大象传媒

DISCLAIMER:
This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Phil Sealey of the Somerset County Museum Team on behalf of Don Weston and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions

鈥淚 was eight years old when war broke out. I don鈥檛 remember any formal words that war was declared. It was just one of the things that happened, I was a child and you accepted things. Perceived knowledge was that we were immediately going to be bombed. They were going to bomb everything and the government wanted the children out of the cities. I was evacuated, not with the school, my father borrowed a car and took my mother, my brother and myself down to live on a small farm near Chard, in Somerset.
I had been there before with my grandparents because there was a slight family connection. I don鈥檛 seem to remember it with my grandfather but I have seen pictures of the place at the time. It was a culture shock. It was an old farm, there was a well out in the yard, there was a big sheep dog which I never saw not chained to its hutch, it made a noise any time when anyone came. The only running water was a big hand pump with a lead lined trough in the kitchen. You pumped the water up, no bathroom, no inside toilet; that was in a little shed up in the field next to the farm. I don鈥檛 know whether we had a bath while we were there. We were only there nine months and I don鈥檛 remember washing there, but we must have done.
Boys were dirty in those days; we did all manner of things. I fell in to living on a farm. We had cows you would drive in for milking, we had pigs, chickens and we had to collect the eggs, go to the henhouses reach under the hens and get the eggs, walk down the hedge. They are still there, the hedges. You鈥檇 fill a bucket with eggs. All these things you could do were a delight to a city boy. We were also near Chard reservoir and they had shooting stands at the reservoir, myself, a friend of mine, and my little brother - he was about five or six - used to go out on these narrow duckboards, right out onto the reservoir on these shooting stands. If mother had known about that she would have had kittens!
It was a smallholding more than a farm. There was a labourer who used to come in to use the horse to take stuff about, because the farmer himself worked during the day on the railways as a platelayer on the track. The railway passed within a few hundred yards of the place. He would get up in the morning and do the milking, his wife used to run the place where they cooled it, you鈥檇 see the milk in the churns, and once that was all done he would go off to work and the labourer would come in and run things during the day. He鈥檇 come home in the evening and there would be more milking. Most of the swear words I still know I learnt from that farmer, because when it was time to take the pigs to market, they鈥檇 back a lorry into the yard, put the back down and the sides up, then they鈥檇 get the pigs out of the sties and up into the lorry. Every now and again one would get away and the farmer would chase it round the farmyard trying to guide it back on the lorry. The language he used when chasing that pig in a muddy farmyard was something else! I learnt a lot! I enjoyed it; it was good fun.
I went to school in Chard, that school is no longer there. There is a blue plaque on the wall where it used to be. My main memory is that the history teacher used to like to enact battles with toy swords. A wooden sword and clattering around was smashing for a boy. Nine months and nothing happened, Mum missed her home obviously, and so we went back to London.
When war started I had been at a school, known as Furzedown Demonstration School, in Streatham where they were trying a lot of new ideas. You are talking about children from five onwards having a sleep in the afternoons, in the open air. Children were doing woodwork at quite a young age, making little models out of matchboxes, and also making simple models from wood, which was already cut to size. You joined it; you were using tools. I always look back on that and think what a marvellous school that was, Furzedown Demonstration School. There was a Teachers Training School next to it and a girl鈥檚 grammar school just down the road. There was also a large area of grass, which I don鈥檛 ever remember playing on, but certainly they had their fetes and that there. I look back and still remember things I did there, so the teaching can鈥檛 have been that bad, I look back with a considerable amount of pleasure, I enjoyed that school. I was too old for that school when I came back to Streatham from Somerset. I don鈥檛 know whether it closed, or what happened, but it was never the same again. We also 鈥榓dopted鈥� a ship, a tanker called The British Prestige, the captain used to come and give us talks when it was in harbour.
As soon as we were back the Blitz started. We used to go down to our shelter every night, what they called an Anderson shelter, which was fairly thick corrugated iron, covered with earth, in the garden. We had bombs at the top of our road, a road called Clareview. In the road round the corner a friend of mine, one of twins, was killed when on a paper round one morning. I am still in touch with his brother, distantly.
I recall the guns, which used to run on the railway track. There was one gun that used to make more noise than all the others; we used to call it 鈥榗rackerjack鈥� because of the terrific crack it made. I lived a couple of miles away and you could hear 鈥榖ang鈥�, not necessarily continuously like the lighter guns, they fired faster, you didn鈥檛 hear them, but that one you certainly did, you heard the gun go off. Most of them were more distant to us.
I remember the drone of the aeroplanes; the special noise the German aeroplanes made. It was a rising and falling noise, caused by the engines not being synchronised. On British planes they always synchronised the engines to exactly the same speed and propeller pitch, so they ran evenly. The Germans didn鈥檛 do that for some reason, they made this distinct sound so they were instantly recognisable, you just sat down in the shelter listening. Every now and again you鈥檇 hear this whistling sound, then there would be a crump, and you鈥檇 know somebody else鈥檚 house had gone. The damage to our house at times was quite considerable, apart from the windows, the ceilings came down and glass was embedded in the furniture.
The gable of the house was so damaged that I used to go up into the attic and move it, all the cement filling round the edge was shaken out. I don鈥檛 know whether they are still there, but my initials should be round the chimney pot, and my friend鈥檚. They left the ladders there when they were putting the chimney pots back up so we went up there and did it in the wet cement. The house is still standing. We went round there the other day, my son, my wife and myself, and I have to say the main difference is that the road is full of cars, one perhaps two cars when I was a lad. We used to play cricket, tennis ball, a dozen games to play with a tennis ball, all out in the street, if a car came along we likely heard it and it was so slow we got out of the way. Now it is absolutely full of cars.
Back then, just at the end of the road, we had this large common with a running track, ponds to take boats on, ponds to fish in and ponds to sail boats on. We also had a hundred yard open-air swimming pool we could go into, all on this common. Now you can go across this common and you won鈥檛 see kids on it, I don鈥檛 know what they do. It looks unkempt, untidy; it looks dusty, not green. In those days there were council hired common-keepers who would chase you off if you rode a bike there or climbed trees, but we all did. It was our playground, all the trees, the ones we used to climb, had names. We played cricket there and football; you name it we played it.
I remember one game called the Battleship, another one called the Persuader. You climbed to the top of tree, and if the wind blew it persuaded you to come down! You could say to someone, I鈥檒l meet you over at such-and-such and they鈥檇 know straight away where it was. They were fun days; we enjoyed ourselves, we weren鈥檛 tied to television or anything like that. You made it. You did it.
The return fare from Tooting Junction Station was tuppence halfpenny. You were taken to Wimbledon Common, you got out there with your bottle of Tizer [fizzy drink], or whatever else you took with you, and you marched up the hill and had all of Wimbledon Common to play on, always something new, marvellous. Then you鈥檇 come back again, same ticket on the train, walk up from the station. It鈥檚 hard to imagine anyone doing that now. Everything is a good memory.
Both Mum and Dad joined the ARP Service. They manned one of the air raid warden posts; they had posts at set intervals. As volunteers they were there when they could be, but eventually Mum became full time. She spent her time in the air raid warden post, it was like a little blockhouse, she was contacted if there was any incident, if bombs were dropping, the phones would ring, she鈥檇 answer the phone, then phone the fire brigade, police, ambulance, heavy rescue and light rescue, all the branches of the ARP were connected like a web. Dad was a warden when he was home, he didn鈥檛 go in to the forces, he was in a reserved occupation, he worked for the newspapers. Each road was supposed to have a warden, under the charge of a senior warden. She was just one of the points in the communication web, but vital of course. Earlier in the war Dad had been on duty one evening when one of the first bombs to fall near us killed two other wardens and, as Mum put it, he had gone out to pick up pieces of his friends.
Mum was taught to fire a gun. Many years after the War we were sitting watching television one night, my son was eighteen or nineteen at the time, and she said 鈥楾hat鈥檚 not the way to hold a rifle, they don鈥檛 do it like that.鈥� And this boy, who鈥檇 never held a gun in his life, said 鈥楬ow do you know that?鈥� 鈥極h, they showed me how to fire a rifle during the war.鈥� His mouth dropped, this little old woman sitting there, who he has known to be a very determined person when she wanted to do anything, she鈥檇 been firing rifles during the war. He saw his grandmother in a new light, he鈥檇 never heard anything like it before.
When, a few years after the war, I was doing my National Service in the Royal Engineers I was sent to the headquarters of the bomb disposal unit UK RE. It might seem strange that, years after the war, we still had a bomb disposal unit, but at that time the unit was being called out two or three times a week, sometimes out weeks at a time at various places, digging up bombs which had been known to have been dropped during the war, or had been found since. There was a lot of mine clearing being done up on the beaches in Norfolk and down at Folkstone. People were killed doing this work and, while I did not do any of the bomb disposing, I was present when mines were blown up, and I did work for that unit, so I played a small part in trying to clear up the mess that was left.
In actual fact when I was up in Norfolk on one minefield I returned to base and some other fellows went up, and the bloke who slept in the bed opposite me was killed. On that particular part of the coast twenty-six people from the bomb disposal unit were killed clearing the mines.
Sometime later when I was down in Mundesley I mentioned at the local coastguard station that I had once been involved in clearing mines in the area. They told me the story why we were called up there. It seems that a local councillor was out with his dog, the dog goes charging across the beach, bang; it was his favourite greyhound. He kicks up a stink, the council kicks up a stink, they got in touch with the Army, the Army got in touch with bomb disposal, so we had to go up there. Anyway, that is the reason we had to go up there to start clearing those mines.
The mines had been laid during the war in the cliffs and along the beach. All maps had been lost. All these things are supposed to be mapped. In any case, the cliffs there are eroding, the sea hits them and they come down in lumps. So a lot of mines were down in the debris and had to be found. The old mine detector things, you would walk up and down the beach for hours and never find them. The mines themselves could be so rusty you could drive a tank over them, they wouldn鈥檛 go off; or they could be so rusty that at the slightest touch they would. What they eventually used was water jetting. A Bren gun carrier, with fire monitor mounted on the front, which was connected to the sea, was used. It was aimed straight at the cliff, it washed the cliff and beach away, exposing any mines, and that is how they鈥檇 find them. What they ended up with eventually was a Leyland truck chassis, with a big pump on the back. It was towed up there and permanently backed into the sea, the pump pumped to the monitor.
Something I wanted to do was go back to Mundesley and so recently I made the trip. The little coastguard station there they鈥檝e turned it into a small museum, it鈥檚 full of photographs of bomb disposal people I knew. They鈥檝e got a monument there, a big bomb, a proper bomb, on a plinth, around the base are the names of the people who were killed there and above the names is carved the badge of the bomb disposal unit. 鈥�

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