大象传媒

Playing with the rabbits Ch.4 (Part 1)
(This first part is the completion of Chapter 3)
Living in the country was filled with incident. We went every Sunday to church, in spite of my mother鈥檚 misgivings about the high church leanings of the vicar and I recall the harvest festival service with baskets of fruit and vegetables, intricately woven loaves of bread, flowers and branches everywhere. In that time, even in the country, where the rationing was just as frugal as in the towns, it seemed like an extaordinary abundance. Permanently hungry I eyed the fruit and bread hopefully but it all went to the nearest hospital I was told.
One night it snowed and we woke up to inches of snow on the twigs and branches. I remember the freezing cold of the outside toilet at the end of the garden. The roads were icy and it was difficult sometimes for trucks to climb the shallow hill on which we lived. One time we all went out with what seemed like half the village to help push a truck up the road.
One weekend my Uncle Leslie came down to stay and my mother and aunt went with him to the local pub. Afterwards my uncle was too pissed to climb back up the hill and my mother and aunt had to push him, he was giggling and helpless when they got back. to the cottage. My mother was embarrassed and claimed that someone had 鈥減ut something in his drink鈥�, I think he was just pissed, that was all. He was a lovely man, he was the 鈥渁rtisitic鈥� one who my mother much loved and felt that I took after him, when I showed some minimal talent for drawing.

One night we were aroused by the sound of aircraft, followed by tremendous explosions. We all climbed down the ladder and gathered in our tiny living room/kitchen. My cousins and I were put under the table, my mother and aunt sat close to the fireplace. We had the light out and opened the curtains. We were treated to a spectacular air raid, bombs and incendiaries rained down, fires started, 鈥榩lanes roared overhead, the ground shook. My cousin Rhoda started to cry, I tried to comfort her but it was reminding her of all the horrors of the London air raids. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, it ceased and the aircraft droned off to wherever they had come from. We were amazed, all that on a little village with about twelve scattered cottages and farmhouses, a pub, a church and a pigstye. Many years later I heard what was a possible explanation. Apparently the German bombers were guided by intersecting radio beacons or beams and we, the British, had found a way of bending these beams so that they intersected at a different point. We just happened, that night, to be at one of these intersecting points, the raid was really intended for Bristol, nine miles away.
In the morning we went out to inspect the damage. All the fields round had huge craters in them and there were burned out incendiaries everywhere, but nobody seemed to have been killed or injured, apart from someone鈥檚 henhouse there was little or no damage to buildings. The 鈥淗umpty Dumpty鈥� field was more 鈥渉umpty dumpty鈥� than ever, and as I said, most fields sported craters. A few years later after the war, when I had occasion to revisit the village, I went to the little quarry and clambering up one of it鈥檚 rock faces I found an unexploded incendiary on a ledge, high up.
Finally the time came to go back to our respective homes. Jean, Rhoda and Aunt Dorothy to London, Peter, my mother and I back to Southampton. We packed up everything, cats included, one of whom had a litter, which we transported with the mother in a cat basket, all the way, by bus and train.

Chapter 4 (Part 1)
Move to Bournemouth

I do not remember much of the time immediately after the return to Southampton, other than there semed to be less air raids and there was still no schools. I do remember having private lessons with my friend, Peter Trask, whose elder brother was a priest and seemed qualified to teach. It was only for a couple of hours each morning and I don鈥檛 remember learning very much. There was also another brother, who came home on leave in his uniform, bringing his rifle with him. We of course were fascinated by this and played with it until he took it away from us. I think it was this brother who had, at some earlier time, had me pose while doing a drawing of me. This was interrupted by my friend Peter, who could not understand why I did not come out and play in the garden.
One day my parents announced that we were going to make a trip to Bournemouth. As all previous trips to Bournemouth had been a prelude to a holiday, we were quie excited. This must have been the summer of 1941 and I was not quite nine years old. We went by train and once we arrived in Bournemouth my parents took us to the 鈥淟ower Pleasure Gardens鈥�. The river Bourne, which was hardly more than a stream, flowed through the gardens and eventually into the sea through a pipe under the pier. In the pleasure gardens there was an area through which it passed just below the bandstand. It was very shallow at this point, hardly more than three or four inches and it was quite safe for young children to play and paddle there. On either side there were rows of benches, on which were seated many parents, watching the children splashing about. My parents left us there with my brother in charge. He must have been about thirteen at the time, so it was quite reasonable. They went off on some mysterious errand. When they returned some two hours later they informed us that they had been to see two houses and had decided to rent one of them and that we would be shortly moving from Southampton to live in Bournemouth.
I suppose there must have been quite a lot of activity after our return to Southampton but the only thing I clearly remember is standing in the empty house, after the removal men had gone, and seeing the strangeness of the empty carpetless rooms rooms, only the light bulbs remained. My father explained to me that legally one had to leave these for the next tenant. I was very sad to leave, after all it was the only home I.

By the time we arrived at our new house in Bournemouth most of the furniture had been moved in. I was fascinated by the garden, which had orange flowers in it, an orange blossom tree (syringa), a crabapple tree with little rosy uneatable apples on it and wonder of wonders a shed at the end of the garden, with a long workbench with a vice, and in the corner a tandem bicycle. The tandem did not stay there long, it belonged to Mr. Grieg, who owned the house and indeed was our landlord, although I never thought of him as such. He and his fiancee, shortly to become his wife, came and collected it the next day. Mr. Grieg鈥檚 mother, who had lived in this house, had died recently, which was why the house was available for rent. It was a relatively new house, at that time probably not more than ten years years old. Built in the early 30鈥檚 it was hardly bigger than the house in Southampton, with two rooms and a kitchen downstairs and three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, with a separate loo. There was also another loo on the outside of the house with a warm plain wooden seat. My brother used to refer to it as his 鈥渃ountry鈥� seat and would retire there with a book for what seemed like hours. He and I were both chronic readers and I suppose it was the only place one could get a period of undisturbed privacy. We seemed permanently to have bottoms like baboons, with red rings round them from long periods of sitting reading on hard wooden seats.
The main difference between this house and the one in Southampton was that it was completely detached from the houses on either side, whereas the previous house had been semi-detached.

Life in Bournemouth was far more peaceful than our time in Southampton and Bristol but there were still incidents to remind us that we were still at war and that the evidence of the military was still with us.
Soon I became friends with all the other children who lived in our rather short road, called appropriately 鈥淧etit Road鈥�, we all played elaborate games related to the war, fighting imaginary battles in the bushes on the undeveloped land at the top of the road. Sometimes we engaged dangerously in stone fights, we would divide into two groups, sometimes in the road way and sometimes in the bushes. We would hurl stones at one another from a distance, usually we were too far away from one another or too nimble to do any harm to each other, but one day, throwing from quite a considerable distance I managed to hit one of the girls on top of the head, it was Margaret Parsons, sister to my asthmatic friend Brian. He didn鈥檛 mind, I don鈥檛 think he liked her much anyway. There was considerable uproar and a lot of blood and I got into a great deal of trouble.

One day Peter Tooley, a friend I had made quite soon after we arrived in Bournemouth, who also had a sort of refuge in the garage in his house, rather like mine in our garden shed, showed me some grey ash coloured substance, which he said was magnesium, he had acquired it from another boy who had picked it up on a piece of waste ground which was on the other side of town. This piece of ground was apparently frequently used as a practice battleground and it was often littered with the debis of warfare, used cartridges, sometimes live ammunition, burnt out flares, which is where the magnesium had come from and occasionally the small silk parachutes that the flares were dropped with. Peter had one of these parachutes which he produced and showed me. I was fascinated by the smootness of the silk and immediately wanted to go and find one. We agreed to go the following Saturday to this battleground area, when we were not at school. In the meantime Peter lit a small piece of the magnesium and we watched it glow with incredible brightness.
The following Saturday we rode our bicycles to where the practice battleground was located, it was an area between Bournemouth proper and Poole, which at that time was in the next county, Dorset. It was a sort of 鈥渘o man鈥檚 land鈥� area. It was about as big as two football pitches and surrounded by pine trees which concealed it from the nearby roads, there were no houses in sight. We soon found signs of the 鈥渂attles鈥�, spent cartridges, shallow trenches, small shell holes and burned out flares, but no parachutes. I was very keen to find one of those silky canopies, I wanted to give the material to my mother, as I was sure she had not seen anything like that for a long time. We searched in vain, the only things we thought were exciting enough to keep were several rounds of live 303 ammunition and what looked like half of an unexpired flare. It was in a green metal shell like container, with one end open and caked inside with what looked like grey magnesium, this substance was quite hard though, not crumbly like the stuff that Peter Tooley had shown me. I kept it as I thought I could scrape some of it out when I got it home. We searched for about an hour but found no parachutes, so we set off back home.
The next day, Sunday, after I had returned from church, I went down to the shed where I had concealed the container which I had brought back from our expedition. I tried scraping some of the caked powder out from inside but it was too hard to move. Finally I secured the container in the vice on the workbench and with a cold chisel and a mallet started to chip away at the substance. I had been doing it for several minutes when there was a loud explosion, so loud that I became temporarily deaf. The chisel was blown out of my hand and the the shed was filled with smoke. I staggered out and saw my parents standing at the french windows, looking down the garden, they opened the door and came rushing down towards me, their faces filled with anxiety, they were talking to me but I was still deaf. I tried to explain what had happened, my father went into the shed and found the container, he took it away and must have disposed of it somewhere, I never saw it again. My hearing returned gradually and I was given a severe telling off by my father. I was not punished though, I think they were just relieved that I was still alive and all in one piece. I suppose I was lucky that I did not kill myself or injure myself in some way.

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