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Looking back I am often amazed that I survived World War 2 and, if I think about it too hard, a shiver runs down my spine! I was an 8 year old boy at the start of the war, lived in Hove, Sussex in a new housing estate sited at the foot of the South Downs. That doesn’t sound too hazardous. The trouble came when the Downs, a favourite haunt of my mates and I (my closest mate being Tom Downing), were taken over by the army for intensive manoeuvres. For ‘intensive’, read live ammunition, mortars, mines, the lot. Our gang, being a handful of red blooded young lads, were desperate to get into the war. Age was against us, but by the end of the war I guarantee that I knew as much about the different types of munitions as most of the troops.
It all started off when, judging by the lack of bangs, we decided there was a pause in the manoeuvres. After much nagging, we got a concession from our parents to go ‘up the Downs’. The troops were not present to start with and we could survey what was going on. The first thing that caught my eye was a huge pile of spent cartridge cases, from machine gun practice. Scrabbling through these I found a whole lot of the .303 bullets that had not been fired. I later found out that was quite common and that something like one in ten didn’t fire. We soon had a healthy collection (or perhaps ‘unhealthy’ would be a better description) of live bullets. They weren’t much use to us without a gun to fire them, but later we learnt how to take out the cordite and use it to make a crude but effective, bomb.
The next thing we discovered were unused Thunder-flashes, these were every boy’s monster banger and were intended to simulate the noise you got in a real bombardment. Explode one too close and it was ages before you could hear again.
I’m sure it would get boring to tell you about the mines we dug up and the unexploded mortar bombs we found, so I won’t. There were a lot, but for the ‘experts’ we had become, not enough! The next stage was coming up. Not too far from our house was a building the army had put up. It was a sort of bunker. Concrete walls had been built around a corrugated iron shell and the only entrance was a steel door with a formidable padlock. The weakness of the structure was a small aperture covered with wire mesh, about a foot square, near the top. I say ‘weakness’ because the designer had not reckoned on the size and agility of a determined 10-11 year old boy. I can honestly say that I did break the wire mesh, but may have adjusted it to fit. I wriggled through and let myself down. Inside it was like an Aladdin’s cave; crates of all sorts of things; Hand Grenades, Sticky Bombs (they looked a bit like toffee apples and were used against tanks; I believe they contained Phosphorous; not nice!). Not wanting to be greedy I passed just two or three items out to my mates. I can’t remember exactly what but know there was a Hand Grenade, that we took up to a disused golf course on the downs (the Dyke Golf course), and from the safety of a bunker tossed the grenade very professionally on to a putting green, and waited the regulation 3 seconds for the explosion. Apologies to those who had to restore the course after the war!
Our ‘discovery’ was eventually detected and led to a visit by the police to my home. I might have been able to bluff it out but they seemed well informed. I finished up in court and may have been able to get away with just a ticking off, instead of a year’s probation, if I had ‘split’ on the others but I didn’t. I later wondered if one of them, or their parents, had anonymously split on me, but at the time I was too innocent to think that sort of thing could happen.
It transpired that this ‘blot’ brought a couple of unexpected benefits. My father got leave from the RAF to come to the court, so that pleased Mum. Also, a year or so after the war I applied to join the police force and when my earlier transgression came to light, I was rejected. Whew! I went on to a lot better career than the police force would ever have been. I was later allowed, after solemn promises to stay away from bombs and the like, to again go up the Downs. On one such trek Tom and I discovered, near Poynings, a carefully hidden underground room that was almost certainly used by spies, but that’s another story!

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