大象传媒

By the end of my time in Whitland my class had shrunk to about a dozen people, but once home we were joined by the non-evacuees who had been going to Dartford Grammar School, so classes were of a more economic size. While we had been away a Junior department of Erith Technical College had taken over part of "our" building, so once again we were sharing the hall/gym if not all facilities. School was two bus-rides away. I used to get a 698 trolleybus from the end of my road to a stop called the Wheatley Arms, in Erith (now buried under a road scheme) at around 8 am, and then change to a No.99 motor-bus to school. With the clocks still an hour forward how dark the winter mornings could be.

Most masters wore gowns, this would not have been very practical with all the to-ing and fro-ing in Wales. The school field was a good mile away, which meant another bus ride on games afternoon. We had Rugby in the Autumn term, Soccer in the Spring term and Cricket in Summer. Despite the school鈥檚 other virtues I was none too happy about games. The emphasis seemed to be on potential school team material; the lesser sporty types like me being given less encouragement. I chiefly remember games as a way of getting very cold!

We learnt French from the start; in the second year we could choose Latin or German. I opted for German, even though we were at war with them, as, I associated it with science. At the end of the second year, when we returned home Mr Bonney, who taught German went into the R.A.F. so we all had to do Latin. I wasn't keen, but it has since proved useful at times.

It was in that third year that the battle of El Alamein took place. What a morale boost that was! We had seen the Desert war swing back and forth, success and failure so many times. This time we were really on top. My father said that the next thing to do was to land in Algeria, or thereabouts to catch Rommel in a pincer movement. Many of us thought the same. So had the Allied High Command. Brother Tom, now a Warrant Officer (Senior N.C.O.) came on Embarkation Leave, but not knowing where he was being sent. We all expected it to be North Africa, so we devised a simple code by which the initial letters of his first letter home would tell us. Very naughty, but very simple (we promised not to tell anyone else). In due course the letter arrived, beginning "Now at last I鈥檝e got a chance to write. .. .." so we knew we had correctly guessed - North Africa. (We only told other people, if they happened to ask, that we guessed he had gone there).

Life at home continued in its rather humdrum way. Rationing gradually got tighter. Coal was rationed geographically, the North getting more than the South, which seems logical, but our Geography master got us to turn to our atlases which showed that the winter isotherms ran roughly North-South, meaning that it was the East side of Britain that was the coldest, not the North generally, so logically should have had the higher fuel allowance.

Although major air raids had ceased there were alerts from time to time, mainly nuisance attacks by a few aircraft at a time. Following the big fires of "The Blitz" emergency water supplies were provided. By Bexleyheath Clock Tower (the town Centre) a big prefabricated steel tank was erected. Similar ones were put up in other places; I think they held 5,000 gallons. Elsewhere, suitable basements of bombed buildings were made watertight and used as static tanks. Each bore the legend "E. W. S." (emergency water supply) in bold letters with a black diagonal cross sign, together with the capacity and the location and capacity of the next one in either direction. In major towns six-inch steel piping was laid along street gutters, fitted with standards at intervals having four hose fittings. They could be charged with water when needed, in case the ordinary street mains were out of action, or to save lengthy hose-laying.

A number of streets in Bexleyheath, and presumably elsewhere, were provided with what seemed to be smoke generators. These consisted of metal chimneys about 8" in diameter and three or four feet high on a base like an over-sized round cake-tin. They were placed on the roadside, in pairs with perhaps ten feet or so between pairs. There must have been hundreds of them in Bexleyheath alone. Just what they were supposed to achieve was never explained; London had the long finger of the River Thames pointing straight at it for navigation anyway, so was hard to miss.

One thing we were spared was gas attack. It appears that neither side was willing to try it for fear of retaliation, but some flat surfaces, typically the tops of pillar-boxes, were painted with a greenish-yellow paint that would change colour if exposed to poison gas. It must have been around this time that our gas-masks had to be upgraded by taping a small circular extension on to the basic filter unit. It was called a "contex" attachment and was, so we were told, intended to filter out fine noxious smoke particles rather than gas.

About this time, too, everyone was warned not to touch "butterfly bombs" which were small extremely sensitive anti-personnel devices which had been dropped in some places. (I think Nevil Shute's 鈥淭he Small Back Room" has something about them. It is a very long time since I read it; I think it is the right book).

Because of the congestion caused by having to share the main building with the Junior Tech. an old Church school some 700yds along the road was given a lick of paint and generally spruced up a bit, to be used as an overflow building. It was an amazing place; we all used to say every classroom had three doors, one leading outside, one leading to the next classroom, and one leading nowhere! There were six rooms altogether, including a hut, of greatly varying size.

This was our principle base for most of my remaining four years at school, but there was plenty of trekking back and forth for P.E., science and music, as well as Assembly. Teachers also had to trek to and fro, as in Whitland, so we were left on our own quite a bit. On Wednesday afternoons in the 5th form my class was the only one there all afternoon; it seemed a bit lonely waiting for teachers to change over, especially on a late Autumn day with the wind howling round the building.

I said "teachers" rather than "masters'. On returning from evacuation we found ourselves with two, later four, women staff. We thought this terribly infra dig at first - we were a boys school, you didn't expect to find women around the place! (Please don't be too shocked. In those days having a girl friend, unless perhaps you were in the Upper Sixth, was considered "cissy". In the light of what happens now, perhaps it wasn't as bad an idea as all that). Eventually we got to rather like two of the women, but looking on them more as mother- or big sister-figures. They seemed to be forty-ish.

A feature of wartime was the idea of "Holidays at Home". Local authorities would arrange sports and various entertainments to discourage travel. "Is Your Journey Really Necessary?" stared at us from many a poster. Well do I remember how crowded the trains were on that holiday in Yorkshire mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1943 we managed a holiday in Brighton. Because of other commitments it was an odd arrangement. Dad and I went down first, though why we went to Brighton via Hastings I have no idea. Never mind, I always enjoy rail travel. A few days later Mum joined us so we were together for four days, then Dad went home leaving Mum and me. So they had a week each and I had ten days. It might have been because Dad could only have a week off or perhaps it was to do with the price of oneweek tickets and not wanting to leave the house unattended for long. Anyway, it was a welcome break, staying with one of Dad's old pals. We went on various visits by Southdown bus; well do I remember the artistry of a man at the bus depot who produced wonderful lists of the days excursions, all executed in coloured chalks with plenty of flourishes.

You must remember that few people owned a car before the war. The only car ride I had pre-war was with friends of my mother. He was something clerical in a garage and had as Austin Seven! We all went to Canterbury; what an adventure! Soon after war started petrol supplies were restricted to essential users only, so it was quite usual for people to use buses and coaches, or trains.

Although the invasion threat had receded by mid-1943 there was always the possibility of sneak raids, so we couldn't go on the beach; there was always plenty else to see and do. For me the most exciting was watching the shooting. The promenade, Madeira Drive, was closed to the public, but was overlooked by Marine Parade, a main road. Walking along it one day we heard some sharp cracks. Looking down we saw trainee air gunners shooting clay pigeons on the lower prom. I remember there were two big squares of thick straw for clays that had been missed to land on without breaking. The instructor was trying to get his charges to swing their shotguns to lead the target slightly (how one remembers fine detail when it is unusual and so interesting!). Another time there were much sharper cracks as we watched a rifle being fired along the Banjo Groyne. At a whistle signal two men would emerge from a sort of cellar at the seaward end and stick paper patches over the bullet-holes in the target mounted above the parapet. The bullets hit the sea with quite a splash someway out.

Most exciting of all was when a Lysander aircraft would take off from nearby Shoreham aerodrome and fly up and down towing a drogue (sleeve) for the coast defences to shoot at. There was a 40mm Bofors light AA gun just to the west of the Palace Pier; the crew would often try to swing the gun to follow a swooping seagull, with much frantic turning of crank handles, but not actually firing of course.

I preferred the gun above Madeira Drive. The emplacement was made of large square tins, presumably filled with sand or earth and vaguely camouflaged with paint and wire netting, rather ineffectively I thought. A Lewis machine-gun was mounted on a short pole driven into the tins. Whenever the Bofors gun was stripped for cleaning and oiling one of the crew would man the Lewis gun, so the crew were not left defenceless. When the drogue was towed past the various guns would fire short bursts at it, very noisily. You could easily follow the tracer in the shells till they burst with a white puff at the end of their flight. "our" gun once hit the towing wire so the target floated gently down into the sea, while the aircraft went back for another one. Meanwhile our gun put a couple of rounds into the floating target with more splashes. With all this noise going on, my mother continued calmly reading a novel only a few yards away, wholly unmoved by the commotion. Further along towards the pier there was a pair of 20mm cannon (outsize machine-guns) but I thought the Bofors more spectacular.

Many of these memories may seem rather detailed, but I did keep a diary and it was all very exciting! We returned from Brighton by the direct route.

There have been many programmes about the War, but something that never seems to be remembered is firewatching. After the severe fire damage of the "Blitz" proper it was thought unwise to leave buildings unattended at night; someone should be around to deal with small fires before they could take hold or call for assistance if necessary. Our form room, being a bit larger than most, had the firewatcher鈥檚 bed, leading to remarks about the 4th :form being so hard to teach that we wore out the teachers. ! think you had to be sixteen to be required to firewatch, but I did help out once when younger, as it was thought that my aircraft recognition skills would be useful.

Being able to tell 鈥渙ne of ours" from "one of the their鈥檚" was a useful art in those days. With several friends I joined the Erith branch of the National Association of Spotter's Clubs. A Govt. magazine "Aircraft Recognition was issued, together with quite well-made model aircraft in the popular l/72nd scale. We would have talks and quizzes, and could take tests where we were shown one view only, head-on, side or plan, of an aircraft for one second only and had to identify it correctly, including in some cases the actual Mark number. The pass mark was 90%, no less. Class 3 involved 40 basic types, Class 2 the same plus 60 more and Class 1 the same 100 plus another 30 Russian and Japanese types. We all passed Class 1, which just shows what enthusiasm can do! For variety our instructor would get us to blindfold each other, then we had to identify aircraft by handling the models I mentioned. Aircraft Recognition was a serious subject in those days. We avidly studied the pages of "The Aeroplane Spotter", an offshoot of the well-known journal "The Aeroplane鈥�.

An air raid warning could easily disrupt factory production over a wide area, so many factories had permanent lookouts on duty who would give a more localized warning if things looked like getting a bit hot. One our Spotter's Club instructors was such a lookout on a platform mounted on a cut down redundant chimney at Fraser and Chalmer鈥檚 where my father now worked.
By now everyone realised that the war could only be won by invading Europe. The Communist Party and their "Fellow Travellers鈥�, ie hangers鈥� on, having attained some slight degree of respectability now that Russia was an ally (or so we supposed) campaigned loud and long for a 鈥淪econd Front Now鈥�, ostensibly to take some pressure off the 鈥淲orkers鈥� Fatherland鈥�. Of course, we were nowhere near ready to undertake such a huge scheme, but that did not bother them.

Another seldom-mentioned feature was the various fund-raising events to help finance the war. Sometimes a factory or other organization would raise money to "buy", say, a Spitfire fighter, which would be named after them. Then there would be various "Weeks", Warship Week, Wings for Victory Week, Salute the Soldier Week and so on, usually with parades and exhibitions. On Bexleyheath Clock Tower, and all over the country, there would be a large "Thermometer" showing how much the area had deposited in National Savings each week.

I remember that John Lewis's in Oxford Street had been badly damaged. The remains, including the basement, were made safe and used for lengthy exhibitions of warlike interest, with lots of military, naval and aerial hardware. The section on jungle warfare in the far east was alarmingly realistic, (or so it seemed to us; no scorpion bites or malaria, though!).

Autumn 1943 saw the end of ice-cream; we had sweet-rationing, of course. Various ways of "stretching" the rations were published. I remember that back in Whitland they used a sort of cornflour concoction to mix with margarine to make that go further. Our school dinners were held alternate terms in the "Tech" canteen or in the "Public Hall, which looked like the nave of a Victorian church without the rest of it. Another walk, although it was half-way between the main school building and the old All Saints building that became our principal base now we were in the Remove (4th year).

In the early part of 1944 there was a bit more enemy air activity, sometimes called the "Little Blitz鈥�. Perhaps at this point we should remember that "Blitz" was a British nickname for air raids, though it actually was borrowed from the German word Blitzkreig meaning lightning war, referring to sudden rapid attack with overwhelming force giving the enemy little chance to re-group and counter-attack. We should also remember that there wasn't just one "D-Day". The name was applied to the day any operation was to start, so it could be referred to without revealing the actual date. Similarly with "H-Hour".

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