大象传媒

Playing with the rabbits Ch. 4 (Part 2)
The End

Peter Tooley and I did a lot of more innocent things together, like 鈥渟crumping鈥� apples and even plums from various small holdings in the country nearby. Where we lived was called Moordown and was in effect a northern suburb of Bournemouth, the last frontier before it became countryside. So not far away, down Muscliffe Lane were all sorts of delights, open fields, a river, a mill, woods, estates, lots of small holdings and about two miles away 鈥淗urn Aerodrome鈥�. This aerodrome became part of the chain of aerodromes under Bomber Command, which would later launch the 1000 bomber raids on Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg and many other German cities.
On Sunday mornings in the summer I would sometimes go out with my father on our bicycles. We would often go as far a Hurn Aerodrome and watch the bombers taxiing up and down and sometimes taking off. We would wave at the bomber crews and sometimes they would wave back. One Sunday my father and I had cycled there and were watching the Lancasters, Stirlings, and Halifaxes taxiing up and down, one of them came to the end of the runway near us, it revved it鈥檚 engines until they were going full pelt, then it raced off down the runway, rising gracefully at the other end and disappeared over St. Catherine鈥檚 Hill, a small flat topped hill about a mile away. We had just resumed our ride when there was the sound of a heavy explosion, we turned and there rising from behind the hill was a huge column of black smoke. Soon a fire engine and an ambulance from the airbase raced past us down the road in the direction of the smoke.
About a year after this incident, probably sometime in 1943, a bomber took off at night from Hurn and sweeping over our house crashed into a patch of ground behind some flats some 300 yards away. I slept in the small room at the front of the house, looking towards Hurn, yet I did not wake up. My brother, who slept at the back, heard it all. The 鈥榩lane crashed and burned, as it burned the heat began to set off the ammunition in the guns and for some hours the machine guns and the cannons going off kept him awake. I don鈥檛 think there can have been any bombs aboard or if so they did not explode. I was furious that he had not woken me up. The next day I hurried up the road on my way to catch a bus for school and there was all the wreckage of the crashed and burned 鈥榩lane. The block of flats had bullet and other holes in the walls, but was not seriously damaged. One man had apparently died in bed in one of the flats, riddled with machine gun bullets from the burning aircraft. Sadly we heard that the bodies of the crew had been found scattered over the surrounding streets, they had tried to bale out when only a hundred feet up.

One day I cycled as usual to school, through the park and I noticed Army trucks parked under the trees and by the large bushes and shrubs, some with camouflage netting stretched over them. There were soldiers also with camouflaged tents. Each day from then on the number of trucks grew and anti-aircraft gun emplacements appeared on the hillside. There were American soldiers as well as British. The British soldiers played football and the Americans played baseball, we would stop and ask them for gum. These were the first Americans we saw but soon the town was full of them. Also we began to see Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Free French and many others. There were soldiers, sailors, airforce men, WRACS, WRENS and WAAFS. One day I saw an army truck with soldiers in the back with woollen stocking hats and blackened faces, someone told me they were commandos just back from a raid.

Round about this time the thousand bomber raids began, I remember standing in the garden one Sunday afternoon, with my father, looking up into the sky and seeing bombers in formation filling the sky from one horizon to another, the sound was thunderous and the ground shook with the noise. A few hours later the formations would return with ragged holes in them.

One Sunday my family and I were just sitting down to lunch when the air raid warning sounded. This was a very unusual event, being of no particular strategic importance Bournemouth had suffered very few air raids, this being the main reason my parents had moved us there. Almost as soon as the sirens sounded we heard the sound of aircraft, we ran out into the garden in time to see a small flight of aircraft crossing the town very fast, behind them appeared a succession of black mushroom clouds followed immediately by the sound of explosions. It was all over very quickly and the All Clear was heard. We soon discovered what had happened, it was what was called a 鈥渢ip and run raid鈥�, a quick strike by enemy aircraft on a strategic target, then away. The Germans must have become aware of the buildup of military personnel and equipment along the south coast and were attempting to hamper it. Being Sunday lunchtime all the bars and eating places downtown in Bournemouth were packed with service people. A lot of them were hit and in one alone, which received a direct hit it was reported that 200 service people had been killed. That was the last air raid that I remember.

My father travelled everyday by train to Southampton to the BAT factory where he worked. he would get up at 6 o鈥檆lock every morning and leave the house just before 7 o鈥檆lock, every five or six weeks he would have to stay one night at the factory. He would stay up all night, manning the telephone as part of a makeshift early warning system. There was a map on the wall of Southern England and as enemy bombers were spotted coming in he would receive telephone calls from other sectors and would plot them on the map and pass this information on to the next sector. He had been doing this from the early days of the war. It must have been quite hazardous, especially in the beginning of the war as the factory was very close to the docks which were constantly being bombed.
I continued cycling through the park every day, each time there seemed to be more and more trucks parked under trees, more and more soldiers, sailors and airmen playing football and baseball, then one day they were all gone, it was D-Day.

In late 1944 and early 1945 I would often go with my mother to the cinema, at the time we usually had two films and a Pathe newsreel as part of the programme. As this was the final stages of the war in Europe we saw a lot of horrific newsreel evidence of the atrocity of war, but nothing was so atrocious as the newsreels of the German Nazi concentration camps. My mother was so horrified that she kept trying to cover my eyes with her hand, which I kept impatiently shrugging off, so I saw all these horrors with my twelve year old eyes and they have remained with me ever since. I have since worked and spent time in Germany and cannot help wondering what the fathers and later grandfathers of the people I have worked with there, did during the war. I know this is an unreasonable attitude and that there have been many other atrocious acts by many other countries, including our own but the imagery of those concentration camp victims and the knowledge that all of it required the collusion of vast numbers of Germans, has always coloured my attitude to them.

In 1945, in my thirteenth year, VE Day, the end of the war in Europe came. I remember the excitement of it, going down to the centre of the town, to The Square, as the centre was known, in the evening, on my bicycle, following the crowds around until it began to get dark. Finding myself outside the Norfolk Hotel on Richmond Hill and standing there silently with the crowd, just staring at the hotel, lit by floodlights. Because of the blackout we had not seen floodlights or street lights for five years and it was like magic. We stood there, gazing silently, maybe two or three hundred people, just staring at the brightly lit building until someone, a warden I think, came along and asked the hotel to put the lights out, in case there were German submarines out there who had not yet got the message that the war was over and might shell us.
The crowd moved away from the hotel and I began walking home, pushing my bicycle, mingling with the crowd of euphoric people, some singing, some crying, it was over we thought, now everything will be beautiful.
Life went on of course, much the same, rationing still existed and would continue to do so in one form or other for another eight or nine years, in 1953 when I went into the Army, I would still have to draw a temporary ration card when I went home on leave. Of course the war continued raging in the Far East and although many people regarded it as a distant event there must have been many others who had relatives and friends still directly involved and the same anguish must have continued.

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