大象传媒

I was 14 years old when war broke out. I was standing at the garden gate talking to my friend, when the air raid siren sounded at about 11 a.m. on Sunday 3rd of September 1939. We both stood there 鈥渂ravely 鈥� ignoring the pleas of my mother to come inside of the house. As we know now of course, it was a false alarm.
The next morning there was much excitement at the firm of building and electrical contractors where I worked, as we were being sent on 鈥淲ar Work鈥�. This turned out to be the converting of a local Cloth Hall into some type of hospital (presumably for the anticipated air raid casualties).
Soon the Army appeared on the scene. Large houses were commandeered, mainly for the use of the officers, while the men were housed in Nissan Huts built in the grounds. More work for our firm! Also Searchlight sites were dotted around in remote areas.
This was the period of the鈥� Phoney War鈥�, when very little seemed to be happening. This all changed in May 1940 with Hitler鈥檚 sweep through France and the imminent invasion of the South coast of Britain only 10 miles away.from our village. We heard of trainloads of soldiers passing through Headcorn (our local mainline station) following the Dunkirk evacuation.
Immediately the Local Defence Volunteer Force (later renamed Home Guard by Churchill) was formed. A retired captain, a farmer, was in charge of our village unit. I joined and was issued with an ill fitting uniform, and we paraded on the farm.
Sundry gardeners, shopkeepers and N.C.O.s from the 1914-18 War were put in charge of us.
The coastal area around Dymchurch and Littlestone was evacuated and soldiers stationed in the emptied properties. I was among some members of our firm who were sent there to make blackout shutters for the windows. I well remember a grizzled veteran regular corporal (a Dunkirk survivor) stating that his conscripted men were rubbish, and that when the invasion came, he was off inland. Whether he meant it or not was not put to the test.
Other members of our firm were sent to dig holes and erect poles in the flat marshland fields to deter airborne glider invasion.
Soon a branch of the Air Training Corp was formed in the nearby town of Tenterden and I transferred to this, and eventually ended up as a flight sergeant
Soon the Battle of Britain began. We lads would watch the air battles and when a plane was shot down or a parachute bailed out, we would dash off on our bicycles to locate it. The Army would send a couple of soldiers to guard a crashed plane, but we were allowed to wander inside, and I remember one lad calmly picking up the bomb sight of a German plane and taking it home.
One Saturday evening I stood in my garden while wave after wave of bombers flew very low overhead, presumably to get below the radar beams transmitted from towers built along the coast. When these first appeared there was much speculation as to their use. A Death Ray was the most popular suggestion. The planes flew so low that evening that I felt that I could throw a stone and hit them. In fact I did try. That evening there was a glow in the sky. London was burning.
When Canterbury was bombed, coach loads of builders were sent there daily to carry out repairs on or demolition of the damaged buildings and our firm was among them.
I was clearing one house when the lady who had lived there said that the one thing that she would like to retrieve would be her engagement ring, which had been on the stone slab in the larder. We grovelled through the debris and under the mess of bricks, timber and dust and were able to locate it.
I volunteered for R.A.F. aircrew and started service life, in May 1943, living in commandeered flats in St Johns Wood, London. We marched to Regents Park Zoo for meals, were kitted out at Lords Cricket Ground, and had lectures at Seymour Hall.
This lasted for three weeks and then off to Edinburgh, in private billets (six of us to a room in my case) for Preliminary Aircrew Training at Learmonth Technical College
This lasted for six months.
The next posting was to Initial Training Wing at Newquay in Cornwall. This was where we began aircrew training proper-
Navigation, Signals, Meteorology etc. This time we lived in commandeered hotels. One night we were called out to help launch the lifeboat.
After three months, the next posting was to Elementary Flying Training School at Swindon. This consisted of up to twelve hours flying training in Tiger Moths. I managed to fly solo after eleven and a half hours.
Unfortunately this was not enough to qualify me for pilot training, as new tests were introduced, and we spent a couple of days doing mental, manual and psychological, test at St Johns Wood, and I was selected for navigation training.
The next months were spent at Heaton Park, Manchester and the on the island of Tiree in the Hebrides. This was a Coastal Command station equipped with Halifax bombers, which flew far out over the Atlantic gaining weather data.
There was a bad accident one sunny day. A plane preparing to land collided with one taking off, and there were no survivors. We cadets were helping to pick up the debris, both human and material, when an order was sent by the Commanding Officer that we were to return to our Nissan huts. He thought it was bad for our morale.
Eventually we were sent to Liverpool and embarked on the Aquitainia, for our journey to Canada. We slept in hammocks on a lower deck, but below us on the bottom deck were many German prisoners of war, existing in pretty confined conditions.
We eventually arrived at No 1 Air Observers School at Malton Ontario, quite near to Toronto. Living quarters were luxurious compared to the Nissan huts that we had been used to. The huts were warm and comfortable.
We studied in large classrooms and our flying training was done mainly over Lake Ontario, in Anson aircraft, piloted by civilians.
One night there was an unforeseen blizzard and one flight on night exercise had to bale out.
Leave was spent hitchhiking around Canada, or travelling by train to America. Once when I was travelling on a very crowded train to Washington DC I found a half empty carriage and thankfully sat down, only to realise that it was a black people only carriage and that white people would rather stand in the corridors than sit there.
Following qualification I was commissioned and travelled home via New York where I spent V.E. day on the Queen Mary (then converted to a troopship) in New York harbour, awaiting sailing. Also on board were thousands of American troops.
We docked at Liverpool
In June I attended the No1 Air Crew Officers School at Hereford where we were subjected to Army type training.
Soon the war in the Far East came to an end and we were grounded. I retrained at Bicester as an Equipment Officer.
I got married in December 1945, and within four weeks was on embarkation leave and flew out from North Weald sitting and lying in the bomb bay of a Liberator
We landed in Cairo and stayed there for a short time, and then flew to Karachi. There I got dysentery and was confined to hospital.
The next trip was by seaplane across India dropping down on inland lakes, ending up in Calcutta for a short time. On then to Singapore, where the authorities lost touch with three of us for some time. Conscience got the better of us and we reported to H.Q. They said they had lost us and wondered where we were, but we had been in R.A.F. billets all the time. My friend Neville and I were given the option of deciding which one should go to Thailand, and which to Burma. We tossed up. He won and opted for Thailand, so I ended up in Rangoon, at No 2 Forward Equipment Unit.
I left there in March 1947, and was demobbed in April.

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