大象传媒

(Ann extract from an unpublished manuscript entitled Young Henry鈥檚 War by the author)

Henry George Highmore

The Blitz occasionally visited the London suburbs, sometimes through inaccurate navigation on the part of the bomber crews and sometimes because they were panicked into releasing their bombs short of the target in their anxiety to return as quickly as possible to the Fatherland. In this sense, Surrey had its share of indiscriminate attacks. So, occasionally, the boys would stumble innocently upon a horror of the night before.
One early morning Henry and Ron turned a corner, as they scuffed their way to school, to see the road blocked with a criss-cross of debris scattered over and concealing the road. Emergency vehicles, including a fire tender and an ambulance, had been hurriedly parked in cleared spaces. A dozen people, some in uniform, some in work clothes and a couple in smart suits, were busy clearing the worst of the debris from the road, whilst more were working close to what remained of two houses. A pall of dust and the unique smell of newly turned earth and of ripped timbers assailed their nostrils and gave evidence that the explosion had happened within the previous hour, or so.
There was no fire; there rarely was one to speak of in the suburbs when a bomb or a stick of bombs fell among the quiet leafy streets. Unlike the scenes from newsreels that they watched on every trip to the cinema, which showed the great fires in the centre of London as the enemy rained hundreds of bombs on a small area, there were rarely large fires in the suburbs. In the cinemas they saw pictures of whole sides of big buildings falling in a slab on to streets where, moments before, they had seen fire-fighters silhouetted against the flames. The bombing in the suburban streets and shopping squares was nothing by comparison.
Only a very rare direct hit on a gas main might send up a vertical shaft of flame which would ignite adjacent buildings. Plenty of gas pipes were fractured as the debris of a substantial house came tumbling down but the single flames would soon be extinguished, and the supply quickly shut off by the Auxiliary Fire Service or the local Air Raid Warden, but the acrid stench from gas seeping into the soft clay was common enough and everybody was extremely cautious and never allowed a naked flame to persist. Although nearly everyone smoked cigarettes or a pipe, they did it well away from danger. Finally, there was no domestic fuel oil systems to heat homes, and very little rationed petrol around to ignite as a bomb exploded in, or near, a house.
As Henry and Ron walked, now more quickly and deliberately towards the piles of debris and groups of civil defence workers they could see that, as so often happened, the two houses had collapsed, mostly into what had been their front gardens. An ambulance and one green fire tender of the Auxiliary Fire Service, and a big van with ' LIGHT RESCUE' painted on its side were pulled up as close as possible to the area where men and women were busily passing shards of timber and single bricks along a human chain, as those at the front burrowed into a compressed gap between the ground floor living room and the debris of one of the bedrooms. The void, into which the rescuers dug with any implement to hand, was formed by the angle of a whole collapsed floor which sloped dangerously towards the group of rescuers at the head of the line. Henry and Ron joined the tail end of the human chain and set-to placing chunks of debris well clear of the site. The first piece of any size to come their way was a crushed kitchen cabinet which still contained packets of food and some china jars and tins that rattled around and fell about them as Henry guided Ron towards a clear patch of what was once a neatly tended front garden lawn and flower beds. They dumped their heavy load, with much relief and little care, on to a neatly trimmed hedgerow and returned to the fray.
A whistle blew and everyone stood still whilst an ARP man wedged a piece of stout timber under the joists of the floor that had collapsed to stop further slippage and which might bury the rescuers. Everyone listened intently and Henry heard distant voices and responses from within the house. He was surprised at the calmness with which the unintelligible conversation took place. He thought he would be panic stricken in the same circumstances. The whistle blew again. Those working at the front resumed their careful selection of debris, to remove and pass back to where the boys worked safely.
Above them, one of the bedrooms was rudely exposed in a naked display of sheets, blankets, pillowcases and shredded linoleum, but a quite undisturbed framed print of a highland scene remained hanging perfectly on one wall. The picture, which Henry guessed, might have hung just above a big double bed, now part of the wreckage sat perfectly square on the wall some fifteen feet above the ground.
As Henry looked up, the joists slipped just a little without invoking another whistle from the Warden, but it was enough to exaggerate the slope of the bedroom, and a chamber pot slid incongruously across the exposed floorboards to dangle, half full of strong yellow urine, at the edge of the torn timbers. The ARP Warden, ever vigilant, balanced a long strip of timber over his head to topple the china pot so that it fell harmlessly to smash and spill its content over a pile of rubble. The small act lent a grave dignity to the scene.
Without any need for instruction or direction from the civil defence workers in their meagre protective clothing and tin hats the boys, in school clothing ironed for the purpose, worked hard for hours at the rear of the rescuers. They cleared loose debris and passed along each massive sliver of roof timber or armful of bricks and broken plaster as it was sent back. They created an untidy pile in the front garden as those in the vanguard burrowed a clear corridor through the tangle of what was once a home.
The helpers at the rear heard about the family who were trapped and how they were hopeful of freeing them all. Henry and Ron straightened their backs in a moment of relief as the whistle was blown again and everyone stopped what they were doing. The rescue team leader called for silence and they once again heard distant voices calling and now moaning from inside the wreckage. Then, as an awful, unwanted silence enveloped them, the whistle blew again and everybody doubled their efforts.
About a half hour after the last whistle there was a small evidence of movement from the man-made burrow. Then, in a solemn religious-like procession, three casualties emerged. One, a small boy walked trance-like between the lines of helpers. His eyes were fixed on some point ahead and he kept one hand tightly gripping that of his blue uniformed escort. A woman, with wrinkled feet under transparent skin which poked out from a grey army blanket was carried past Henry and Ron on army stretchers toward the ambulance. They saw the ashen, bleeding face and shredded dress only half covering her body, but eyes which glanced around her told them she was alive. Someone near the boys reported that the last one was an old man who had been in the bedroom. As he went by on the stretcher he was completely covered and they guessed his fate.
School, and retribution for absence, was far from their minds as they worked on to help the final clear-up at the site. They continued passing pieces of broken furniture and bricks on to the big pile they had created. As items of value or use were discovered they were passed to a man in a suit who they realised was a school master, who had also been on his way to their school and who had volunteered to take charge of anything valuable or attractive. He was writing a make-shift inventory in a familiar school exercise book.
For Henry and Ron, the normality of school and studies was suspended for as long as was necessary and only when the Civil Defence men gave the assurance that there would be no more casualties and no more effort was needed, did they leave the scene. The acrid and choking dust had dried their throats and made them choke and sneeze.
They stepped, as though from a film set, on to the streets where life went on as if the destruction of houses and people was unremarkable. Henry was silently thankful that the bombing in his part of the world was relatively light, yet everyone knew it could be their turn next. The victims of this bomb, except the one old man, had been lucky in their choice of the cupboard under the stairs as a shelter, it rarely gave adequate refuge. As Henry and Ron sipped a welcome mug of tea from the WVS van, it was confirmed that the old man had been in the bedroom when the bomb fell. Henry wondered if it was he who had last used the piss pot.

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