大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by a volunteer from CSV Berkshire, Amy Williams, on behalf of Doug Bukin and has been added to the site with his permission. Doug fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

When the war was declared on 3rd September 1939 I was 10 years old. I lived in the east end of London with my parents, and then in Bristol and Coventry. I was then evacuated with about four other boys who'd been bombed out in the Coventry raid to a place called the Wyre Farm Camp School. It was near Cleobury Mortimer and adjoining the Wyre Forest in Shropshire. The camp consisted of about ten wooden dormitories, probably with about thirty or forty double bunks in them, with a hall and a refectory. It was originally built as and called an NCC site; we named it the 'Nazi Concentration Camp'! It was built for mainly itinerant agricultural workers before the war.

For a while I was miserable and homesick. I would have been quite happy to go back to the bombs and so forth and go home but I settled in. My parents were able to visit one Sunday a month. We all had tuck boxes, and my mother always used to bring along my favourites: rock cakes. The rock cakes lived up to their name at the end of the month when they were rock hard. And a baking dish full of rice pudding - lovely! The parents were always invited to a roast beef dinner in the refectory, which was an enjoyable and rather rare luxury that they really appreciated. We spent our sweet ration at the school tuck shop.

My friend and I were quite fed up with it and one day we tried to escape home on some 'borrowed' bicylces - 'stolen' would probably be a better word! We only managed to get as far as Kidderminster or Bewdley.
We were completely lost so we came back to the camp and nobody knew we'd escaped over the wire of Colditz, which was how we thought about our escape from the camp.

On a Sunday morning we'd have bacon and eggs. Everyone had a little notebook, all the kids had one, they wrote 'IOU one piece of bacon, IOU a glass of milk'. They'd always swap things that they did or didn't like. We bartered amongst ourselves. I loved milk, and in those day it was all full cream milk. At four o'clock in the afternoon, we'd all go into the refectory for a mug of milk. I loved it. I could have ten or twelve mugs of milk a day from the kids who didn't want their milk.

There was a little first aid place there as well. There was a nurse. Three or four of us caught mumps, and we ended up in an isolation dormitory.

The gates of the camp school opened out onto Wyre Forest which is a beautiful forest. It was lovely. One of the teachers took an interest in me. He was a butterfly collector and I expressed an interest in butterflies. He used to take me out, we'd get a net and a bottle of cyanide in those days, for killing the butterflies and putting them on a board. I probably know in wildlife more about butterflies than any other creature. I could recognise all of them from a picture and we collected about thirty-six or thirty-eight of the fifty-four species in that area. He gave me a tremendous background interest in nature. I thoroughly enjoyed that - it was lovely. You don't do it these days, you don't destroy wildlife, but we didn't know any better in those days.

It was a normal school. We'd have assemblies in the morning. There were communal showers which I hated. The big boys would always be slapping you with wet towels - big bullies! Then we'd have fairly frequent film shows in the hall, that was one of the entertainments. We were confined to camp. But on Saturday afternoons we were able to go into the local town Cleobury Mortimer, I always remember they had sugary sticky buns, and if you were lucky you'd get in and they'd have some. Spending my pocket money on them was wonderful I wish I could have one now! They were the best buns I've ever tasted. That was our afternoon escape.

Sometimes on a Sunday we'd have a packed lunch and we'd all go out on a conducted climb of Clee Hill which was a steep hill: very close to and overlooking the Welsh borders. We'd climb to the top, and it was probably about seven or eight hundred feet high. I've been up since and it looks a lot smaller now than it did then! In the early autumn, September onwards, we would all have to go out into the field potato-picking. I hated that job. The tractor would go along and turn out all the potatoes in the furrows and we would have to go along picking them up. It was backbreaking work even for young people, putting them in buckets at the side of you. Then you got a penny or tuppence for a sack of these potatoes. I utterly hated that job, I really did.

I successfully set the entry exam to Coventry college, but we were called back to London again. I sat on the back of my father's large BSA motorcycle side-car. It had such a hard pillion seat and I can remember even now my bum was so sore when we were going to London sitting on the back of it! In fact my father bought a new seat for it to use in the future.

The great thing was getting a food parcel from America. You'd get a pen friend or you'd get a list of people; you'd write to someone in America or South Africa and suddenly you got this food parcel. I remember that we opened it up and said: "ahhhh!" It was like it was from heaven: there were tins of dried milk, a big sealed tin eight or nine inches in diameter full of sausage meat in fat which my mum made into sausage pie and things like that. There were also sweets in there, the odd packet of nylon stockings, that sort of thing. It didn't happen often but we did get them. They were very welcome.

Fruit didn't interest children that much, but you missed seeing it. You missed the bananas and the oranges. Sometimes some oranges would come over, but never bananas. The oranges would come up through the Mediterranean, but the bananas would have to come across from the Carribean and there were more important things to put on ships than bananas.

There weren't many toys available at that time. None that used war resources. You could still buy balsa wood model aircraft. I think it was available because we were in effect learning to identify aircraft and it kept kids' morale up. There was no such thing as plastic. I actually made some rather good models. We managed to get cellulose paint to finish them off, little tins of it. They were nearly as good as the Airfix kits that you can get nowadays. We made Spitfires, Hurricanes, Typhoons, Blenheims, Messerschmitt and other German planes.

The radio programs, the plays and Childrens' Hour, were marvellous. We used to sit around the radio and listen to the stories on Children's Hour, and plays as well. The Home Service was the only thing we listened to. Everyone sat around their radio in the evenings as that was when the news programs came on. Everyone was glued to their radios in those days. And you had a gramophone, you might have some records still left if you were lucky. We played cards and games, it was our own entertainment. Sometimes we used to listen to Lord Haw-Haw in the evenings: "Germany calling, Germany calling". We'd all be laughing our heads off at this man. We tuned into that not because we were disloyal to the country but we just thought it was so amusing to hear this William Joyce, a British man. He was trying to reduce our morale. He would say: "your Winston Churchill is nothing but a capitalistic pig". We were just laughing at him. No-one took it seriously. Newspapers and the radio also corrected the propaganda that he said, although of course that was our own propaganda too.

Towards the end of the war, I started cycling from my home to the Southwest Essex Technical College about four miles away. I didn't mind cycling there and it wasn't too tiring for me. When I look back, I realise that we were all thin but healthy and fit. The only fat people were the black market spivs and their families.

Things were pretty quiet then except for the occasional air raid. We suddenly became aware of flying bombs, the V1s or the 'doodlebugs' as we called them. You could hear their pulsing ramjet engines approaching, and when the engine stopped you took cover. Once the engine had stopped they would glide to earth and explode causing a lot of damage. I was very keen on film and filmmaking as a career, which I did do later on at the Devon film studios. The manager of our local Odeon knew that I had this interest and offered me unpaid work experience in the projection room. I jumped at it and fairly soon I could run all the machines myself.

One hot summer's evening, while it was still daylight, I went out onto a platform on the top of this Art Deco tower. The Odeon was built of white marble with red and green lines at the side of it in the Art Deco style. I went out there to cool down a little as it was a hot evening. Whilst I was up there, a doodlebug came towards me, the engine stopped, I panicked, tried to get back into the projection room, but the bloody door was jammed so I couldn't get back in! So I was stuck on this thing with it stopped over the top of me and I thought: "oh no!" Luckily it continued to glide - probably further than usual - it glided down to earth and exploded harmlessly on the bank of the King George V reservoir which I saw from up there with relief.

V1s looked like torpedoes, rather pointed torpedoes, with another truncated torpedo shape on top of them that was the engine. A V1 had little short stubby wings and this ramjet engine. It was a very crude engine as it was a rocket in effect, a paraffin driven rocket. They'd set them off from Germany on a launch pad with a certain amount of fuel in them measured just to reach London. They had gyros on them to actually get them into the right direction so it was very hit and miss but they did hit, they often hit London. It was mostly during daylight, I don't remember them at night.

Hearing them was the worst thing. You'd hear them coming at a distance, it didn't worry you while the engine was going; you'd think "mmm, that's fine", but if the engine stops, run for cover! Jump into cover somehow or other. I couldn't of course on top of that tower on the Odeon.

After the V1s came the V2 rockets. Silent death, quite frankly, because you never heard them coming. They travelled at faster than the speed of sound so when they landed and exploded that was the first thing you knew. They had a tremendous explosive charge. Then after the sound of the explosion you'd hear the rushing sound of them coming through the sky but by then it was too late anyway. They actually affected the morale of people to a certain extent because you just didn't know where the enemy was, you didn't know where it was coming from. Well, you knew where it was coming from but you didn't know where it was going; there was no indication that it was going anywhere because by the time it exploded it was there. It was a strange thing. It was the uncertainty of it that affected people. During all of this we never lost our morale, and strangely enough, so we learned afterwards, even through the very heavy bombing of German cities we underestimated the Germans. They kept going as well - they didn't want to give in, after all it's not a natural thing to do.

My grandparents' house in Walthamstow was partly hit by one of these V2 bombs. It was partly damaged and we went over there to clean it up. It was totally indiscriminate bombing. The Germans didn't know where the V1s or the V2s were going, as long as they hit London that's all they wanted. The trajectory of the V2 - it went up miles into the skies. The scientists who produced these rockets later helped the Americans produce the rockets that went to the moon. Due to the propaganda at the time, we didn't know what they were. I don't think the government did at first or if they did they kept quiet about it. We just thought it was a stray bomb, they didn't tell us until later on what they actually were. We knew explosions were coming from somewhere or other, but we had no idea that it was these huge rockets coming over. The rockets were large with a two-ton charge on the front. All we did get to know was that obviously there were big bits of it blown apart when it landed. You were putting the pieces together and you could recognise the fact that this was not an airplane. It was a strange looking bomb; we thought what the heck was it? It did come out in papers eventually, what it was, and it was on the news as well. Again, they didn't want to say too much about it because it would have alerted the Germans that they were on target.

Things went on like this for while but at last we began to realise that we might be winning the war. In the evenings, we saw the thousand bombers raids going over the top of our house, flying from the airfields near our house to Germany. We could see all these Lancasters, flying fortresses, and many others. There were supposed to be a thousand, we must have seen five or six hundred flying over our house at nighttime. It was a great feeling of satisfaction. Some people may say but you were bombing Dresden and places like that, fine, but they came over bombing Coventry, Southampton, Bristol, London. I really regret that we had a war at all. Killing people was unnecessary. But if someone hits you, you hit them back harder to try and win what you're doing, and that's what I hope speeded up the war. Now, I don't know if the bombing speeded up the war as I think the Germans kept their morale as we did.

A lot of our evacuees were coming back at that time, and coming back to the schools and things were getting a lot more normal except for the rationing and shortages. Then VE day came: celebrations, street parties, tables and chairs out in the streets and whatever food and little luxuries we could rustle up to have for the party. I can remember going up to Trafalgar square in the evening, I must have been about fifteen or sixteen I suppose, with all the crowds of people celebrating. Outside Buckingham palace, the King and the Queen with princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, a tremendous cheering, the atmosphere was marvellous. One of the things that was most noticeable was the lights going on. Blackout was over. The first time for six years. It was wonderful. That was in the evening, and six long years of war had come to an end.

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