大象传媒

My father was a Jerseyman, and although his work was in London and our family home was there, we also had a holiday home in Jersey and used to go there for the Easter and summer holidays.

When the war broke out on September 3rd, 1939, we were there for the summer as usual. I can remember my aunts, who lived near by, coming up the front path that morning to tell us that they had heard Mr Chamberlain鈥檚 speech announcing that we were at war with Germany. I was ten, and cried, because I didn鈥檛 know what war would mean for us and I was frightened.

My parents decided that, although my father would have to return to London because his work was there, my mother would stay on in Jersey with me and my younger sister and our faithful Nanny, because at the time everyone was expecting that London would be bombed immediately. So we stayed in Jersey through the winter of 1939-40, and went to school there, and war turned out not to be so terrible after all. There was a little rationing, and a blackout, and I can remember people singing 鈥楻oll Out The Barrel鈥� and 鈥榃e鈥檙e Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line鈥�, but otherwise life went on as usual.

Instead, of being frightening, the war became interesting. I enjoyed putting up wall maps and sticking little coloured flags on pins into them to show where the front lines were, and I started getting up before anyone else in the house and listening to the early morning news: I remember going into my mother鈥檚 bedroom to tell her that the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway. It puzzled me that our Navy hadn鈥檛 been able to stop them invading Norway.

Then came May 1940 and the German breakthrough in northern France, and Dunkirk, and suddenly, instead of being a quiet little backwater safely out of the way of the war, it began to look as though Jersey might soon find itself in the front line with the Germans on the coast of Normandy only fifteen miles away. My sister and myself were still too young to be upset by the prospect of a German invasion 鈥� war was something you played at on maps with flags, not something that came through your front gate 鈥� but we picked up the anxiety in the air from the grown ups. My mother conferred hastily with my father in London over the phone, and they decided that we should return to London immediately. Most exciting of all, we were going to come out by air 鈥� something we had never done before. I remember a brilliantly sunny morning in early June, when my mother and nanny were hastily packing suitcases which were all we could take with us, while my sister and I were banished to the garden and given licence to pick all the ripe raspberries off the raspberry canes and to eat as many as we liked. We were delighted, but bit-by-bit we became aware that something strange and menacing was happening out at sea beyond the southern horizon, where a huge column of black smoke was rising higher and higher into the sky until it began to darken the sun. We had never seen anything like that before, and someone said it was the docks at St Malo burning, forty miles away.

We flew out that afternoon, the first time in my life I had ever been in a plane (and it was fourteen years before I was to be in another). It was a great thrill, all the more because we didn鈥檛 know where we going to land 鈥� in the end it turned out to be Bristol. I had learned that war could invade your life and shake familiar certainties, and that was uncomfortable, but it had its compensations. It meant excitement, and raspberries, and flying. True it also meant spam, and scrambled dried egg 鈥� ugh! 鈥� no bananas and not enough sweets, but children adapt to these things and come to take them for granted much more easily than grown ups do. I had a good war. We spent the rest of it living in rural south Devon and I have the war to thank for starting my lifelong love affair with the English countryside, and the joys of walking on Dartmoor. I saw the bombed ruins of Exeter and Plymouth, and at my prep school I spent some uncomfortable nights on bunk beds in the cellar while German bombers passed overhead; but no bombs fell near us (one stray bomb fell two miles away), and we made a special trip to collect twisted bits of casing (which I still have) as souvenirs. My family were lucky too. The war meant great anxieties for my parents, and my eldest brother was in the Army, but he came through the war unscathed, as did all my relatives. I never heard a gun fired in anger, much less saw a dead body (except the body of a soldier who had strayed into a minefield by accident and trodden on a mine - seen a mile away across a Cornish estuary). Only one boy I knew at school was killed in the war, and my relatives in Jersey all came through the German occupation unharmed. It was very different fron 1914-18.

At the end of the war, I was in London on my way back to school on May 8th 1945, when the war ended 鈥� the big war, the war against Germany 鈥攁nd the blackout came down. I wanted to go out and see the crowds in the West End on VE Night 鈥斺�� Victory in Europe Night鈥�. My father鈥檚 heart was not in it, but he was unhappy at the idea of letting a boy of 16 out into the crowds alone, and he came with me, and we walked the length of Regent Street, through the rejoicing crowds that filled it from one end to the other. It was wild and exciting, but it was outside me, as the war itself had been. I was one of the lucky ones.

I had a good war.

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Rosemary Hamilton of the 大象传媒 Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Laurence Le Quesne and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.