大象传媒

My father Brian and his brother Arnold were young men when war broke out in 1939. Their father William had been unusually prescient about the upcoming conflict, having travelled to Germany on business several times in the 1930s. Long before other families were assembling their flimsy sheet-steel Anderson shelters, he had already dug up the garden on the Pollard Road "ancestral semi-detached" to build a dry, comfortable concrete air-raid shelter. He had also stockpiled German binoculars and other high-quality optics which he later sold to the British Army and Royal Navy for a tidy profit.

Anyway, his sons Brian and Arnold had different outlooks on life. Brian was a conscientious objector and escaped military service by taking a job at the Rolls Royce plant in Derby as an engineer building Merlin aircraft engines. His stories from the time were mostly hilarious, of how they baited the apprentices (and how he was a victim himself), -- eg. send them all over the factory in search of a "left handed screwdriver", or have them stand in a damp pit holding the wires as the senior engineers tested the dynamos. He was a volunteer fireman as well. One particularly tragic story is about a factory worker who quit to join the RAF. When he got his wings, he flew his Spitfire over the plant and to the cheers of his mates did a victory roll. Unfortunately, at that moment his (Rolls Royce Merlin!) engine quit and everyone looked on in horror as he made a safe landing on nearby railway tracks only to be killed by a passing train. (Would be grateful for confirmation of this story.)

Arnold joined the Fleet Air Arm and went to Canada to train to be a pilot of Swordfish torpedo bombers. He failed for medical reasons and was discharged. Good thing too -- every single one of his classmates was killed in action flying these deathtraps. Instead, he became an officer in the Indian Navy serving aboard destroyers, and enjoyed a fairly comfortable and (as far as I know) incident-free war.

The surreal story that links them together happened shortly after the war, as India was moving towards independence. The British were anxious that no war materiel was to fall into the hands of the Indian forces, so one of Arnold's duties was to transport tons of vehicles, ammunition, guns, and, yes, brand-new Merlin engines into the open ocean and dump them overboard. So at the very moment one brother was carefully building the finest aircraft engines in the world, the other brother was busy chucking them into the sea(!)

(In my studies of the transfer of power to India, I have never read about this deliberate sabotage. Perhaps something new for the historians?)

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