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Teenage Memories: an extraordinary way of growing up

When the war broke out I was just thirteen. When it ended, I was almost nineteen so the war covered my teenage years exactly. In that respect, my teenage years were quite different from what went before, and from what came after. Yet in some ways they weren’t so different from the sort of schooling I would have had anyway — it was a curious mixture. I was at a boarding school during the war. The war broke out during the summer holidays in 1939 when I was staying in Cornwall with my parents. We could see it coming pretty clearly: in fact my father left for home in Harrow before the war was actually declared. I can remember sitting in a room in the house where we were staying and listening to Chamberlain announcing that we were now at war with Germany, and helping my mother put up some blackout on the window of the room, which overlooked the sea. It was thought particularly important to do that because otherwise submarines might be able to see the lights and make some use of them. Curiously, a few days before, I can remember standing on the cliffs and seeing a whole convoy of large ships passing close inshore - something very unusual, which alerted me as a boy to realise that something very strange was happening.

My father was a housemaster at Harrow School. Our house stood on the Hill, and one of my most vivid memories is of standing in 1940 with others on the Hill, looking over London, and watching the East End on fire — the docks — after one of the East End bombing raids. It looked like a vast bonfire, and it was a strange experience. My parents and other adults were clearly very worried. I think hanging over us all in the first months of the war there had been this strange feeling that the war hadn’t really begun. Then came Dunkirk, and the air raids, and we realised that things had begun with a vengeance. My parents were very worried about whether we were going to be invaded and occupied by the Germans, and although most of that didn’t impinge on me very sharply, it was enough to make me uneasy at times.

Yet at school life went on very normally, and I ought to emphasise that. Of course, we were rationed, and rationing became more severe as time went on. Things like ice cream and bananas disappeared, there were very few sweets, and things like eggs became sought-after rarities. My father was a diabetic so he surrendered his sugar ration and got extra eggs and meat in exchange. But we weren’t underfed at all, and basic things like potatoes and vegetables and porridge weren’t rationed, and plenty of them were available. One of the curious things that I remember is that rationing became marginally more severe after the war than during it.

Another thing that I look back on with some pleasure is the amount of cycling I did. There were very few cars on the road and you could cycle along all the main roads quite happily. I went youth hostelling on quite long trips. There was an occasional army lorry or a delivery van, or the doctor on his rounds, but that was about it — an amazing contrast with the roads today. Later in the war I worked on a farm in north Cornwall in the summer holidays. It was very hard work, but I’ve always been glad of the experience. The farmers were very hardworking, hard swearing, rather rough people, but they knew their job. They put me to work to help get the harvest in, which was the greatest priority. I did all sorts of jobs — I learned to load a cart with sheaves, how to lead the horse in, how to work on the steam-driven thresher, all that sort of thing.

Then came the Army. I was called up like everybody else at the age of 18, and had almost a year’s training in this country. This coincided with the last year of the war so I didn’t actually see active service. Much of the training wasn’t very interesting but it was valuable experience. One thing I do remember is that every week as an ordinary soldier you had to queue up and get your pay. You had to declare your number - ‘14494794 Trooper Bowlby, SIR!’ and then you were handed a pound note! 21 shillings minus one shilling deductions for ‘recreation and other services provided by the Army’ — whatever they might be! It had to last you for the next week. It doesn’t sound much now, and it wasn’t very much then, though it bought you a few NAAFI drinks and other necessities. The Army, of course, clothed you and fed you and gave you an occasional travel warrant if you were going on leave.

My training, which was eventually to be commissioned as an officer, ended in August 1945, and I remember being out on an exercise on a very wet night, having been made to dig a slit trench and lie in it, thinking what an absurd thing this was. We were overlooking the Thames Valley and all of a sudden all the church bells started ringing to mark the final end of the war. The European war had ended in May and people forget now that the Japanese war went on, and the one thing we all dreaded was that we would be sent out to the Far East, which was a much more unpleasant war even than the war in Europe had been. So we heard this with great relief, for it was quite unexpected — it was known that the Japanese would fight to the end. So it was a great relief, for both my parents and for me.

While I was away from home some bombs did fall one night on the school in Harrow, mainly incendiaries, and my parents found an unexploded incendiary lying on my bed! I was told that many of the incendiary bombs were made in factories in Czechoslovakia, and the Czechs made their contribution to the war by making sure that they wouldn’t explode! All the houses, both at Harrow and at my own school, had large air raid shelters built for them, rather like underground railway tunnels, with bunks on each side three rows deep, like being in a submarine. From time to time there were air raid warnings and we would all be sent down to the shelters, and spend the night there. They were very crowded and the ventilation wasn’t good, and they got damp, but they remain part of my memory of what the war was like.

Later in the war the V1s, the doodlebugs, and then the V2s, started arriving, and some of them reached north London. They were a strange experience — I can remember lying in the air raid shelter listening to the doodlebugs. They had a rather slow, thudding sort of engine, and then it would cut out, and you counted to about ten, and down it would come, and you would hear the explosion. The great thing was not to hear it cut out immediately overhead — there was nothing you could do about it. The other bombs, the V2s, were much more frightening because they simply arrived, and you didn’t hear them coming until after they arrived. I wasn’t often in central London but I was always amazed how extraordinarily well the public transport system coped, in spite of all the difficulties. At night we got quite used to travelling around in trains and buses which were very dimly lit — all you had was little blue lamps.

Just after the end of the war in August 1945 I went and joined my regiment, an armoured car regiment, and was posted to a part of it stationed in Germany, just outside Cologne. We lived in various houses in a place called Brühl because Cologne had been so badly damaged by air raids and fighting that there were no intact buildings in the city where we could be stationed. We did go into the city occasionally, and I remember one night standing on a slightly higher part of the city. From there I could see the twin towers of the cathedral in the moonlight, still surviving when everything else was so badly damaged, and I can remember thinking that this destruction must never be allowed to happen again; and I think the very strong impression that that moonlit night left on me contributed indirectly to my offering myself to be ordained, as I did later on in my time in the Army.

The role of the regiment was to act as a sort of policing force, particularly in the countryside, and particularly at night, because there were a great many people who had been forced labourers during the war who were now at large, desperately hungry, wandering over the countryside in bands and attacking farms. So our job was to drive round in our armoured cars at night and act as a deterrent. I think it did some good, though I have to admit that some of our time was spent catching hares in the beam of our spotlights and shooting them as they froze in terror. Then we moved to the edge of the Ruhr to a newly built SS barracks, and I spent the next year and a half stationed there. It was a very curious existence because we were not supposed to fraternise with the German population, who at one point were literally on the edge of starvation. I made it my business to try and get to know some Germans, and I could do this only by making use of church connections, which was permitted. So I met one or two people locally, and tried to build on that. My job in the regiment later included some responsibility for relations with the German population and the civilian Germans who were working with us in the barracks. So I have quite vivid memories of a country that was devastated and, at that time, not really on the road to recovery at all, but just struggling to survive. We were rather bored with nothing much to do but a bit of policing work. I remember a Russian defector coming over from the Eastern Zone — we were very aware of the Russian presence, being very close to the frontier of the Zone, and there was great excitement over what we should do with this man.

I once went to Berlin, in the early days before the Wall was built, and have very vivid memories of going to one of the first concerts that the Berlin Philharmonic gave, in a rather damaged cinema, conducted by Furtwängler, with these rather gaunt tired-looking musicians who were undernourished like everyone else. Many of them had not played for a long time and yet they gave what I recall as a remarkable performance.

There was a certain amount of living off the fat of the land by British troops, but I think not much. There was a lot of black market trade in cameras and so on, and of course the most curious thing was that cigarettes were the currency. It was no good offering a German anything other than cigarettes if you wanted to buy anything - their currency was worthless. You would get your washing done each week for ten cigarettes and then they would trade that for some potatoes. It wasn’t supposed to happen but it did, all the time. And then we would carry out spot checks on the roads, and I remember finding one vehicle with a wood-burning engine. On opening the bonnet we found several panniers hanging on each side of the engine stuffed full of cigarettes. They were removed and taken, which was like relieving people of several thousands of pounds. Then there was the story about a German farmer who, offered a tin of fifty cigarettes in payment for some vegetables, opened the tin and said ‘But these are damp!’ and the man who was handing them over to him said ‘Well, you don’t want to smoke them, do you?’

It was an extraordinary way of growing up. I was given a lot of responsibility and I suppose that, in some ways, it was good way of growing up. I came back eager to pick up the threads at university, and with a high motivation to get on with my chosen way of life.

This story was collected by Laurence Le Quesne and submitted to the People’s War site by Graham Brown of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Ronald Bowlby and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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