大象传媒

MY WW2

When war was declared in September 1939 I was seven years old. By the time it ended I was well into teenage, and there can be no doubt that for me and for my generation the war had a profound and far-reaching effect. I guess my story is fairly typical.

My family was comfortable, middle-class. I lived as a child with my parents and my elder sister in St Ives, Cornwall. My father was a Territorial Army officer, and was away from home through my most formative years. My sister took the earliest opportunity to escape from small town society and joined the WAAFs, so she too was away. That left my mother and me.

As Cornwall was reckoned to be pretty safe, there were lots of evacuees. In St Ives there was a London County Council school, and my mother volunteered to take two of its teachers. Miss Mitchell and Miss Weary were duly billeted with us, and Miss Mitchell took a particular interest in the rather lonely little boy I was at that time. I owe her a great deal; she pointed me towards the acquisition of knowledge and skills I might never otherwise have encountered.

Life in wartime was very restricted. Practically nobody had a car, so the only way of going anywhere was bus or train. There was very little to do in the evenings, so we listened to the wireless, read books, and occasionally played cards. We went to the pictures a lot, mother and I. There were two cinemas, each showing two programmes a week. The cinemas opened after lunch and closed at about ten in the evening. A typical programme would contain a main feature, a 鈥楤鈥� picture and a newsreel. There was one programme on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and another on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so it was possible to go to the pictures four times in any one week. Not that we did, but twice a week was not unusual for us. The cinemas were pretty full as I remember, and or course everyone smoked. It must have been very unhealthy for me, but I survived.

Food rationing affected us all, but I never went hungry until in 1943 I went away to boarding school in Truro. There we were hungry most of the time, although the school did its best to feed us properly. To this day I almost always finish up everything on my plate.

The wartime shortage that most affected me was toys. Soon after war broke out, the supply of children鈥檚 toys just stopped. I remember looking longingly at pre-war catalogues from firms like Hornby and Brittains, and pestering my mother to send away for things, only to receive a card saying something like 鈥榝actory bombed out鈥�.

Clothes were rationed too. This meant that for my generation there was really no choice about what you wore. You wore what was available. My mother collected clothing coupons from aunts and uncles to kit me out for boarding school, and when I grew into a lanky teenager I was able to 鈥榰se up鈥� some of my father鈥檚 clothes. He didn鈥檛 need them; he was in India by that time.

So you see, there was no such thing as teenage fashion. It must have been very tedious for girls, who are so much more dress-conscious, but for us boys it was no problem. And the great benefit was that we had no reason for envy.

The war did not affect me directly, except once. It was, I think, in the summer of 1943. My sister was home on leave, and we were on Porthmeor beach. I suppose I was pottering about in the rock pools or something. Suddenly and without warning a German aircraft appeared round the headland. It was a Focke-Wulf 190 (like all my friends, I was keen on aircraft recognition). It flew over the beach as my sister told me to lie down, but I saw it drop a bomb on the gasworks before it disappeared over the hill and dropped another bomb. As flames shot up interestingly from the gasworks my sister finally got me face down on the sand and I could see no more. We made our way home by a roundabout route to find that mother was unharmed although the second bomb had hit a house a hundred yards away from ours.

For a young boy, the most exciting thing about the war was the parades. We had, I remember, a 鈥榃ings for Victory鈥� parade in St Ives. And later on, the Americans arrived, and they paraded. How smart they looked with their nicely tailored uniforms! They came in large numbers to our Methodist church on Sundays, and livened things up no end. I remember kids following them in the street, saying: 鈥淕ot any gum, chum?鈥�

On May 8th, 1945, we were at lunch in the school canteen when one of the masters came in, called for silence, and told us that the Germans had surrendered. My, how we cheered! I was thirteen years old, and I remember that moment as if it were yesterday.

As I look back, it seems clear to me that the war affected me very profoundly indeed. It influenced many of my beliefs and attitudes, and its influences were of mixed value. I grew up believing firmly in the British way of life 鈥� a belief I still hold 鈥� but it was a long time before I developed enough healthy scepticism about our national institutions and traditions. We really were subjected to a deluge of propaganda, and some of it stuck.

But鈥�. We were healthy; nobody was obese then. There were no drugs. There was very little traffic on the roads, so that you could (and we did) cycle everywhere). We knew we were going to win. And we did.

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