大象传媒

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As the laconic comedian Rob Wilton once said on the wireless, (the word radio was not in usage then), 鈥淭he day war broke out, my wife said to me, 鈥榃hat good are yer?鈥� 鈥�

Well, on that third day of September, 1939, I was asking myself the same question, because earlier that year, I had sat the entrance examination for Dunstable Grammar School. When I took the exam I was only nine years old and the formidable Miss B, then the headmistress of Burr Street School, quite rightly thought that it would be better if my father held me back for another year. But my father demurred, 鈥淚t will be good experience for him for next year.鈥�

So I sat the exam and was awarded a scholarship. This was a mixed blessing, because it committed me to surviving in a group of boys who physically were much bigger than me, and inevitably one or two of them were bullies. I asked for a set of boxing gloves that Christmas and the practice I had with them served me in very good stead. Luckily my swimming earned Brownie points!

The realities of age and physique became all too apparent in that first term because the school had a cadet corps, which was formidably well equipped. It had a whole range of fire-arms. These were kept in an armoury built alongside what were then called the New Buildings. Looking back, I suspect that at that time, Dunstable School was one of the best-equipped fighting units in that part of Bedfordshire. They had enough .303 rifles to arm a platoon. They had a rifle range complete with large butts and they had a selection of .22 rifles for practising marksmanship. They also had all the necessary ammunition. The firepower was kept under the watchful eye of Sergeant Major Odell. He was a veteran of the First World War and his uniform was what he would have worn fighting in France. He had a peaked cap, rather like that of a present day officer and he wore puttees, which came up to his knees. No one pronounced the 鈥済鈥� in sergeant major, either. So his rank came across as 鈥渟arnt-major.鈥�

The corps drilled on the school quadrangle. This was between the main school building and the fives court and the swimming pool. New boys were nowhere near old enough to join the corps, but some of those that were, those in the sixth form, knew that within a year, they would be in the Army and fighting in France.

At the beginning of the war, the ground underneath the school鈥檚 rifle range was tunnelled to provide a network of underground air-raid shelters. These were capable of housing the entire school, as well as the boys in the prep. school over at Ashton Lodge.

In the early months of the war, the headmaster, A.F.R.Evans (Alf), organised practices in the drills necessary to evacuate the class-rooms, the gymnasium and the boarding house, so as to move more than three hundred boys and masters into relative safety.

Once the hard-pressed RAF had won the aerial Battle of Britain, these practices were discontinued. The nearest we came to being bombed or strafed by German aircraft was when the newly built Meteorological Office near the Green Lanes, was targeted by a light bomber. At that time, the nearest housing was in Chiltern Road. Asleep in my bedroom of our house near the junction of Friars Walk and Bull Pond Lane, I did not even hear the explosion.

By then, I had a season ticket to the California swimming pool up on the Downs. This had been built in 1937. It was an open-air pool and it was straight out of the 1930s American concept of what such a facility should look like. The pool was 33 yards long and 11 yards wide. A high diving-board was in the middle with a spring-board on one side and a set board on the other. Those two boards were the same height, at about four feet. On one side of the pool, just out of the shallow end, was a water chute. Set back from the side of the pool were two stepped terraces, and those were comfortably furnished with solidly built wooden benches, each capable of seating four people. There was a lot of land around it too, much more than an acre. It had been a chalk pit, but work on that had been stopped for environmental reasons. This made it possible to concrete an area big enough for basketball or netball, and the ground rising up to the Downs beyond was terraced for sunbathing. On a good Sunday in the summer holidays, the California pool attracted more than a thousand swimmers and sunbathers. Some even found their way to it from France.

As soon as war was declared and I can see the front room in which we sat, listening to the wireless as Neville Chamberlain told us that as from eleven o鈥檆lock that morning, we would be at war with Germany 鈥� we busied ourselves with Air-raid Precautions. A nice man called Mr Pillinger had a sweet shop in Prosperous Row, just at the back of the town square, and he made room available for the part-time volunteers to use as a base. My father was one of those local men who became involved. Gas masks had been issued complete in their cardboard boxes, and it never occurred to anyone to raise their eyebrows and ask if they were ever likely to be necessary, which they weren鈥檛.

Those early months, stretching from September through to the following summer, became known as the phoney war. In the course of that time, my father was called up for the Army. He snorted about that, because twenty-two years earlier back in 1917, he had fudged his age and joined the force that ultimately became known as the RAF. He sat behind the pilot, out in the open air from the waist up, while he wrestled with the Lewis machine gun mounted in front of him.

In 1940 therefore, he decided that if he was going to be called up, he would volunteer for the RAF, which he did. He got out his car, a newish Vauxhall, drove up to the Air Ministry in Kingsway, London and volunteered. Volunteers were allowed to wear a badge on their uniform signifying that they were not pressed men! It set them apart. He was stationed in Lincolnshire which, being as flat as it was, and being as near to the continent of Europe as it was, had so many airfields on it, of one sort or another that it was probably the biggest air base in Europe.

One foggy day, I think in 1942, my father was home on leave and he was testing a new and marvellously comfortable bed that he and my mother had bought for me. My bedroom was at the back of our house, which was not much more than 300yards from High Street South. Like most schoolboys I could identify every aircraft flying at the time, British or German. My father was luxuriating on my new bed and I was looking out of my bedroom window, when I saw a plane flying up High Street South, almost at ground level. I could see at once what it was. 鈥淒ad鈥�, said I, 鈥渢here鈥檚 a Dornier flying up the High Street!鈥� Father snorted in disbelief, but no sooner had he done so than we heard the unmistakeable rattle of machine-gun fire. The German aircrew were probably lost, and following the Watling Street. But as soon as they got past Half Moon Lane and saw the Empire Rubber Company down below, they let fly with every machine-gun they could bring to bear.

My father leapt out of bed, but by then the Dornier was out of sight. All we could hear was its engines and machine-guns. Following the old Roman road was common practice for both friend and foe, and later we heard that when the Dornier got to Redbourn, it turned to the left, no doubt with the idea of finding the shortest and safest route to the east coast. However it never got that far. It was brought down in Hertfordshire.

That incident was dramatic enough, but it did not compare with the huge flight of German bombers which I saw attack the Vauxhall works. The enemy must have known by then that Vauxhall were no longer making cars. They were making tanks. Anyway, quite by chance, I happened to be standing looking over the wall of the balcony of the California pool. It was a brilliant day and as soon as I saw the size of the flight of aircraft, I knew they must be German.

I watched them fly over Wardown Hills beyond Luton and then I saw them dive. Briefly they disappeared from sight behind the knoll of Blows Downs, but we all heard the explosions as they dropped their bombs, and then I saw the towering clouds of smoke rising above the Downs.

The aircraft were Junkers 88s and they did not turn away. Instead they came straight on, straight over the top of the California swimming pool. They were almost exactly overhead when they passed us and we could see that they were being harried by two lonely British fighters. The Junkers turned left as they went over Whipsnade, no doubt also to follow the Watling Street. We heard later that two of their bombers were shot down.

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