of 500 people, nowadays grown to over 6000.

My mother was equally involved in wartime activities. In her teenage years she had wanted to become a doctor, but openings for women then were rare. But now she trained as an auxiliary nurse, and held First Aid classes for local people. Also, because she kept chickens, the local council officials dictatorially allocated most of the eggs to various families in the village. With the larger gardens of those days one wonders why they didn't keep their own chickens.

Perhaps the biggest impact was made by the many evacuees of all ages which my mother took in. At night every room was a bedroom, with someone even sleeping under the stairs! Although both our parents are now gone my brother is still in touch with one of the children who stayed in our house all those years ago.

FAMILY LIFE

But 1942 brought all that to an end. With me inside making her gradually larger my mother cried 'enough' to the Evacuee authorities. These were perhaps the most difficult days of the war, and yet when our first child was born some thirty years later my mother's comment was "I don't think I'd want to bring a child into the world in the state it is now"!

My mother's time was further stretched by my being a sickly baby needing an operation at six weeks old for pyloric stenosis, which was often fatal in those days. I subsequently had to have a dairy-free diet, so we bought goat's milk from a 15th century farm house down our road kept by Mr. Teague, whose chief claim to fame was that as a radio operator on the west coast of Ireland he was the first person to reach the crash landing in a bog of the first trans-Atlantic flight in the 1920s. It was in his goat field that I first discovered what an electric fence is!

But, survivng that, I became a toddler and had a special playtime arrangement: whenever 'the music' was played I could go under the kitchen table and play with some favourite toys, but had to stay there until 'the music' was played again. The music was, of course, the local air raid siren, which continued to stand in the Park Street playing field until fairly recent years. Because of this I don't have any very early memories of the air raid warnings, because they were just fun. After 1944 when my brother was born I suppose that I had to share this playground, probably very reluctantly as I was irrationally jealous (having had so much attention previously) and remember once throwing stones at the bedroom window to keep him awake! I was a lovely little brat!

SIGHTS OF WAR

My most significant early memory is of the air lift of our forces to the Dutch town of Arnhem. We were right under their flight path, and my mother made me stand in the garden with her watching them until they had all flown over, which seemed to take hours. At the time I didn't appreciate this discipline at all, but have been immensely grateful since then for the experience. We saw what seemed like hundreds of aircraft, most or all of them towing gliders. We waved to them, and I distictly remember one man in a glider waving back. I have often wondered if he ever came home alive.

I nowadays watch the film 'A Bridge Too Far', and read books such as 'Arnhem Lift', with a great deal of feeling and respect. They were the cream of our young men. Many years later a friend who had just joined the army at that time told me of his meeting with some of those who managed to get back; he said that young men in their early twenties looked like old men, such was their harrowing experience at Arnhem.

THE GERMANS ARE COMING!

With the end of the war approaching in 1945 my mother decided to tell me what 'the music' really was, so that I would have some memory of it. I well remember the very next time the music happened. I was terrified (-I was an old man of 3 years by now), and insisted on keeping watch for invading forces. It was a breezy day, and I called my mother in great alarm to report that I had seen the bushes at the bottom of the garden moving, and that German soldiers were there! I was quite unable to accept her assurances, and was convinced that we would be overrun at any moment.

A much more sinister event had taken place a few months earlier. It was 9am on a foggy winter morning and my mother heard the drone of an approaching V1 flying bomb. These were designed to fly in a straight path to their intended target, then cut the engine and glide steeply down. (I have heard that sometimes our fighter pilots gently turned them around with their wingtips and sent them back!) Suddenly the noise stopped, and my mother realised that an impact on our house or very nearby was imminent. She rushed into the bedroom, got between the wall and the cot where I was sleeping, and leant over it to protect me from falling masonry. After what seemed like an age she heard a loud explosion some distance away. For some reason the V1 had levelled out and glided a further two miles, hitting a farmhouse in the middle of fields and killing the farmer and his wife who were having breakfast. The bomb was probably intended for the Handley Page aircraft company, situated about a mile from our house. Years later, in response to the many war films showing the heroic side of the conflict, my mother passed the comment, "The wartime wasn't an adventure; it was a dirty time".

A POWERFUL LEVELLER

The war was certainly a buildings leveller; the building adjoining my father's small printing firm in Clifton Street, London EC2, was destroyed and burnt out, and for two decades the outside wall showed where internal fireplaces and stairs had been. Unfortunately my father, a keen amateur photographer, never thought to take a picture of it! But the war was also a social leveller. When my parents moved to Park Street in 1937 my mother was met in the street by a belligerent local women who declared, "It will be twenty years before you're accepted here!". With the outbreak of the wartime threat this prediction became very untrue. Nevertheless, family and social life was more stable then, and most of us had the blessing of a firm family background even though it was sometimes pulled apart by the separation and death of war. One wonders how much of the loosening of such ties since those days was started by the later reaction against the austerity of the wartime years.

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