大象传媒

I was an unlabelled evacuee, self-elected even. Fleeting acquaintances with the Luftwaffe in the Vale of Belvoir; during a "holiday" to Glasgow, and in a respectable London suburb should have convinced me they were after me - but I was too worried about being pushed from pillar to post for my ration book and Red Cross parcels. The result of a wonderful bit of unrecorded organisation, I never found out who compiled and packed those, but they were sent to children of prisoners-of-war by ladies of the British Empire, filled with goodies very alien to those who rarely saw sweets. When they got to me past the Kriegsmarine, and the parasites and vultures on the Home Front, I was very grateful; but never had chance to thank them.

My peripatetic war ended in a one-class boarding school at Burgate, near Diss. Apart from the general war news, and recognising and modelling aircraft, the major bellicose activities were blessing the bombers heading east and counting the tragic gaps on their return. In the morning out went USAAF B-17s and B-24s; and in the evening, RAF Lancasters and Halifaxes. I wonder if those aircrews realised the close attention we paid them, and how much we knew. It was the time of the Battle of Berlin, and for closing Herr Krupps' works at Essen. Once a crippled Liberator span its smoking descent to within walking distance, and we got there to steal souvenir bits before the jeeps and MPs arrived. With some dead aircrew still aboard, we caused a terrible fuss, bringing police to the school - and many punishments for what seemed to some to have been treason. They confiscated my lovely altimeter and a box of engine cogs. But wartime children got like that.

One day a convoy of smart US army trucks drove up and disgorged a mob of exuberant Italian POWs, with big coloured circles on their backs. They were to repair the school fences, including all round a large paddock, and we broke the rules and fraternised. That was discouraged even in 1944 when defeated Italy was technically an ally, and the POWs were left on their own until the US guards and trucks came back in the evening. They showed us their family photographs, and sang when working; and when not - which was most of the time. They were never even counted - but they were still prisoners with big circles on their backs. When they heard my father was, as they, captured, they shared their food with us boys - having cooked it on Primus stoves. They were better fed than us, firstly because they were in American hands and secondly, because they were Italian. They must have been a battalion of chefs. Their good cheer and genuine friendship made a great impression on me, particularly as they assured me that being captured by the enemy was no dishonour, and better than being killed. They didn't mind missing the war, and I soon imagined my father with his own Primus in an Austrian alm - although in truth his life under the Germans was much different.

Early one morning the East Anglian dawn chorus was shattered by the noise of a low-flying tractor, waking me up. I stood on my bed, by a window, and towards nearby Suffolk saw and heard an ominous black thing cough its way from right to left, probably about three miles away. Its fuselage had a parallel tube above it, erratically pulsing an orange flame. It was a vanquished V1 - a doodlebug - at a very low altitude and in a shallow dive. Snorting from west to east, it must have been turned and shot at by a Hawker Typhoon - a reasonably successful tactic achieved by flipping wing-under-wing, although like a billiards fine chip, there was no real control of the ball. It could go anywhere - and this one was very far from Doodlebug Alley. It reached ground below my line of vision, without a sound. It was a dud. If it wasn't found, someone should try any thick copse between the Thorhams Magna and Parva. World war two aircraft carcasses still keep turning up in odd places.

I received my last Red Cross parcel as Hitler was shooting himself. It came from the United States of America, not from South Africa as previously, and contained such strange things as massive squares of chocolate weighing a pound, and packets of a powdered something called Marshall's junket I never reasoned what to do with to turn into something I'd never seen. I let the war end without them.

It ended very dramatically for me. On the second Sunday evening in May, six days after my 9th birthday, our only day-boy raced his father's big bike in from the village shouting "It's over!!!". In his excitement to deliver the message before we caught it on the wireless, he demolished a fence repaired by the POWs and broke his arm. Within days I was on my way back to Nottingham, where I'd been in September 1939, aged three-and-a-half. My father had already been repatriated into a bright blue uniform with a shilling-sized badge on his lapel. I never learned if the Ities (as we called them) finished the fences, but I don't suppose they got home before 1947.

But the fighting was over - and a new nine-year old faced a new world. I'd lost my gas-mask, and no-one even cared.

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