大象传媒

At first it was exciting: air battles through the long, hot summer of 1940 seemed to hold little menace for a ten-year old. The drama though was real enough with the roar and whine as engine notes changed as the combatants wheeled about the sky and with occasional falling parachutes, brillant white against the bright blue sky and the billowing whiteness of the clouds. Sites of crashed aircraft were visited eagerly by us schoolboys and pieces of debris were carried home as trophies, to be displayed and perhaps swapped in the playground. Highly prized were sections of alloy pipelines or pieces of perspex from which objects such as rings could be easily fasheioned with the most rudimentary tools. Later I reflected that we must have been callous or at the very least lacking in imagination to grub around at such sites. Once, at the site of burnt-out Spitfire I found a charred sock and some blackened small change. And quite suddenly it dawned in my child's mind that a man might well have died here and so the first seeds were sown of the realisation of the actualities of war. This was brought home again even more powerfully when, after cycling miles to a German crash site I brought home a piece of twisted metal, which I left outside our back door whilst I had tea. Going out afterwards to examine my prize more closely, I saw that our little Sealyham dog was sniffing and eagerly licking the underside. Picking it up, my heart leapt as I saw that a fold in the metal hid some human hair, a scrap of scalp and some dried blood ... My mother had come up behind me unnoticed. Angrily she took the object from me and ordered the dog away. I was glad not to have to see the trophy again. From then on I visited no more crash sites until later in the war a Junkers 88 crashed in the early morning in a lane quite close to where I went to school. Here we learned the whole crew had died and one, having baled out with insufficient height, was found at first light swinging from his parachute lines, decapitated, from the eaves of a nearby house. Other bodies were found in the wreakage and were said to be housed in the former mortuary of the old hospital which at that time served us for a school, our own premises having being partially destroyed. Some boys it was said, had climbed up and seen these through a window. During the dinner hour I went with others to the actual crash site. A boy of my own age prodded a blackened and glutinous mass, making a hideous joke about whether or not it would fit one of the specimen jars in the biology lab. Today I know for sure that this had been part of a man; I really am not sure whether I knew this for sure at the time. Perhaps a protective veil enabled me to think it may have been something other than human remains ....

I continued to grow up as the long summer of air battles drew to a close and with the shorter days came the night offensive on London. Now our nights were heavy with the ominous drone of the German bombers on their way to bomb the capital. Now in the darkness the sound of the siren struck terror in my heart. Once I remember being comforted by my eldest brother, a flier in the RAF, on one such night, saying, with the stammer he had only recently developed "You might be scared, b-b-but I tell you what, you're probably not half as scared as those poor b-b-b-buggers up there!" Somehow I found this to be a comfort, but I remained very scared, especially when later, in the so-called Baedecker raids, Canterbury became a target. My imagination was by now fully developed and the war never again seemed like an exiting game.

It was about this time too, that the names of old boys and their war activities, including casualties, read out by the headmaster at Monday morning assembly first took on human shape; names became assigned to faces. Most old boys of my grammar school who died in the early part of the war had left school before I stated and were not known to me. Soon though I was to discover how short was the time between death in the war and the prefects' room. My next older brother was a Sea Cadet and had earned his signaller's badge. One day a sixth former beckoned me over to say "Are you young Baylis, brother of Denis?" .. "Yes I replied".
"Give him this for me then", he said, handing me the navy blue badge with its red crossed signalling flags. Afterwards, this prefect would nod to me and I was of course most gratified. Even by the extended time scale of youth, it seemed not long after this that I learned of the death of this man. An observer in the Fleet Air Arm, he had drowned after being shot down and was seen trying to help the pilot leave the plane when he disappeared from sight.

Once, about this time I was out for a bike ride and stopped on Tyler Hill, which overlook Canterbury. Now it accomodates the university, but then it was open fields. The barrage ballons glinted dully in the late afternoon sun and looked somewhat incomplete with tails hanging limply down on this windless day. In the field before me stood a boy in a blue shirt whose face was familiar. He was flying a model aircraft and as I watched, it flew above my head to curve round in a graceful turn before the elastic poower ran out and it descended in little staggers. It landed closer to me and I walked forward to pick it up and then turned toward the boy. He was slightly built and like myself had brown hair. I noticed that although his face was ruddy from the sun, his neck was white from a sharp line at the edge of his collarless blue shirt which I recognised as RAF issue. "Thanks", he said, and continuing with the infectious eagerness of a true enthusiast, "... flies well doesn't she .. slight tendency to stall though". I agreed and we spent a pleasant half hour flying the little model until it sustained damage by flying into a tree.

The next time I saw the face of my friend of that afternoon was some weeks later. It looked at me from the front page of our local paper. Above the picture I read "Local man lost over the Ruhr". The Halifax bomber in which he had been the flight engineer was seen to fall to the ground burning fiercely; there were no parachutes. I told my mother of how I knew him, but she said I must have been mistaken, he was a "man", like my eldest brother Tom. But I knew I had not been mistaken, and the young eager face filled my dreams for many nights. The war was totally real to be now ....

Just before D-Day Kent was bulging at the seams with soldiers. Each and every coppice provided shelter for their tents and hutments. One Sunday morning I cycled into the countryside with my father. He carried a small bundle of magazines, such as Liliput and Men Only, and we stopped by a small wood where a pathway bordered with whitewashed stones led into the cool darkness and my father, in a voice I did not recognise, called out "Hello Canada!" He handed over his bundle to the grave soldier who came out, sooned to be joined by others with the same serious mien. I wondered at the lack or response and the seeming ingratidue of these men and wondered too why my father did not seem to notice this. It was very much later that I appreciated the reason for this lack of warmth and friendliness; these were men soon to face batttle. They would have been amongst the very first to land, and my father, shot in the head by a sniper whilst digging trenches near B茅thune in 1916 and regularly suffering violent headaches until his death fifty years later, knew how men looked before a battle .....

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