大象传媒

The really exciting event of that first autumn came in December when the cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles intercepted the so-called "Pocket Battleship" Admiral Graf Spee in the south Atlantic. Although heavily out-gunned the three cruisers damaged the Graf Spee sufficiently to force her to take refuge in the neutral port of Montevideo in what became known as the Battle of the River Plate. We did not know at the time of the various ruses, and diplomatic pressures which led the Germans to think that overwhelming Royal Navy forces were gathering just outside territorial waters (we hadn't any within thousands of miles!) but the ruse worked and Hitler ordered the Graf Spee to be scuttled. This was a tremendous boost to our morale, the men from the cruisers were feted with a parade through London and a reception at Guildhall. I still have the special commemorative issue of "Picture Post", produced for the occasion. (The paper shortage had not yet hit us hard).

At home, life settled down to a pattern. We dutifully carried our gasmasks everywhere. I was by now in the top year Juniors. The three classes of that year were held in an oldish building about a quarter of a mile from the rest of the school which was only a few years old. I suppose the planners must have under-estimated population growth when they approved it. We rather enjoyed being on our own in this way. While we were there the playground was dug up to install air-raid shelters (and then re-instated, of course).

We had a very remarkable teacher, Mr. Cleary. He would start a music lesson by sitting down at the piano and playing a tune I had never heard before or since, a fairly long one of twelve bars. After a few such lessons we began spontaneously to hum along with it which drew an approving smile. He even taught us to sing at sight, at a simple level. Remember, there were no instrumental classes in schools, not even the now-ubiquitous recorder. I still remember Mr. Cleary's tune.

We did simple science, some twenty years before it became an "in" subject in Junior schools. Lanterns, the sort with large, blue rectangular batteries were "borrowed" from the air raid shelters for some experiments. We learnt to sing La Marseillaise, in French. So we were lucky to have two inspiring teachers in a row, following Mr. Stoneman in the third year. Sometimes- I never found out why - we would have singing with Mr. Palmer who taught the 'B' stream (we were "4A"'), He was a real Cornishman and good fun. He was still teaching fifteen years later when I became a teacher, although not in the same school as me.

My brother, then 22, had left school at 14, as usual, and worked for a small painting and decorating outfit - about six men, I recall. Mechanical transport was not so common then, so they had a handcart with two big wheels, just like a Boy Scouts' trek-cart of the time. When war began trade was badly hit, as everyone expected the homes to be bombed anyway. So, like many others, Tom joined the A.F.S, the Auxiliary Fire service, while awaiting call-up. Being a very practical common-sense sort of chap he soon rose to be a Leading Fireman. This was my first direct experience of anyone doing shift-work or night-work. I well remember him setting off with his steel helmet, gas mask and shiny black rubber mackintosh, such as all the Civil Defence people had - no two-piece suits in high-tech materials until very much later.

Many additional 'fire stations were set up in various places often in garages. There were a few specially built emergency appliances (I soon learnt that you never, never called an appliance a "fire engine. It was a pump; an escape, a pump-escape or dual-purpose appliance [DP] hose lorry, turntable ladder etc.). Often I would visit Tom at his station where a "kid brother" was treated as a bit of a "mascot". Needless to say I found the equipment fascinating and soon learnt about the various types of trailer pump, the big Scammell, the Beresford "Stork鈥� and the Worthington-Simpson with its flowing mudguards also housing the hoses. Trailer pumps, meant that any suitable towing vehicle could be pressed into service. Some lorries carried a tubular-framed canvas water tank called a "dam", holding 500 gallons of water if memory serves.

Apart from the black-out the first Christmas of the War wasn't so very different from usual. Early next year (1940) Tom was called up, put in the Middlesex Regiment and sent off to a lonely part of the East Anglian coast to man a machine-gun post. Still the "phoney war" went on.

I don't know what happened in country areas but we had no school dinners; everyone walked home and back, some of my classmates for a good mile each way. Nothing remarkable in that, that was how it was.' One day I arrived home for dinner (not "lunch", please) to find my usually calm mother in an unusual state of agitation. "Hurry up and eat your dinner - I'm going back to school this afternoon!". None of your modern re-training courses for her, although I don't suppose methods had changed that much since she last taught, so picking up the threads would have been much easier that it is now.

Apparently, faced with the problem of men staff being called up. everyone was asked if they knew any ex-teachers. The problem then arose of trying to remember addresses and married names. Few people had a telephone so directories were no use. Someone remembered my mother so the "Attendance Officer" was despatched (on his bicycle) to call on her, hence the rush that day. The "Attendance Officer", still often called by his old name of "The School Board Man鈥� used to call on absentees to find out why they were away. Bexleyheath was still being built up, so it could not have been so many years since children were kept away to help in the fields and the like and needed to be checked on.

The "phoney war" came to a sudden end with the German invasion of Norway, but still there were no air-raid warnings - not for us, anyway. With Mum being at school I remember that Dad and I would eat at a cheap cafe (the sort that were more often called "eating houses") down Bexleyheath Broadway,. It was rather a sparse building with a gabled roof and looked as if it had once been a small meeting hall. I think it was run by the Oldring family. I cannot remember anything about the food - it must have been run-of-the-mill "wholesome" food of the time - nobody ate anything "fancy" in those days. (By the way, you shopped several times a week. Ordinary people did not have a refrigerator, let alone a freezer).

Rationing came to cover more and more things. Prices must have remained pretty steady for long periods because meat was rationed by price, not weight; you were allowed so much worth of meat per week or whatever.

After the disastrous invasions of Norway and Denmark came the campaigns in the Low Countries and then France. We could not believe how quickly the Germans would advance. I think we had all fallen for the French belief that the fixed defences of the Maginot Line, so widely publicised before the War, would hold them back. In fact they were largely by-passed. This caused us much alarm.

I need not say much about the defeat, and the evacuation of the B.E.F., and others. But I do know that no-one, for one moment, ever imagined that we could lose the War. That just could not happen. I was barely 11 at the time, but we knew, without being told, that we were witnessing, indeed, were part of, a great, possibly the greatest, moment in our history. We felt proud! In the 3rd-year juniors, with the inspiring Mr. Stoneman, we actually learnt much poetry that would be thought "too difficult" today. We also learnt Henry the Fifth's speech at Agincourt where Shakespeare makes him speak of being proud to be there. The parallel with 1940 was not
lost on us, schoolboys that we were. We used to think of ways of discomfiting the Germans if they should come; no thought of brutal reprisals ever crossed our (fairly) innocent minds!

Before we broke up for the summer holidays our teacher, with us, worked out a way of calling everyone back if necessary (for evacuation or the like). Only one or two classmates had telephones so it was arranged that they would be telephoned first. Each would call on certain others who would in turn call on a few more and so on so that everyone was warned. In the event the plan was not needed, but it was a good idea.

Meanwhile, those of us whose parents wanted us to took an examination, which was popularly called "the scholarship", although we were supposed to be hoping to get a "special place" to either Erith County School or Dartford Grammar School (they were both Grammar schools, in fact). Notice that not everyone took the exam; the "Eleven-plus" idea was yet to come. I was a bit cross at having to give up a Saturday morning, to sit the exam at the local Central (non-selective) School! The exam included writing a short essay, I recall. Those of us who took it all got our "special places". That was the first part. There was still the question of whether we would need to pay anything or not. (I have never quite understood how one's parents income, fitted into this; you didn't ask so many questions in those days). So we took the second part which was an interview at the old Erith building in Upper Belvedere, a bit of a "foreign country" for us in those days. To get us to talk freely about ourselves the interviewers used the standard method of asking what you would spend it on if you were suddenly given 拢5 to spend how you liked. (That was more than most people's weeks wages at that time). Anyway, I got through, and we did not have to pay.

Soon came the "Battle of Britain". My particular friends were pretty hot on aircraft recognition, but we had never seen what are now known as contrails before. It was all happening too high up for us to identify anything anyway. I well remember the beginning of the serious daylight raids. It is odd how little incidents stick in your mind when associated with something much more important! We had an old mangle which we didn't need any more; I cannot remember what we did instead to wring out the washing. So Dad offered it to a neighbour. Round the back of our house was a concrete path with a bevelled edge. The mangle wheels did not castor, so shifting the fairly heavy monster was not easy. Dad, being in the furniture business knew that moving things needed more skill than brute strength, but our neighbour "knew" otherwise and gave the thing a mighty heave to slew it round a bend. One wheel went off the path, the whole thing canted over, and at that very moment the sirens sounded.

We had not had a warning for a long time, and nothing alarming had ever happened when we did, so we were not unduly bothered. It was not long, however, before we heard some ominous thumps, getting louder and more numerous. That was the day they hit the docks for the first time. After the 鈥淎ll-Clear," we walked down the road a little way and could see the vast clouds of smoke billowing up to the north-west, several miles away. It was pretty obvious that things were going badly. Sometime later we actually took a newspaper out into the garden to show that you could read it at midnight by the light of the fires when the Thames-side oil depots were hit, even though these, too, were several miles away with no direct line of sight. I remember the daylight raids, with large formations of Heinkel III and Dornier bombers, wondering why the numerous shell-bursts never seemed to hit them.

Dad had fixed our Anderson shelter up with a frame supporting a mattress well above ground level, so we were able to sleep in it tolerably comfortably at first. Our soil is very gravelly, so, when Autumn weather really got going the shelter soon had several inches of water in the bottom so my parents abandoned it and decided to take their chance indoors. By this time I was an evacuee, which is a story in itself.

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