大象传媒

Playing with the rabbits

Chapter 1

I was seven years old when war was declared, I remember it clearly. The following is an extract from my personal 鈥渕emoirs鈥�, covering the period from 1939-1945.

Things were happening at this time that I was blissfully unaware of. Chamberlain had returned from his meeting with Hitler at Munich with 鈥淧eace in our time ..........鈥�, the persecution of the Jews was well under way, Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland were over run, Poland was threatened and I played with the rabbits in the garden.

One day I became aware that something of immense seriousness was about to happen. My father did not go to work, he stayed at home to await a special broadcast by Neville Chamberlain, the then Prime Minister. I asked my mother what it was about and she replied that it was whether we were going to war or not. I knew nothing of war but it sounded exciting and I privately hoped it would happen. We all waited for 11 o鈥檆lock when Chamberlain was due to broadcast, 鈥�.......I have received no such assurance from the German government, so now there exists a state of war between us and Nazi Germany........鈥�. My father went white and retired upstairs and my mother looked close to tears, something I had never seen before, and suddenly like J.G. Ballard a year or two later in Shanghai, I felt totally responsible for the war. This was to last me for some time but I eventually grew out of it.

At first nothing much happened, at some point we were issued with ration books, later with gas masks, which made me feel very claustrophobic. Margarine appeared in our larder, one day I took a small slice, thinking it was butter and popped it in my mouth, only having tasted butter before, I found it totally nauseous. Margarine at that time was very unsophisticated and was little more than a yellow grease, made I think from whale oil. School went on as usual and at first there were no air raids. My father, who was too old for miltary service and also had very poor eyesight, enrolled with the local A.R.P. (Air Raid Precaution) section and was issued with a steel helmet, a whistle and a large wooden rattle to warn us of a gas attack. One afternoon I had come home from school and was in the house alone, suddenly the air raid siren sounded. I found my father鈥檚 steel helmet and whistle and went to the front door, opened it and as I had seen my father do before, put the helmet on and blew the whistle. I was secretly longing for there to be a gas attack so that I could put my gas mask on and use the rattle. I am not sure how I would have blown the whistle.

Daylight air raids had started by then and I remember standing at my bedroom window with my father and seeing aircraft flying very low in the distance and objects dropping from them , followed by explosions and plumes of smoke. My father said 鈥淭hat鈥檚 the aerodrome at Filton鈥� This was a little aerodrome on the outskirts of Southampton.

After that the first 鈥渂arrage balloons鈥� appeared in the sky and soon I was able to count 64 of them from my bedroom window. Their purpose was to prevent the German aircraft from flying too low, this they succeeded in doing but they themselves were very vulnerable. They sat on their cables in the sky, looking like fat puppies with big ears, out of the clouds would come the Messerschmidts with their guns blazing and as I watched one after another catching fire and being frantically hauled in by their ground crews would sink out of sight.

About this time we decided to have our own air raid shelter dug in at the end of the garden. You could either have a surface shelter, rather like a brick and concrete blockhouse, or an Anderson shelter, invented no doubt by a man of that name. We elected to have the latter. First of all a large hole had to be dug in the middle of the lawn at the end of the garden. We all helped to do this, my father, my brother and myself took it in turns with the shovel. We were supervised and helped by a rather hearty man who obviously had a lot of experience of this. Having dug the hole to the correct depth we then laid a concrete floor with a sort of low concrete wall about two feet high and about nine inches thick all round it. Then curved sheets of heavy galvanized iron were placed so that formed a sort of corrugated arch from side to side. These were bolted together. Then straight upright sheets of the same material were erected at either end, leaving a door sized gap at one end as an entrance. It was then all tightly bolted together and earth heaped around it, except at the entrance. The whole thing was half submerged to a depth of three or four feet and, we were assured, would be adequate protection aginst everything except a direct hit. To complete it my father acquired three large wooden packing cases from the factory where he worked, which was a branch of BAT ( the British American Tobacco co.), these he placed on either side of the entrance and one directly in front of it, they were then filled with earth. So there it was , ugly but practical. Mostly at that time the air raids occurred during daylight hours.

Occasionally one of the barrage balloons, caught by the wind, would go berserk. I remember watching one out of my bedroom window, twisting and turning violently on the end of it鈥檚 cable, while it鈥檚 ground crew desperately tried to haul it down. It was based at the end of our garden, in what had been the girl鈥檚 school and was now an army camp. The barrage balloon was attached at it鈥檚 base to a truck with a large winch on the back around which was wound the cable, the ground crew had to do their best to haul the balloon in without snapping it鈥檚 cable it was a bit like hauling in a giant whale in the sky. This time they succeeded but I had seen other balloons with broken cables drifting across the town. They could do a lot of damage, the balloons were about twenty feet long and the cable was at least an inch thick, when towed along at speed it could be dangerous to both people and buildings.

One Sunday when I went to church with my parents to St. James and we saw a large lump of stone lying at the foot of the tower, which had apparently been knocked off by the cable of a drifting balloon. Another time, on my way to school, I came across a downed balloon in an alleyway between two rows of houses. It had squashed the fences on either side flat and was sitting there rather defenceless and helpless, with it鈥檚 big ears flapping, waiting to be rescued.

Going to school at this time was also something of an adventure. Almost every day there was new bomb damage, the sight of bombed houses with one side gone snd the insides spilling out into the road, the private and personal lives of the people exposed for all to see, towels still hanging in the bathroom, beds half hanging out of the house, the bedding hanging down, pictures still on the wall, floral wallpaper patterns, a cot empty and smashed, in the garden, broken furniture, books and toys scattered in the debris. Much later I read a book of Graham Greene鈥檚 in which he describes exactly what it was like.

One morning, at school morning prayers, it was announced that one of the boys that I knew , whose name was Michael Howard, had been killed in an air raid the previous day. He had been standing in the garden watching the air raid taking place and had been hit in the head by a brick from a nearby explosion, he was in my class. It was my first awareness of death and it seemed somehow that he was just absent, not gone forever.

One of our chief excitements at school was finding and collecting shrapnel. We would find it everywhere, in the road, embedded in the roofs of sheds and garages, in bomb craters. They varied from small pieces no bigger than a finger to villianous eight inch long pieces of jagged metal. No wonder people like my father who would patrol the streets at night in the middle of serious air raids, had to wear steel helmets, death and terrible injury was constantly raining down from the sky, both from exploding bombs and our own anti-aircraft fire.

One night my brother and I were already in the shelter and my mother had gone back to get something from the house, blankets probably. She was coming back and had just reached the door of the shelter when there was a tremendous explosion nearby and she was hurled into the shelter by the blast. She was not badly hurt but very shaken. She never really got over it and after that was visibly scared whenever the raids started.

There was something quite exciting about waking up in the morning in one of the bunk beds in the shelter. My parents would go back in to the house as soon as the 鈥淎ll Clear鈥� was sounded, usually about 3 o鈥檆lock in the morning, leaving my brother and I to sleep undisturbed. There was the odd smell of damp concrete and the close proximity of bird sounds, we were after all in the garden. I would lie there watching the early morning sun filtering in through the open doorway of the shelter, waiting for my mother to come and collect us.

One afternoon, coming home from school, I stopped at my friend Peter Trask鈥檚 home, he lived at the further end of the road that I lived in. We played in the garden and I trod on a broken bottle, it was a curved section of the bottle and one end curled up and cut deep into my ankle, blood poured out. At this moment the siren sounded, Peter Trask鈥檚 aunt, who seemed to live with them, came out to get us to go into the shelter, seeing the cut she rushes indoors and comes out with a huge bottle of iodine and is about to pour it into the cut. I know about iodine, it hurts! I have had it before. 鈥淚t鈥檚 alright鈥� I said, 鈥淚鈥檓 going home鈥�. She was horrified, 鈥淭here is an air raid on, you should stay here and go down the shelter鈥�. I was having none of this, the idea of sitting for an indefinite period of time with Aunty What鈥檚-her-name pouring iodine into this large hole in my ankle was more than I wished to contemplate. So I stuffed my handkerchief into my sock to try and stop the bleeding and set off home, which fortunately was not very far, only at the end of the road. By the time I got there the air raid had developed quite well, all hell was breaking loose above me, German 鈥榩lanes diving and shooting at the barrage balloons, which were coming down in flames, bombs were dropping, anti-aircraft fire was going up, complete with 鈥渇laming onions鈥漚nd an aircraft is plummeting in a trail of black smoke. My mother, who has had a friend to tea, is already down the shelter at the far end of the garden, complete with a pot of tea, bread and butter (margarine I expect) and jam. I arrive in the middle of my mother鈥檚 tea party, where she is trying to have a genteel conversation with her friend. In the middle of this mayhem, bleeding profusely from my ankle, I cheerfully join in the tea party, whilst examining the bloody handkerchief and the deep cut in my ankle, remarking that the blood looks rather like tomato sauce. This earned a reproach from my mother who obviously did not regard it as an appropriate remark at tea time. We are in the shelter for about an hour before the 鈥淎ll Clear鈥� sounds.

The girl鈥檚 school at the end of the garden, as I have mentioned before, had been requisitioned by the military and was now an army camp. It seemed mainly to be occupied by Canadian, Australian and New Zealand troops, rallying round 鈥淭he Old Country鈥�. I would watch over the fence, their cooks working in a temporary open sided tent, preparing endless meals for these cheerful soldiers, many of whom must have been at least 10,000 miles from home. They were always friendly and would come across to the fence and talk to me, who knows what happened to most of them.

We did not realise at the time but having the troops stationed there made us all the more vulnerable to the bombing, we were unwittingly living next to a target, One night, when the night raids were becoming increasingly fierce, we went across the road to spend the night in a friendly neighbours surface shelter, ours having, like a lot of others, filled up with water, so that it looked like a miniature indoor swimming pool. There were a number of other people already in the shelter, including a child with whooping cough. My mother, brother and I huddled in with the other people. My father, as an ARP warden, had to patrol the streets, looking for fires, bomb damage and occasional badly blacked out windows. There was some attempt at cheerful conversation but mostly we listened to the sounds of the air raid outside, the thud of gunfire, the crump and vibration of bombs, the rattle, like a shower of rain on the thick concrete roof, of shrapnel falling. Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion, seemingly right outside, the light went out, the child started screaming and there was a tremendous sound of debris and shrapnel on the roof. Someone shone a torch but apart from the screaming child we all remained silent, the adults wondering doubtless, what scenes of devastation would greet us outside. Gradually the sounds of bombs and gunfire died down and at long last, about 3.30 in the morning, the 鈥淎ll Clear鈥� sounded. My father appeared at the door with his black tin helmet with A.R.P. printed on the front, covered in dirt, even I noticed that he was pale and shaken. We crossed the road to our house, my brother and I went into our downstairs bedroom and I saw that my bed, which was by the window, was covered in a layer of dirt and broken glass. A bomb had dropped in next door鈥檚 back garden, my father and two other A.R.P. wardens had been in an Anderson shelter, only partly flooded, in the same garden, the bomb had landed not more than eight feet away. They reckoned that the blast had gone upwards and over the shelter. No wonder my father had looked so shaken. The fence between the gardens was blown down and the next morning I hurried through to view the crater and search in it for juicy bits of shrapnel, which I found in quantity, some of it irridescent from the heat of the explosion.

The gas and electricity was cut off, the water too. My mother acquired some buckets of water and we built a fire in the garden. Somehow we rigged a contraption to put the pots and pans on and over the next two days she cooked our meals over the fire.
One afternoon my brother and I go to the cinema, I can鈥檛 remember what we saw but by the time we set of home it was already dark. We walked back, pushing our bicycles. With the blackout it is pitch dark, no street lights and no lights on our bicycles. We hear a lone aircraft high above us and we try and guess by the engine noise if it is German or one of ours. The siren sounds and one anti-aircraft gun fires. High above us the shell explodes, the engine stops and in flames the aircraft falls to earth.

We still had our cat 鈥淭igger鈥� named after the character in 鈥淭he House at Pooh Corner鈥�. Tigger found the air raids as disturbing as my mother did. My parents used to shut her in the garage at night in case she ran away. The rabbits, Mickey and Minnie had 鈥済one to help the war effort鈥漨y father said, a euphemism I fear for someone鈥檚 lunch.

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