大象传媒

"The day war broke out.." (to borrow the opening words of Rob Wilton's famous Mr Muddlecombe sketch), I was about 8 1/2 years old. We lived in Sevenoaks (Kent).
I remember the event, the apprehension, the uncertainty. It was clear, even to me, that things were not going to be the same. My Father was just young enough to be called up: he had been through the trenches in WW1, and he went off to join his regiment on the Isle of Wight. To this day I still have the khaki woollen scarf that my Mother knitted for him with equal strips of darker khaki at each end - her way of using up two balls of slightly different coloured wool in a tidy military manner!

During those days of war we relaxed a bit, since all appeared to be quiet and static. We tried to keep our gas masks handy but no longer carried them with us everywhere we went. The containers-metal canisters on strings so that they could be slung over our shoulder-were downright uncomfortable, and I remember wondering whether those flimsy masks made of rubber and celluloid would really keep out seriously poisonous gas鈥 scary thought, but we just dismissed it.

It was all a bit unreal. At the time I was a radio nut: twiddle-knob mania my parents called it. The game was to 鈥渃ollect鈥� and identify as many foreign radio stations as possible. I could even detect the difference between Flemish from Belgium and Dutch from Hilversum. Hamburg was a favourite, bringing the ridiculous voice of Mr Joyce aka Lord Haw-Haw intoning 鈥淕armany calling, Garmany calling鈥� (why couldn鈥檛 the silly man say 鈥淕ermany鈥�?) He told us of our shipping losses in great detail, never in tons but in peculiar 鈥済ross register tons鈥�, whatever they were: perhaps it was a ploy to make the figures sound worse. I clearly recognized the big gap between his news and ours. His of course was a pack of lies while ours was 100% true. That HAD to be: God鈥檚 an Englishman-he鈥檒l see us right.

Come the summer of 1940, things started to hot up. That June I had measles. My Mother told me that I lay in bed slightly delirious and begged her to have the distant rumble from Dunkirk (could this have been audible in Sevenoaks?) silenced. Then a few weeks later the Battle of Britain began. I can still see the big formations of silver enemy aircraft flying high overhead, glinting in the blue September sky.

We evacuated briefly to Aylesbury where my Father was in charge of the guard at a prisoner-of-war camp. On the car journey there, in the absence of signposts, which had all been taken away, we got lost. I remember a Scotsman telling us that we needed to go to Slough, pronouncing it to rhyme with 鈥渢hrough鈥�. As a child I had the run of the camp, until鈥ne lone lorn prisoner arrived. He was a Luftwaffe pilot who had parachuted out of his plane and broken his neck on landing. To everyone鈥檚 great amusement, his name was Meinecke! While we were billeted on a local farm, one of the workers there taught me how to recognize all the aircraft which filled the skies; Spitfires, Hurricanes, Defiances, Battles, Ansons, Lysanders, Blenheims, Wellingtons, Hampdens, Whitleys, Tiger Moths, Magisters and Harvards, even Sunderland flying boats. I was hooked! But except during the Battle of Britain, I never saw a German aircraft-rather to my regret. They were all 鈥渃ollectable鈥�!

The Battle of Britain came to an end and my Mother and I returned home to Sevenoaks, where we remained for the rest of the war. Life assumed a routine. I did not suffer any real hardship or privation, thanks no doubt to my Mother鈥檚 sacrifices.

Absence of coffee, bananas and oranges did not bother me, though more chocolate would have been nice. Ration books seemed rather fun: 32 鈥榩oints鈥� for a small tin of salmon 鈥� cor! We kept chickens which had the freedom of the garden-free range par excellence! We fed them on 鈥榖alancer鈥� meal which was brought at the corn chandlers, mixed with boiled up potato peelings and scraps. The chickens went wild for this grisly m茅lange. My Mother used to meet her Sister every week for the formal exchange of our eggs for her carefully packaged food scraps, referred to as 鈥渟losh鈥�. We were hard put to keep track of the hiding places where the hens laid their precious eggs. The trick was to listen out for the triumphant cackling by which the hens betrayed their secret caches. Discovering a nest containing a dozen eggs raised a serious problem: which ones were fresh and usable? Once we reared a goose. Imagine a tiny broody bantam hen hatching out this huge egg. The gosling has a special diet reinforced with cod liver oil. When it was eventually killed to provide us with Christmas lunch, our disappointment was great: it tasted of fish. Yuk!!

I remember the night air raids on London. We never built a shelter: we would sleep under a robust dining room table which my Mother reckoned was equivalent to another floor above us. We regularly heard the throbbing drone of those BMW engines overhead (apparently specially tuned to sound scary). I never really believed that anything would happen to us, and luckily nothing did. Then towards the end came the Doodlebugs (V1 flying bombs). I clearly recall the first night of these-a totally different sound from their crude jet engines. In the morning we could see the things clearly and the news soon got around. 鈥淥nly duck if the engine cuts out鈥� was the watchword. And then the V2s-no warning of their arrival. One fell a few miles away, and we found a long length of thin oily wire on the driveway; it came in very useful for the raspberry plants! Italian prisoners of war worked in the fields opposite our house, bussed in from their camp. All quite relaxed-they roamed around as they wished. They made baskets from flexible twigs and came knocking on our doors offering them for sale. My Father was demobbed half way through the war approaching the age of 50. The former major became a private in the local Home Guard, to which he cycled off in the evening. 鈥淒ad鈥檚 Army鈥� is so evocative!

Our aircraft remained a big interest. A new kind of plane appeared and for some reason it was a while before the authorities revealed its name. Could it be an enemy? No, the RAF insignia were plainly visible. This was the Mosquito. Then came the four engine bombers, the Halifax and the Lancaster, and the Yanks; Fortresses, Liberators, Havocs, Marylands, Dakotas and Mustangs. Also the big gliders, towed by powered aircraft, that were to play a big part in the invasion.

School was not seriously affected. In the garden the Headmaster had a shelter built which, being a teacher of French, he named 鈥淢on Abri鈥�. I remember a visit to Biggin Hill aerodrome during the 鈥減honey鈥� war and surreptitiously touching a Hurricane very gingerly with just one finger just to be able to say I had; also I recall PT (that is what we called PE) being interrupted on the morning of 6th June 1944 for the radio announcement of D-Day. And my concentration while taking the entrance exam at Tonbridge was slightly affected by the sound of Doodlebugs buzzing overhead鈥�.

As a boy I was too young to be acceptable to the Royal Observer Corps-although precociously I reckoned I knew as much as they did about aircraft recognition. My contribution to the war effort began in 1941 when I was asked to help a lady neighbour who was our Salvage Steward. Recycling was not the buzzword then. This saved the Council precious time and petrol when weekly collections were made. It entailed collecting salvage from about 15 houses and sorting it into categories: paper, newspaper, cardboard, metal, rags, rubber, and wait for it, BONES! We did our rounds every Saturday afternoon. And then after a few years my boss moved away, and I, at the tender age of 12, was pronounced to be Salvage Steward. Power at last! I have a confession. From my earliest years I was (and still am) an avid collector of postmarks-not stamps, but the black marks that cancel them. I now ask myself how much more salvage would have gone to make planes (or whatever they used it for) had I not wickedly diverted a small proportion of paper to my albums. Naughty boy: I might even have delayed our victory!

And then suddenly it was all over. Quite an anti-climax really. I look back on my war years as something of an adventure, a time of excitement鈥ut then I led a sheltered existence. I never had first hand experience of the ugly side.

"This story was submitted to the People's War Website by Michelle Moore of CSV Action Desk on behalf of John Stuart Newcomb and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the sites terms and conditions."

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