大象传媒

In September 1939, my father, Eric Nicholls age 39 worked for the Scottish Assistance Board and had just been transferred from Dundee on the east coast to Stranraer on the west coast. We were to live in nearby Portpatrick, a small, idyllic fishing village which has changed very little since.

Most of our furniture, boxes and other items were scattered on the lawn outside our new house, Knowe Cottage, facing the harbour. My parents and my three-year-old brother and I, age five, sat on blankets on the grass, My grandmother came out with a loaded tea tray. "We are at war", she said. In spite of my young age, I can still see her very clearly, as she was then, draped as always in black, with a hat on too.

What I don't clearly remember is the effect her words had on me. But I very soon knew what they meant as she and my parents huddled round the wireless listening for the latest war news - my brother and I standing silently behind them. Each chilling bulletin announced that more and more Polish officers were being executed. 'Executed' - a word that I cannot read or hear, even now, at age 71, without the same frisson of horror as when I first heard it.

Because my brother was under five, his gas mask was fashioned after a Disney character, Mickey Mouse, I think. Mine was a smaller version of the adult one. Plain, if that is the right word for that strange, rubbery smelling thing which had to be clamped tight to my head - in the frequent and compulsory air raid precautions excercises at the local school. I suppose it was funny too. Conversations sounded as if they were taking place at the bottom of a well.

Soon, propaganda posters appeared on every available wall. In the village school, in the doctor's surgery, even at the entrance to the tennis courts and alongside the church board, listing times of services, and in all the little shops. "Careless Talk Costs Lives"; another was a terrifying illustration of a red-eyed, steel helmeted German soldier pointing his black gun straight at me. He was the bogeyman who lay nightly under my bed.

Until very recently I had great difficulty - even as a supposedly grown-up fiercely anti-racist liberal, in subduing a resurrection of that image when I met German people. However, one morning, waiting in a queue for the tea room to open on the top floor of Heal's or perhaps Liberty's in London's Regent Street, the woman next to made a casual remark and I responded. Somehow we established that she was German and we were exactly the same age. We took a table together and exchanged our war experiences. Her horror could have been my own. The difference being that she had lived in far more danger than I had, and that her father - like many, many Germans she said - had risked his and his family's lives by sheltering and facilitating the escapes of shot down RAF pilots and crews. Most British people, she said, had no notion of how many Germans loathed and abhored what had happened to Germany and her people in those years. And the risks ordinary people took in fighting back in any way they could.

I can still conjure up that red-eyed monster and shiver at the thought of what he might have done to me if ever he crawled out from beneath my bed. But thanks to that brief encounter, a God-sent messenger you might say, I have put my fearful five-year-old self back where she belongs. I may even have grown up!

But the legacy of those terrible years lives on in my absolute loathing of war. Which is why I almost crippled my ageing bones in March 2003 on London's anti-war march, protesting (unheeded) against the barbaric killing, the executions, the let-loose, snarling dogs of war, that close on two million of us knew were to come..

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