大象传媒

My father was too old to join the army so dad joined the Home Guard. His headquarters were in a small hall (the Scout Hall I think) in a road running parallel to Sutton High Street, about 1 陆 miles from our home on the edge of a big LCC housing estate called St Heliers.

For quite a while they had no uniforms, weapons or ammunitions, but on one momentous day father came home with his uniform. Father was only 5 ft 8 inches tall and slightly built, and what he brought home was intended for a much larger man. The trousers overlapped front and back and could only be kept up by being held in position by a stout brown belt. The jacket was equally large, the front overlapped by inches and the sleeves hung over his hands. Then came the cross straps over his chest, with various bags, holders and rain cape which all had to be fitted into the right position, and about which my father was very vague. There was also a purse like thing (for ammunitions?) which slotted onto his belt, - however when he undid the belt to slot it on, his trousers fell down! By getting agitated and angry, because mother and I were laughing so much, he managed to get one of his straps, which should have been over his chest, between his legs!

My mother said that he couldn鈥檛 go out like that on Sunday (the day they went for their weekly drill), and being both a dressmaker and an ingenious make-do-a-mender, she contrived by moving buttons, putting tucks in the sleeves under the cuffs, where they wouldn鈥檛 show, turning up the trousers and putting pleats round the waist, managing to send him out for his manoeuvres reasonably smart and tidy.

Although the unit went off on an occasional weekend to a woodland near Oxshott, most of the manoeuvres were in and around Sutton, where there were a number of tree lined roads. They would lurk behind trees, and run from one to another brandishing unloaded rifles, pretending to sneak up on imaginary enemies, and thoroughly frightening old ladies on their way to church!!

Mother always said that Dad was always at his headquarters when he was needed at home i.e. when a flying bomb (V1) dropped on the hospital at the back of our house. She was trying to sweep up broken glass, comfort my brother who had pneumonia at the time and encourage me to finish my revision, as it was the time of my School Certificate exams! The street warden would shout through the letterbox periodically to see if we were OK, and say encouragingly that we had shot another of the buggers down! (This in fact wasn鈥檛 true, it was just the V1 rockets coming down but we had had no experience of them at this time).

My father had fond memories of his times in Oxshott Woods and shortly after the end of the war, he and mum made an expedition on several buses and with a picnic in tow, to show mother those lovely woods. Unfortunately when they arrived they found the woods were still in the hands of the War Department and so were out of bounds to civilians. So Dad and Mum ate their picnic sitting on the roadside looking through the wire fence- and then came home again!

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