大象传媒

I was nearly two when the war started, so my earliest memories are of growing up in a small Norfolk village far away from any real action. Life was, I guess "normal" for us - school and so on, though school did not start until we were five. There were no food shortages, with friendly farmers around, though obviously we children had no idea what bananas were -we only saw them as black dried stuff.

Wells is a seaside village, now a popular holiday resort, but then you were not allowed anywhere near the beach - the paths to the beach were blocked with barbed wire and the beaches were mined. The beach was a faraway magical place There was usually an air sea rescue pinnace in the harbour, with a single barrage balloon floating over it.

My father - too young for the first war and too old for the second - was the chief clerk in the bank, and he was in charge of the home guard. So this was an almost exact copy of Dad's Army in Warmington on sea. My father loved the programme Dad's army, but he said the real thing was even funnier. He had the only rifle for a while, and it was kept in the cupboard under the stairs.

I remember s demonstration the Home Guard put on on the Butlins - the village green. I think it must have been part of s fund raising day, because there was a "penny trail" down staithe street, the street leading to the quay. People put pennies along a chalk line and I think the idea was that if the line was long enough the money would go to buy a bit of a Spitfire. Anyway, on the Butlins they let off a "controlled" explosion and got the amount of explosive wrong, and blew out several windows. I think that was probably the biggest explosion the village heard, though I vaguely remember one night when a German bomber - presumably in a hurry to get home -dumped his bombs on the marshes, and our next door neighbour gave me a bit of shrapnel. I attach a photograplh of the Wells Home Guard (my father wearing glasses, in the middle of the front seated row)

There were airfields all round, and I suppose it was 1943-44 when we used to watch the flying fortresses head out towards Germany in the mornings, in nice tidy formations. We watched them come back in the late afternoon - then the formations were ragged and the places were all over the sky. I remember watching them come back with one or two engines stopped and streaming smoke, and I vividly remember one low down with bits missing from the wings and tail with an engine on fire, with a Spitfire at each wingtip encouraging it home. Of course as a child one did not appreciate what the crews had been through over Germany; for us it was simply exciting.

There were these stange very friendly men around with funny accents -they were called Yanks - who gave us something called gum that my mother would not let me eat.

I suspect that it is because of those flying fortresses and those friendly Yanks that I have always believed that our true allies are the Americans, and that Europe is something to be kept at arms length.

Editor - I have a splendid picture of the Wells Home Guard but I cannot compress down to less that 170K. Do you want it?

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