大象传媒

TOM'S WAR
I remember the war - the Second World War - My War.

With the fertile memory and imagination of a young boy, I adopted it as my very own property, with all the biases and colouring that childhood can give.

Just where to start is a puzzle because the ideas and images come tumbling out in confusion, some damping out the others and often obscuring those I now know were of the greatest importance.

Perhaps being raised in the seaside town of Ramsgate, within sight of the French coast, and crammed with maritime tradition, affected me from my earliest days, and gave me at the outbreak of war, a feeling of transition, as if this were the most natural progression of life, instead of the shock felt by my elders able to assess the impact of the horrors to come.

Certainly one of my first memories was the visit of the destroyer, HMS Scout, to our harbour, and spending much of my free time gazing in awe at the ship and her smart crew, wondering how the guns worked, how her monster searchlight was manned, and thrilling to the sound of the bosun's call. The first love of my life was the F. T . Everard coaster Alacrity unloading a cargo of coal for our local gasworks, how huge she seemed to young eyes, a real ship. All this sea romance bombarding me at the tender age of seven or eight!.

I had been familiar, as a child, with stories of the Great War, listening to stories about my maternal grandfather who skippered a minesweeping trawler in Scottish waters, but these were so distant as to be unreal. Now the real thing was about to start, it was an exciting game.

War came as I was in church on the Sunday morning of September 3rd 1939; the vicar curtailed the service with the announcement broadcast over the wireless. Hymns and anthems came to a halt for us choirboys, and I raced home choking with excitement at the first sounding of the air-raid sirens bringing everyone to the state of alert.

The people of Thanet had been preparing for war over a number of years with the construction of multiple deep tunnel shelters mined through the chalk rock underlying the towns. These shelters were to become home to the population over the next few years, some people living for months on end 60 feet below the surface without seeing daylight. Individual cubicles were constructed in the tunnels with boards and hessian, and the full processes of living were carried out in these close confines -cooking and eating the meals prepared over paraffm cookers, sleeping in bunks hung about with curtains to ensure some degree of privacy from the gaze of passers-by. I still recall the smells; mildewed sacking, disinfectant from the chemical toilets, acetylene lamps mingling with simmering stew and frying bacon.

To this day, a dark sky with clouds passing across the moon, flips my memory into pictures of hurrying along the blacked-out street to get to the tunnel entrance accompanied by the eerie wail of the sirens, sometimes punctuated by the local anti-aircraft batteries loosing-off shells at random into the night. We boys used to keep our eyes alert the next day on our way to school for souvenir fragments of the rounds we had heard fired during the night.

In the early part of the war our shoreline was accessible, as it was in peacetime, to the civilian population. The conflict was brought to Thanet's doorstep because of our closeness to the Goodwin Sands where mined vessels were often cast ashore damaged beyond salvage; their cargoes washed ashore onto our beaches to become fair game for any beachcombers industrious enough to dodge the Customs and our town bobbies. The contraband was of a mixed nature, but sometimes the tide brought in some desirable merchandise.

When the liner Dunbar Castle was mined and stranded on the Goodwins her freight, bound for South Africa, arrived soaked and mostly damaged on our sands. One attractive item she was carrying was a consignment of school pencils embossed the name of the SA State Education Department, these proved popular with the townsfolk once they had been dried out.

Our family sat for hours unpicking soggy cigarettes and drying the teased-out tobacco spread on newspapers before the hearth in large quantities which kept my father and his friends in smokes for a year. One of Dad's favourite yarns was about the boots: He had spotted, early one morning, a crate floating shorewards he waited for an hour or so before he was able to wade out and haul it to safety. The crate was sound and watertight, yet yielded easily to his crowbar carried in anticipation for such an occasion. The contents were a pleasant surprise -new army boots of various sizes, promising Dad possibilities of some extra pocket-money -until he examined them more closely; all left footed boots they would hardly excite prospective bargain hunters!

Our beds at home were made of the finest luxury kapok, we felt as though we were floating on a cloud, courtesy of the shore which at the time was covered with the fluff like cultivated fields. Heating had seldom been a problem as we always had the
supplementary supply of driftwood flotsam to burn. We often used huge slabs of cork insulation washed ashore from wrecks of refrigerated vessels; it burned with a dense red glow and a pungent odour when the wind wafted draughts down the chimney.

I could not claim that we were a well-to-do family, but my parents worked hard to keep the family soundly clothed and fed. Dad worked shifts at the gasworks in the boiler house and engine room, and Mum 鈥榣et' a room or two during the summer months for holidaymakers in peacetime in order to remain solvent and to provide some extras for our well-being.

I used to collect 鈥榝ag' cards, taking months of searching and dealing to assemble a full set of cards; my wild dream then was to obtain the album in which to mount my collection, but the cost was beyond my means. I needed to raise threepence (old money) to reach the purchase price and finally summed-up the courage, or audacity, to ask Dad to subsidise my scheme; his voice peaked to a pitch of disbelief at my request and he exclaimed 鈥淲hat! do you think I am made of money?" The album appeared some time later.

Our food was wholesome, plain and sufficient. Dad was a skilful sea angler and was able to bolster our diet with first rate fish; he also had a sixth sense in locating and catching superb crabs and lobsters in cavities in the rocks at low water - with his bare hands. Mum cooked the lobsters in a huge fish kettle and we sat at the table armed with hammer and pliers in addition to our knives and forks. It became a standing joke in the family when we became aware of the luxury value of this seafood by crying ""Oh, no, not lobsters for tea again"!

Holidays for my parents were out of the question but they must have sacrificed some comforts of life to send me away for a week in Maidstone with some friends who had lodged with us, as a token of reverse hospitality, or, I suspect, they were glad to be free of me for a while, it was a memorable week for me.

One other red-letter day was that voyage across the Channel to Calais on the paddle steamer day excursion. My parents had obviously saved hard in order to treat themselves to the day trip to France and had played their cards 'close-to-chest' about it lest I should suspect the plot. I stumbled on the notion by overhearing a careless remark and, confronting my devious parents, wheedled my way into the scheme and probably using some form of juvenile blackmail to secure a ticket for the great adventure. Even the bribe of ""a whole sixpence to spend on anything you like" and the agonizing decision to deprive myself of a long-coveted pack of coloured pencils at Woolworth鈥檚 failed to buy me off. That sea outing set my destiny to go to sea when I grew up.

Dad made me a wonderful barrow, stout and sturdy to do "errands', honour demanded that I should earn an occasional coin on Saturday mornings by delivering quarter-hundredweights of coke for orders obtained from neighbours. The only alternative form of income was the hopeful collection of empty jam-jars to sell to the rag and bone merchants.

The war continued without excess excitement for us and, discounting the omens like the introduction of rationing and the call-up of the neighbourhood men, it seemed that the current description of "Phoney War" was about correct and many folks believed that it would be soon over. How wrong they were. The German armies swept our BEF back to the coast and the time of Dunkirk was upon us.

Ramsgate's citizens were not prepared to see the spectacle of the procession of craft entering our harbour laden with shattered troops, we were aghast at the sight of partly-clothed men, many of them wounded, trudging along the quayside en route to the railway station. British and French came ashore together, hungry and exhausted, some putting on a brave face with a wave to the cheering people. We kids had our important part to play in this military drama; we went collecting food clothes from neighbours, and rushed them down to the port where we personally handed them to the grateful troops. At the shop next-door but one, Mrs Finn gave me bags of biscuits and packets of cigarettes which I dutifully delivered to the soldiers who acknowledged the gifts with a pat on my head -I felt ten feet tall.

From this stage Ramsgate's war history accelerated and the place assumed the appearance of a garrison town with the army erecting barricades, barb-wiring the beaches, installing gun emplacements and setting up stores dumps.
The invasion was imminent. Everyone expected German uniforms to appear at any moment, and the time had come when the children had to be moved out in a hurry.

Becoming an evacuee was one of those unpleasant times in my life but it was not completely without its enforced element of adventure.
My young sister and I had our cases packed hurriedly for us, gas masks slung round our necks in cardboard boxes on strings, and luggage labels tied to our coats. We waved goodbye to weeping Mum and boarded the train with only a vague idea of our destination. The evacuation of the youngsters from the coastal towns was a much more hasty affair than the evacuation of London's children, we were moved out with less organisation for a different reason -almost at panic speed, hence the scarcity of information.
We were aware that we were supposed to be going to a place called Stafford, but so far as we were concerned, this could have been somewhere in South America.

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