大象传媒

Extracts from 鈥淐hurchill鈥檚 Children鈥� A memoir of WW11

TWO
C鈥檓on a my house,
My housa c鈥檓on.
C鈥檓on a my house,
My housa c鈥檓on鈥︹��

I see Jack now, in my mind鈥檚 eye, playing in the garden of his family prefab just around the corner from ours. He was the new kid in the street, as it were, our family having arrived in 1946 and his not until about a year later. He was helping his father dig the virgin soil around their new home; perhaps not so virgin, as it was strewn and mixed with builders鈥� rubble, making it exhausting work to break up and to clear.

Nobody in Minster Way cared about that, though. We had all come through the greatest war in history. Houses were scarce before the conflict but in addition many were lost to the Blitz and overcrowding had become the norm. When Jack鈥檚 father Arthur returned in early 1946 after his worldwide service in His Majesty鈥檚 Battleship Nelson, his family found themselves with simply nowhere to go. They solved the problem for the time being by banding together with some others like themselves and squatting in a cluster of old wooden huts in Langley, just down the road from the prefabs. The local council in their spite cut off the electricity (they were former RAF billets) until the press got wind of what was happening. At one stage, Jack鈥檚 mother, Daisy, told me, the squatters barricaded the entrance to the site and defied the authorities to evict them. Daisy even faced down one official with the words: 鈥榊ou鈥檝e bloody well had my husband for five years and now we鈥檙e bloody well getting something back!鈥� There Jack lived with his family, his sister Catherine arriving around about 1947, in a shack with no proper heating, no electricity, no mains water. In fact, during the terrible winter of 鈥�46 鈥� 鈥�47 they had to pour hot water on the taps before they would function, frozen solid as they were. There they stayed until that great day that they were awarded a prefab and I saw him in the garden the day after they moved in.

Those prefabricated homes, awarded to us after The War, although only a concrete raft with an asbestos box bolted together on top of it, were like
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mansions to us. Jack鈥檚 father鈥檚 family came from the dreadful poverty and fearful conditions of the pits of South Wales, while my mother鈥檚 family sprang from the same in South Shields. We were all definitely from the working classes.

Working classes in the loosest definition of the word, of course: work
was not always to be had until The War changed everything.

I visited the Prefabs, some time in the 1970s, while they were being demolished. There was nothing left but the street, Minster Way, itself, and the concrete rafts upon which the houses had been so speedily
assembled. I was able to identify ours, number 16, and wondered at the smallness of it.

The scene of desolation brought back many memories; in those days, it seemed, the sun shone all summer through and the world was garlanded and hushed with snow every Christmas Eve. I could see the outline of the
rooms 鈥� there was my old bedroom where I had lain awake at Christmas, in a frenzy of excitement. There was the living room and the door through which my father had invited the carol singers inside so that we could all sing together, in the warm. There was the kitchen and the spot where THAT fridge had stood. Just up the street was the place where the off-license had stood, where we kids used to meet after Boxing Day, each with a wheelbarrow, eager to collect the returned deposits on the empty beer and cider bottles from Christmas Day. There were the places where my parents and sisters had loved, laughed and cried, now simply blocks of concrete, strewn with sheets of abandoned asbestos and the other detritus of a demolition site. The outline of our garden was still visible and I smiled to myself as I recalled a story my father used to tell of the time when we first moved in.

The garden, being virgin soil, needed to be dug but Dad was suffering from a painful back injury and so was unable to do it himself. He hit upon the idea of asking around in the Red Lion pub for a gardener. The landlord pointed out an old fellow in his seventies playing dominoes in the corner and said, 鈥榯alk to Walter, he鈥檒l help you.鈥�

鈥楾hat鈥檒l be easy,鈥� said Walter,鈥檕il bring me spade termorrer.鈥�

鈥榃on鈥檛 that be a bit much for you?鈥� asked Dad, a creeping disbelief beginning to touch him.
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鈥極h, that be alright,鈥� said Walter, 鈥榦ill bring me dad!鈥�

And so he did. Walter said it don鈥檛 be ard that diggan it鈥檚 just ow ee does er tha counts.
None of it is recognisable now. Private houses cover the whole area, including the Green Drive, The Dump and The Brickfield and a mobile home park covers most of Trenches Farm.

I turned away, steeped in nostalgia and it seemed to me, although it was probably only imagination, as if the faint sound of 鈥楽ilent Night鈥� briefly echoed and died upon the wind.

Whatever their temporary nature, they were warm and snug and had those 'fridges! I had never even seen such a thing before, let alone used one. It seems strange to think that we must have been among the very first
'Working Class' people to have used them, now that virtually everybody has one, it being a sign of abject poverty not to possess one.

After the 'muck in together' mentality of the War we found the same attitude in the prefabs. Everyone was friendly and pretensions of class and position were, at least temporarily put aside.

Jack and I were born literally to the thunder of the guns, he in late 1940 and I almost exactly a month later. The Blitz was well underway by then, with bombs raining upon London and thousands already killed. My mother has described to me the sight of London鈥檚 East End burning, clearly visible from thirty miles away, its dreadful glow painting the sky orange.

My earliest memory is of what seemed to me to be an enormous air raid shelter (it turned out to be the one built under the garden of the pub across the road, so could not have held more than a couple of dozen souls before it became crowded). I remember that it had bunks, with people sitting on them, singing; I cannot recall exactly what but no doubt all the old singalong favourites of the time would have been belted out: 'Side By Side', 'My Old Man', and so on:

It鈥檚 a long way to Tipperary,
It鈥檚 a long way to go.
It鈥檚 a long, long way to Tipperary
To the sweetest gal I know.
10

Goodbye, Piccadilly鈥�

Somehow I, a mere toddler, slipped away and up the steps to the outside. It was different out there all right, and that is probably why I recall it from so tender an age. The night was a cacophony. Searchlights lanced through the sky, guns hammered and shells burst high among the stars and beneath all was the drone of aircraft, that drone, the sound of Jerries, a drone which in time became as unmistakable as the voice of a relative. I

thought it all utterly wonderful and remained there, taking it all in for some time until my father found me and, putting his strong arms around me, carried me back down. I remember the feel of the coarse cloth of his Home Guard greatcoat and that he had a rifle on a sling over one shoulder.

How do I remember all this from my babyhood six decades ago? Perhaps something so cataclysmic, and so seminal to one's life, imprints itself on the memory in ways that we cannot understand. Perhaps memories such as this were all a part of the preparation for my Awakening.

Another early memory, the details of which I have been able to glean from my parents, is of a train journey. I do not know how they managed it, but Mum and Dad arranged a holiday, in 1944, to their hometown of South Shields, which, even after nearly seven decades, is still 'Home'. Off we went, Mum and Dad, Barbara my sister and I, to the North.

I remember the train being packed with American soldiers, GIs. I can remember parroting to them the catch phrase of the time: Got Any Gum, Chum? I am certain that they had plenty for me. I was fascinated by their uniforms and their accents, but most of all by their rifles. Rifles! What things for a little boy to see and touch.

My mother had scraped together enough ingredients to make a cake for the journey. It was huge and almost filled a suitcase. We shared it with the GIs and they shared their rations with us. One of them became so enthusiastic that he unscrewed a railway company mirror off the wall and presented it to my mother. 'You like this, Ma'am? Yeah? Well, here yah go!'

10

I imagine that there was more than a little liquor around those boys that night and I sometimes wonder how many of them died soon after in Normandy.

THREE
When we were kids,
On the corner of the street,
We were rough and ready guys
But Oh! How we could harmonise鈥︹��.

It was at this time, while we were at Minster Way that the war gradually began to fade away. For most people that is; certainly not for people like my grandmother and certainly not for people like Stan Pointon.

Stan could scream. In fact Stan could scream more painfully and terrifyingly than anything I have heard before or since.

He had been captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore in early 1942 and had been listed 'Missing, presumed dead'. He returned in late 1945 after the defeat of Japan and his widow had to adjust to the fact that he was actually alive, having accepted his death after so many years.

He had been taken, with others, upcountry from the infamous Changi prison to work on the Burma-Siam railway, the 'Railway Of Death' as it came to be called, the one that crossed the notorious river Kwai. Men were starved, beaten, tortured and worked to death and they died in their thousands. It has been said, apocryphally, that a man died for every sleeper laid. Disease and malnutrition claimed them as well as overwork and mistreatment. To be in the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army for so many years and survive, even in the condition that he was, like a human skeleton, is a kind of miracle.

The Pointons lived exactly opposite to our prefab, their back garden abutted ours, so they must have been at least forty yards away, yet I was woken by Stan's screams night after night. They were high-pitched and ragged like a circular saw, like those of a werewolf being slowly crushed in a huge press and they kept me awake, terrified, crouched under the covers with my hands over my ears. I think that he must have dreaded sleep, for I think that it was his dreams that invoked his fearful howls.

10

Only he and God, his fellow survivors and the Japs knew what had been done to him and what dreadful images coursed through his nightmares.

SEVEN

We鈥檙e going to hang out our washing
On the Siegfried Line
If the Siegfried Line鈥檚 still there!

Many children, especially little boys I believe, really enjoyed The War. They would spot aircraft and identify them, as they picked up pieces of shrapnel from the previous nights' air battles. In the days of the Battle of Britain they would watch the twisting and turning of the fighter aircraft and strain their ears for the rattle of their guns. When a Spitfire or a Hurricane shot down a Jerry and celebrated with a 'Victory Roll', corkscrewing just above the chimney pots, they would leap up and down and yell in triumph.

I was too young for all that, being born at the end of the Battle of Britain and at the beginning of the Blitz, but it nonetheless seemed to seep into and permeate my being. Even now, when I hear the words of Winston Churchill, the call to arms, to stand steady and endure where others had crumbled, I feel a shiver of pride and emotion:

'鈥herefore, let us brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say: This was their finest hour.'

As John F. Kennedy said: 鈥楬e mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.鈥�

Although I was very young throughout the conflict, there are nonetheless things that I remember with clarity as if they had happened only a few days ago.

One morning the very building in which we slept began to shake. Everyone rushed outside. Everywhere there were people gazing skyward. Then I saw them, dozens, hundreds, thousands of aircraft. The thunder of

32

their engines was deafening and their numbers seemed to actually turn the morning into evening. I felt no fear: these were ours. I could tell it was so

by the cheering and shouting, and they sounded like ours. They were on their way to deliver the enemy a mighty blow. For hours they roared overhead and for hours they roared back, some limping and leaking smoke as their pilots desperately tried to bring them home safe. Whether
it was the assault on Normandy - D-Day, or upon Arnhem I cannot tell but its cataclysmic effect is with me today. I can still see those aircraft.

In those days we habitually played in the streets. It was quite normal. Nobody thought anything of it. Perverts who preyed upon children were extremely rare, if not non-existent, as were motor cars. One day, however, a friend and I strayed, as children will and were missed when we did not respond to our mothers' calls. They looked for us all over until finally they walked the length of the 'Cinder Track', a path which ran for some miles through the council estates of Manor Park in Slough, having been paved by Italian prisoners of war. It petered out in the countryside near Farnham Royal. Italian POWs, and probably most German too, for that matter and if the truth be known, although sporting a huge round red patch on the back of their clothes, an unmistakable ID and a good target for that matter, as a deterrent to escape attempts, probably harboured not the slightest dreams of escape. They were logical people: why go back to fight for that maniac Mussolini when they could enjoy peace and, funnily enough, plenty of goodwill in Britain? Many stayed after the War and settled here permanently. In fact, many of them took to life over here so well that they became 'more British than the British'. I remember, years later in 1958, sitting with Jack in an Italian caf茅 in London after a day at college. The proprietor looked to be of an age to have been a soldier during the war. A woman, a 'lady of the night', I believe, came in and entered into a furious argument, I know not why, between herself and the proprietor and his wife. In the end, after much shouting, screaming and vile cursing on her part, she swung on her heel to leave. When she was halfway through the door she turned, and red-faced with frustration, and having obviously run out of obscenities, she summoned up the only insult she had left in her locker: 'Mussolini! Mussolini!' she spat. Jack and I laughed until our stomachs hurt. The real point was that, in a prominent position on the wall, was a Coronation commemorative photograph of the Queen, together with Prince Phillip, her consort!

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Eventually our mothers found us, picking blackberries or engaged in some other innocent occupation, and were about to deliver a smack and a good telling off when we heard it, the put-put of a Flying Bomb, or a Doodlebug as they were popularly known. I can still feel my bowels turn
to water in my fear, and that was only communicated fear, caught from our mothers. We did not know what a Doodlebug could do, but our mothers did. They seemed all the more sinister by not having a pilot and were packed with fuel and explosives. The fuel was designed to run out over London so that the bomb would fall and destroy anything beneath.

This one, for some reason, had strayed a bit too far west and must surely be near to its deadly drop.

With bated breath our mothers waited. Put-put-put it went, an innocent enough sound now, for anyone who has never heard one over an English meadow, but one to fill us all with terror back then. Then it stopped and began its almost vertical dive. Would it kill us all? I am certain that our mothers prayed. We huddled together, not a sensible thing to do when to scatter would have been safer, but we did what came naturally, eyes squeezed shut as we waited for it. It did not find us in its blindness, however, and exploded harmlessly in a nearby field. Then what a telling-off, mixed with tears off relief! You little buggers - sob - why did you run off? - hug - wait till we tell your dads - kisses - you'll get such a good hiding - sob, clout, sob, until we were all crying with relief and we two knew that we were never going to get that particular good hiding.

* *
EIGHT
Have you ever heard the wind go "Yooooo"?
'Tis a pitiful sound to hear!
It seems to chill you through and through
With a strange and speechless fear鈥︹��..

There were other terrors during those wartime days of my childhood. Child disease and mortality were still rampant and, while my family did not actually lose any children, we came very close to doing so.

First there was myself: at the tender age of twelve months I contracted pneumonia. This was in the days before antibiotics became available. The treatment was primitive; basically it was simply to bathe me regularly and to try to keep my fluid level normal. The doctor visited one evening. 'The crisis will come tonight,' he told my parents, meaning that that night I would either live or die according to the whim of the disease and my own basic strength.

At about midnight it came. I began to splutter and turn purple as my lungs filled with the deadly mucus and I began to drown. 'Oh no,' thought my valiant and resourceful mother and, grasping me by the feet, turned me upside down and whacked me on the back several times, as she had probably seen her mother or her mother's mother do. Great gobbets of the vile stuff spouted from my mouth, more than she could imagine that my tiny lungs could hold, but finally there was no more and, taking a great breath, I began to scream in the normal, healthy, baby fashion for which I was apparently notorious.

All the doctors in the world could not save me but my mother could. Her love, added to her inbred determination and self-reliance, would not allow her to let me go without a fight. I am still here, sixty years later, because of her courage and decisiveness.

Before I was of school age I had suffered nephritis, a disease of the kidneys where the body fills with water and resembles a grotesque balloon where, if somebody were to press my leg with their finger, the
indentation would remain for more than an hour. God knows how, but I survived that.
I was operated upon for mastoiditis, a potentially deadly inflammation of the inner ear. I still have a small, post-operative dent in my skull today.
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I contracted diphtheria, a terrible spectre which stalked the land killing children wherever it could.

I suppose that I must at some stage have received antibiotics, as penicillin had during this time become available, first to the troops, then to those on the Home Front. I can remember, during one of my stays in hospital, the boy next to me had been dubbed 'Penicillin Pete,' as he was the first civilian in the county, or perhaps even the country, to receive this lifesaver.

All this before the age of five, and I have been very healthy until comparatively recently. I can only conclude that God or the Devil did not want me at that time.

It is impossible to imagine the feelings of my Mum and Dad, having to live with these horrors, any one of which could have whisked me off forever, while simultaneously having to cope with the most terrible war in history.

When my sister Barbara was seven, in 1944, while I was giving my parents terrors with my illnesses, she developed the first symptoms of Chorea, a devastating neurological illness which manifests itself in the total loss of control of the victim's limbs, the fearful 'St. Vitas' Dance,' as it was known. This receded but returned in the 1950s when, as a young girl, she had to spend seven months in a special hospital. She recovered, thank God, went on to marry and raise a fine branch of the family, and is now a grandmother and even a step-GREAT grandmother.

In 1950, Hilary, my little sister, contracted poliomyelitis during the great pandemic that swept the nation and the world. It began with a slight stiffness of the neck and grew to total paralysis from the waist down. This
was the most terrifying disease any of us had ever dreamed of. Victims, if they survived, were often paralysed from the neck down, necessitating the use of a massive ventilator, dubbed by the public 'The Iron Lung'. This enclosed the whole of the child's body, like a giant breadbin, with only
the head protruding, the eyes fixed upon a mirror placed to give some view of the world.

Everyone knew that if you needed to go into one of those, your chances were slim.
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I can remember the whole family, at that time my parents, Barbara and myself, sitting around the dinner table, the meal untouched, my mother weeping, something I had never seen her do, crying, 'Please God, don鈥檛 let Hilary die or be crippled. She's only a baby.' Dad sat with his arm about her, struggling to maintain his own composure in order to give some comfort, while Barbara and I sat still and shocked with the horror of it, all knowing that Hilary lay at that moment in an isolation hospital, where we were not even allowed to visit her for fear of spreading contagion, awaiting the whims of fate: life, death or disability.

A brave friend of my mother鈥檚, nicknamed Blondie, had suggested, at the height of Hilary鈥檚 paralysis, that they visit the local Spiritualist Church. Mum had never been to one, but after all, as Blondie said, what harm could it do?

The medium picked Mum out immediately. He began to rub his right arm. 鈥業 am getting someone who is finding it difficult to move,鈥� he informed her, 鈥榖ut mostly the difficulty is in the arm.鈥� Mum fled in fear, although, when she recalls it, she acknowledges that the medium was absolutely correct and would have been a source of great comfort and strength if she had been able to accept his message.

In the event, perhaps God took pity on us and she slowly began to recover, the paralysis spreading no further and eventually starting to recede, leaving her with only a slight weakness in one arm, just as the medium had demonstrated, which she disguises and compensates for with a special skill.

That sickness seems to me, even fifty years later, to have been the nearest thing to the Great Plagues: not only did it strike down tens of thousands in Britain and millions across the world, but we were shunned by our
neighbours, exactly as those victims would have been in those ancient days. Who can blame them? Only one soul apart from Blondie helped us and showed her contempt for danger. The lady next door, Mrs. Woodall, whom Mum and Dad had always regarded as a complete sponger, popping in at all times, as she would, to borrow a cup of sugar or flour
which was never returned, and had even once sent a daughter round with a piece of bread, begging for Mum to spread jam upon it, was magnificent in the crisis. She did our shopping and fearlessly brought meals in to us and was the soul of kindness at a time when, not only was

39

my sister stricken but we felt as if the whole world had turned its back upon us.

Apart from that one great lady and her family and Blondie, I suppose. After all, what is a cup of sugar or a spread of jam?

Hilary is now a successful business executive, married to a man who is hugely respected in his chosen field of television special effects, and has two children, both on their way to producing their own families.

Even those travails, especially as they had happy endings in that we survived, pale before the experiences of some. About three doors down from us in the prefabs there lived a Mr. and Mrs. Lovejoy. Mrs. Lovejoy gave birth to four children in all, who survived until school age only for all four to die, at different times, of meningitis. It was hideous and tragic but even that was not regarded as so unusual in those days. Now, of course, four cases of meningitis would be regarded as a serious epidemic. The media would be full of it. In the forties it was just another lethal disease.

I often wonder what became of Mr. and Mrs. Lovejoy and a sadness still overcomes me when I do. How did they not go insane?

There was a whole countryside to explore near our prefabs in Langley. There was Trenches Farm, with its cherry orchards, which provided magnificent opportunities for 'scrumping' during the summer. There were the gravel workings, where one great flooded pit formed a lake where whole families picnicked and swam on warm summer days, like a very early and primitive forerunner of the Mediterranean package holiday.

That said that, it was not really safe as several children were drowned there over the years. Somehow, though, that seemed to be accepted, if sadly. The world did not seem to be so obsessed with absolute safety in those days. Nonetheless, this is not to decry the horror and grief caused by the death of a child at any time.

A branch of the Grand Union canal ran from Slough past the gravel workings and, for some reason that will probably always be unknown to me, was full of the corpses of dogs wrapped in sacking. Why so many dogs were disposed of and in such a manner, and whence they came I have no idea but perhaps unhealthy disposals such as these helped to
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pollute other water sources such as The Gravel Pit. Who knows? Anyway, I still bless the name of Jonas Salk, one of the leading developers of a polio vaccine, and I wonder鈥f such as pop stars can be knighted then why are not such as Jonas Salk, who saved uncalculated millions of lives and saved millions more from disability, not honoured by statues in every town on earth?

Sometimes I wonder, with my new knowledge of, and belief in, the Spirit, if someone was watching over us, keeping us safe. After all, things could have been so different.

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