大象传媒

On 3 September 1939 I was playing with friends at their house round the corner when we were called into the sitting-room to hear the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcasting to the nation to tell us that we were now at war with Germany. None of us who heard that broadcast will forget the sadness in Chamberlain鈥檚 voice. I was nine at the time; I can鈥檛 remember precisely what happened next but I think we children talked about what it might mean to us and about air raids and then, I suppose, I went home. My father had fought in France in the First Great War, had married my mother in 1917 and settled down to raising a family and to building a business with his father in Southend-on-Sea, as a surveyor and estate agent. My parents had taken a motoring holiday in Germany in 1937 and had observed the martial preparations taking place in that country, so after events in Poland and Czechoslovakia the declaration of war can have come as no surprise.

The first things I remember are the barbed wire on the beaches, the practice air-raid warnings and a general filling of sandbags. Garages were turned into air-raid shelters and trenches were dug in the
local park. Anderson shelters appeared in people鈥檚 gardens 鈥� corrugated-iron structures erected over dugouts - and supplies of candles, matches, torches, tea, coffee biscuits and tinned food were laid down. The smell of damp sacking and yellow sand hung about and we were all enlisted to fill the sandbags which were stacked round our garage. The Thames Estuary, it turned out, was regarded as being very vulnerable to invasion and Westcliff, where we lived, would be a firing-point for the defence artillery and much of the town demolished to make that possible. In the end that didn鈥檛 happen but the whole of Southend and its satellites was officially emptied and a wholesale evacuation took place. While that was taking place many of the schools closed and my brothers and I found ourselves reporting, for a few days, to schools formerly unknown to us. During this time plans were being laid for resettlement; many householders made their own plans and the local authority schools moved their pupils en bloc to what were thought to be safe areas. The Westcliff High Schools, girls and boys, went to Chapel-en-le-Frith and Belper in Derbyshire, where the bemused pupils were selected by the equally bemused foster parents who took them in 鈥渇or the duration鈥�. One of my brothers went to Belper and I should have joined the girls in Chapel but my parents elected to send me and my youngest brother, aged seven.to Malvern with the headmistress鈥檚 family and a handful of fellow pupils from the small private school we then attended. We joined a train at Chalkwell Station with our gas masks slung over our shoulders and seen off by our parents; I remember nothing of that journey until its end, with the Malvern Hills, which have since been such an important part of my life, rising up from the plain.

People who had successfully run a small prep school for daily pupils turned out not to be altogether happy running a boarding-school in strange surroundings with the threat of invasion hanging over them. My parents, having seen to the emptying of our house in Westcliff, rented a house in Malvern and my father, who was a surveyor and did Government work, booked himself into an hotel, where one of his fellow-residents was a Commander Braithwaite RN who had some responsibility for the convoys which mustered at the end of Southend Pier. Many of the empty houses in Malvern were requisitioned to accommodate soldiers rescued from the beaches at Dunkirk in June 1940 and the green space below the Winter Gardens was full of exhausted men lying in the sun. After they had gone other servicemen appeared in the town in marching order, men from our European allies like the Free French, Poles and Czechs who had managed to escape the Nazis. I also remember a Naval Training Establishment called HMS Duke, which seems unlikely in the centre of England but I believe it existed.

My parents retrieved my brother from Belper and sent him as a day-boy to Malvern College; I went as a day-girl to a school at North Malvern, where I was a contemporary of some of Haile Selassie鈥檚 grand-daughters, they having also found refuge in England. My youngest brother continued at the prep school in Malvern Wells as a day pupil. Malvern College, having been housed in Blenheim Palace
when their own premises had been requisitioned by the Government, had hardly re-organised themselves when they had to leave again; a Radar Establishment, very
hush-hush, moved in and the College was taken in by Harrow School. Michael finished his time at Malvern College in Harrow and my youngest brother joined the school while it was still there, returning with it to Malvern.

We could see barrage balloons over Gloucester 鈥� the docks, presumably 鈥� and one night we watched the raid on Coventry from our kitchen window. But after two years, uninvaded, life of a kind returned to evacuated towns; the schools came back and my family returned to Westcliff. My eldest brother, having been a Territorial, had been called up very early in the war and eventually found himself in Hanover, having been one of the first men to enter Belsen. He married a German girl who has, ever since, been more pro-English than the English.

We returned home in time to see one of the great PLUTO reels being taken down the estuary and elements of the Mulberry Harbour, one of which broke away and is still what one might call a seamark. We had arrived back in time for the flying-bombs, which we could see from our windows, and the V2s, which were never seen and caused much damage. But then, in 1944, the roads for miles around were filled with parked army vehicles, all marked with a white star and some bearing never- before- seen equipment. This was secret. Then one morning we woke to find the roads empty and soon after came the Normandy invasion.

There were other excitements. We had witnessed aircraft setting off on the first thousand-bomber raid on Augsburg, I had seen a Super Fortress break up in the sky and parachutes 鈥� not enough 鈥� floating down, and we watched the gliders being towed to Arnhem. Eventually came victory and we were able, a little uncertainly, to take down the blackout; but the ration-books were to be part of our lives for some time yet.

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