大象传媒

I was 9 when the war broke out and 15 by VJ day, living with my parents on a small Herefordshire farm. News during the initial 'foney war' was of ships being sunk; food rationing started and bananas and ice cream became a memory. Still only 9, I was soon driving a tractor on meadows ploughed up to grow grain.
Following the defeats in France during summer 1940, I listened to Churchill's evening broadcasts, having climbed a filbert nut tree in the orchard outside our back door. Later from by bedroom window, I heard the local Home Guard commander say to my Father "We think they are coming back, and we have nothing to stop them". However, when they came it was by air during the winter of 1940/41 and the menacing 'brmm, brmm' of German bombers passed over us. From our orchard, the distant anti-aircraft defences enabled us to judge whether it was Birmingham or Coventry, further East which was 'getting it'.
Our Grammer school had doubled in size due to evacuees including 3rd cousins of mine. Our gas masks were tested by teachers covering the air intake with a rubber sleeve as we wore them, only snatching the masks off when we indicated we were being stifled and no potentially poisonous gasses was by-passing the filter.
Rat catchers came in the form of attractive Land Girls, one previously a dressmaker, who as they picked up and bueied the rodents, talked of the RAF officers they were seeing. Aircraft filled the skies on training, some flying so low our geese would fly yards in the air!
Summer 1943, and having cycled 5 miles home from school, I found a Merchant Navy man on leave talking to my Father and an Italian prisoner of war working on our farm. The POW found it hard to believe the Axis were being driven out of Tunisia, but insisted that Hitler had a secret weapon which would turn the war. My cousins returned to London in summer1944 only to face the V1 and V2 menaces. Were these Hitler's secret weapons? Aircraft in the skies were now towing gliders, presumedly training before Arnhem.
One afternoon in May 1945, we were called into the school assembly hall to be told that war in Europe was over. Cycling home out of town, a boy aged 8or 9 was wearing a Union Flag and shouting "Ceasefire".
Surprisingly,while the war in the Far East was continuing, the coalition government broke up and party politics returned. First, we were surprised to hear Ernest Bevin, wartime Minister of labour, critisise Churchill in Parliament and then Churchill in an election broadcast suggest that Labour would have to employ 'Gestapo' methods to implement their manifesto.
We had a new Government, and when the two Atomic bombs were dropped and ended WW2, this heralded a new world, but still a period of austerity, and the 'hot' war was soon replaced by the 'cold' war and National Service remained!

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