大象传媒

When the 1939-45 war was declared, I was seven years old and living with my parents and four brothers (two more were born later) on a 184-acre farm called Great Dyffrhyd. Dyffrhyd is situated on the banks of the river Vyrnwy, one mile from Maesbrook in Shropshire, and was an exciting place to spend my childhood and teenage years.
My memories of the early years of the war include the work of the village Air Raid warden, Mr. Harry Ratcliffe, who was responsible for strict black-out control. Since German bombers flew overhead on night raids to Manchester, Liverpool and Birkenhead, any householder showing a chink of light through their curtains would be reprimanded. On the farm, all our portable paraffin lanterns had one side of their glass protection painted black or red, so that little light would be shown to the night sky. Mr. Ratcliffe also issued gas masks to every villager.
Maesbrook also had its own Home Guard, whose members practised using various firing weapons, did field maneouvres, drill and communication. They were men who knew every wood, brook, nook and cranny in the village and were not "daft" as portrayed in TV's 'Dad's Army' series.
Quite early in the war, a big network of bomb storage sheds was built in the Maesbrook and Kinnerley area. These were huge sheds with railtrack straight through the centre and storage bays on either side. They had huge sliding doors at each end to allow passage for trains and wagons to travel anywhere in the network and out onto mainline rail. The sheds had brick sides and ends, with concrete sleepers completely covering the roof, supported on concrete pillars. Outside, the sheds were covered in soil, from ground level to roof, and grss seeded to camouflage them and give some explosion protection. Because of security, our school bus was re-routed from the side lanes and shed sites until the end of the war.
My memories of wartime agriculture are that during the war, farmers were obliged to plough land for grain crops and sugar beet. In this area, where farms had been mainly pasture and were only just starting to move from horse to tractor, it meant the arrival of local agricultural contractors starting up in business. One of the first contractors in the area lived next door to our school, so I saw some of the first Fordson tractors with trailed ploughs and stationary balers and later mobile tractor-drawn balers, parked on the village square, right next to the school. At this time also, farmers were buying their first tractors and converting implement shafts to tractor hitch-ups.
I remember having evacuees at Kinnerley School. The longest classroom was divided in two, with a wooden partition to make room for children from Birkenhead, who were spread throughout the school. Most of them soon made friends, but it was hard for them. As war broke out, we had a Mrs. Haltaway and her two young children as evacuees staying at the farm, but country life was too much of a change and after just one week, they left during the night. What arrangements they had made, we never knew. My grandparents and aunties also took in evacuees during the war, including a boy named Terry Toner and his sister.
We had quite a few additions to our workforce on the farm during the war. We had two Barnardos boys and then, in the early forties, some Land Army girls form Oldham, named Lily, Margery and Edith, who all lived in as family. For a time, we had Charles and Ernst who were Belgian refugees.
Between 1942 and 1944, we began to have groups of Italian POWs, on request. They came in day gangs, under guard, from the local camp at St.Martins, to dig ditches, brush hedges and thresh corn. We also had pairs of prisoners living in, two at a time, and working full time. I remember Pietro and Danielle, Giulio and Raffael, Ciro and Guiseppi, Gaffredo and Pietro. Apart from farmwork, I remember them making baskets with stripped hazel bark and melting aluminium to make rings,cooking hedgehogs, and one of them once borrowing a bicycle to go to a dance in Overton. Most of them were good fun, although I recall one prisoner once pulling a knife on another prisoner. Another memory is of a POW singing the song 'Funiculi Funicula'. They hated the colder British weather.
Towards the end of the war, a displaced Armenian called Angelo arrived and he was a very good worker - he could easily lift a big wire-strapped hay bale under one arm. The German prisoners came late in the war, which shows how long they were kept captive.
By 1946, we had Kurt and Antonio (a butcher by trade) living in. A vivid memory is of Antonio carrying two buckets of milk from the cowshed to the cooler, quite a long distance, and he would often shout in a sing-song tone, 'Every day, Anton must carry the milk!' Later, we had Bruno Lendrich and Karl Weiss. Karl had a good singing voice and sang at an event in Maesbrook Methodist Chapel Sunday School. He was a bachelor and didn't leave until 1948. Bruno was a married man and longed for letters from his wife and family. One day, he jokingly tossed a pebble at me while I was on Bob the horse. Bob shied, I went over into a stone gatepost and was concussed for the whole afternoon, much to Bruno's mortification. All the German POWs were good workers and I think they appreciated the sense of freedom they found on the farm.
Local men who made it home to Maesbrook included Gordon Thomas and Charlie Newell. I went to Charlie's welcome home party in Maesbrook Village Hall - he'd spent part of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese. He became the village's trusted and well-liked garage mechanic after the war.
Throughout the war years, my parents also had my willing help on the farm. While at Oswestry Boy's High School, I took two weeks off school most terms (permitted for the war effort) and left school at Christmas 1946 just before I was 15.

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