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SCHOOLBOYS’ MEMORIES OF WORLD WAR II — PART SEVEN

BRIAN LICKMAN

I remember after the outbreak of War and the sirens sounding their first mournful wail, on a Sunday, as we watched from an elevated position, a dog fight of jostling aircraft over Croydon across the low plain. And, earlier (1936), the burning of the Crystal Palace, from outside the Edge Hill church after Mass. The siting of the College on the hill was good, if slowing the enthusiasm for climbing the path to school.

JOHN DONOVAN

In 1944, the doodle-bugs started in June and our family evacuated to Stockport, where kind friends of my parents took us in for the second time in the war. What heroism, as they were childless, since we were 3 tearaways ! I can’t remember exactly when my mother turned grey, but I’m sure I was a major factor in that change. Eventually, after working on farms all summer, we returned to London in September.

Within 10 days I caused the College to close for a few days (an achievement not attained by Adolf Hitler !) since I had a temperature which soared over 104 degrees; I was whisked into the Wimbledon Isolation Hospital in Gap Road, where it took about 5 days to determine whether I had meningitis or polio - it turned out to be the latter. During 4 weeks of careful nursing, and my parents receiving daily bad bulletins of my possible outcome, Fr. John Sinnott became a regular visitor, for them and for me; he cycled down from the College with a heap of books each time - all carefully selected from the library, and knowing that he would not get them back (all had to be destroyed). Although I don’t recall his conversation - he was a shy man, I felt - he did give me a deep zeal for reading, which I have never lost. I acquired a broad general knowledge of a host of subjects, and read at least 3 books a day.

My health actually improved - the warnings to my parents being progressively: death, an iron lung, permanently bedridden, wheelchair, crutches and so on. After 4 weeks I was transferred to a rehab. unit at Woking, full of wounded soldiers, which led to a different aspect of education for a 14 year old ! Fr. Strachan cycled down to see me occasionally, and blushed a beetroot colour, as he walked down the ward in his full clericals and cycle clips, peered at by the soldiers; but he did try and help me with Latin and maths.

Happily even the later medical reports were overly cautious, and within 7 months I was back on the rugby field; and progressed through under-15s upwards to the First. I am told that I galloped rather than ran, and I did not have any turn of speed, but there was great encouragement from the succession of coaches. (It was 40 years later, when I had my first hip replacement, that the surgeon also gave me 2 legs of equal length - a fantastic improvement !)

There was an occasion when we had no clothing coupons (or money) to buy me trousers, and my legs had lengthened by several inches; my mother ingeniously dyed a pair of my father’s khaki trousers with bottle green. I cycled to the College but was called before Fr. Sinnott, who said that grey was required ! Somehow my parents managed to accord.

PAUL DONOVAN

One day I was asked to call at the house of Mr. and Mrs Woods in South Wimbledon where I lived. They both came to the door and gave me the Scout belt of their only son, a sergeant fighter pilot who had just been killed aged 19. Speechless, I took it and wore it proudly for five years before handing it on to a suitable young scout, never having added my name inside the belt to that of J. WOODS.

BERNARD QUINLAN

The overriding feature of our lives in those days was the War. We followed the land, sea and air battles on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ radio, newspapers and cinema newsreels. We experienced numerous air raids in the 1940 Blitz, and in 1944 the flying bombs, sleeping in steel table-like Morrison shelters. But we younger ones were not especially worried about our safety, though our parents must have faced some difficult decisions about our well-being.. Many of us were evacuated to safe places at one time or another, which interrupted our education.

In almost every family, the parents were married and our mothers stayed at home to look after us; we had no experience of anything different. However, because of the war, some boys' fathers had to be away from home for several years.

At home, almost everything was in short supply; many things were rationed, especially most foods, sweets and also clothes. We grew our own vegetables and fruit as much as we could, and we kept chickens. New clothes were hard to come by and our mothers had to 'make do and mend'.

We had coal fires, gas or solid fuel stoves, a carpet sweeper and a telephone but very few other domestic appliances. Our mothers did the washing and cleaning by hand. They prepared food very economically, and did the dishes in the sink.

Almost every man between 18 and 35 was called up in wartime, and after the war, there was two years' compulsory National Service. If they were not in the services, our fathers had steady jobs and expected to stay with one employer till they retired. Most office jobs meant writing and calculating by hand. Years of experience rather than qualifications counted for promotion: few people had degrees and many left school at 16 or earlier. Most professional careers, such as accountancy, required years of unpaid 'articles'.

Our fathers might also be in the Home Guard, and had to act as ARP wardens at night.

For entertainment, we had the wireless, and we listened a lot; we read a good deal and we played 78 rpm records. We enjoyed going out and about by ourselves, to the Common, down by the railway, all over the place. No one seemed to worry about meeting strangers. We went to the cinema frequently, and to youth clubs and occasionally dance halls. But most of all we played a lot of cricket and rugby, while some boys did athletics or boxing.

For transport, we relied on trolley buses, regular buses and trams, electric and steam trains, and bikes. Few families had cars; we didn’t. But public transport was good, although the bombs often disrupted services. We had summer holidays by the seaside or at camp, because of course we couldn't travel abroad. Harvest camps were important as farm labour was scarce and food imports were subject to U-boat attacks.

There was no free health service or dentistry, and serious illnesses such as infantile paralysis (polio), TB (tuberculosis), diphtheria and pneumonia were quite common. Education was not free either; there were some scholarships but the College was fee-paying till 1945, and Donhead continued to be so.

In the summer holidays, we often went to camps - firstly, scout camps at Forest Row and at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight. I remember the latter particularly because I missed the chance of playing football with the great Stanley Mortensen, who somehow happened to come along to kick around with us scouts. Unfortunately, that was my day to peel the potatoes. On that camp, too, we saw one of the great Queen liners steaming up Southampton Water - I remember it especially because that was VJ Day, the end of the Second World War.

The other kind of camp was the harvest camp, once somewhere in Hampshire, I think, and afterwards near Axbridge in Somerset. That one, in 1948, has particularly sad memories for me because I was with John Latchford when he drowned in the little River Axe. He was a superb all-round sportsman and a most popular figure at school and outside; but like most of us, he had never learned to swim - the old swimming pool at the College was closed for the duration of the war.

I suppose the boys of my vintage (and still more those of today) can count themselves fortunate that none of us was called upon to serve and die in the war that ended in 1945 — although several of my friends have since seen front-line service in conflicts like the Korean War. Instead, we listened every year in the school chapel to the formal reading of the Roll of Honour of former College boys who died in the two wars. The names of all who served in World War II appeared in the magazine; and today we can only boggle at the fact that these names took up ten full pages.

To a young boy, the war was mostly an adventure rather than an ordeal. We took a great interest in the patterns of damage caused in the night-time air raids, and went out in the morning after to collect the pieces of anti-aircraft shrapnel lying around in the streets. A particular prize to look out for was the nose cone of an exploded shell. It also became routine practice to walk over the rugby pitches to pick up the pieces of jagged metal before matches could take place.

We tracked with great and detailed interest the course of advancing and retreating armies and of naval engagements. My father even drew maps of Europe and the oceans on the top of the two Morrison shelters in which the whole family slept during the raids; and we had collections of models of the various ships and troops to play out the battles that we followed day by day. After D-Day, it was fascinating to trace the progress of the Allied forces through France and the Low Countries. Thoughtless though it now sounds, we found it all quite absorbing and had hardly any thought of the suffering and tragedy that lay behind the facts of success and defeat.

In part, we were insulated from the realities of war because none of our close family was seriously hurt by it. One uncle spent many months in a prisoner of war camp, but came home safely; and my godmother was interned in China for a time, but she and her husband were eventually repatriated. Otherwise, the pain of war — if not one or two of the hardships such as food and sweet rationing — passed us by.
At school, there were many refugee families from the continent, and no doubt their experiences were more exciting and dangerous than our own; but I have no recollection that we heard much about them.

There were the servicemen from across the seas also; but apart from the music they brought, there was little sign of them locally. One contact that I recall was a visit by a school choir one Christmas — in 1942, I think — when we sang carols to Canadian soldiers. In turn, they showered us with chocolates and sweets, which were of course severely rationed; and I remember how we lined up and went around and around in amazed disbelief, gathering up more and more of these goodies every time.

We lived in Wimbledon through the blitz of 1940, and Providence kept us, and our schools, safe. However, when the V1 campaign was at its height, we were evacuated from the town, and went first to Nottingham and then on to my mother’s family in Ireland. Before that, though, my brother Raymond and I had the experience one day of seeing a flying bomb fly low overhead, and hearing its engine stop right above our house. It flew on for a brief while and we heard the explosion as it came down further up the hill. We thought it must have landed on Donhead, or at least in the grounds, so we hurried up there full of excitement. It was quite a disappointment to find, after all, that it had exploded perfectly harmlessly in King’s College playing field!

ALAN PRICHARD

I wonder how far the fact that so many of my formative years coincided with the War affected what I remember and the depth of my memories. I suspect I was not unique among boys especially in sustaining a constant interest, almost preoccupation, with the War: I recollect the events and atmosphere with a detail and clarity apparently much more marked than for much of the rest of my youth.

There was much more flexibility of time than when one had to journey considerable distances with the fact or menace of air raid dangers en route and out of class activities were accordingly much easier to manage. It is only at this distance that I begin to sense how much that might have made my experience somewhat different from that of my fellows who lived closer.

WALLY CLOSE

My war experiences were of light bombing in London, a move to Torpoint (my Father was an electrician at H.M.S. Raleigh) and more light bombing. So there followed a return to Wimbledon and the blitz with nights spent in Anderson shelters or under Morrison tables. My father then called us back to Torpoint and we suffered the Plymouth blitz. The family is no good at racing tips either. When the oil tanks caught fire we were compulsorily evacuated, spent the odd night under a hedge and finished up sharing a house just outside Newquay with other displaced families.

BEDE DAVIS

One early morning occupation for us boys during the blitz was to get up early and see where the nearest bomb had dropped and to collect shrapnel. One morning, Nicholas Gahan (I think it was) went to Downs Lodge Convent to serve Mass, only to find that the Convent had been bombed and five of the sisters had been killed. Another morning in the days of the Flying Bombs I was serving Mass at the English Martyrs chapel in the church and one of these things came over. The engine cut out just above us, so it seemed, and we waited in fear during those anxious seconds as it fell to earth and exploded.

PETER HANNIGAN

The excitement of D-Day in the June of our year in Figures was overshadowed by V1s landing haphazardly across Greater London. I remember Fr. Sinnott, obviously worried, moving from class to class asking for notes from our parents to tell him whether in the event of an air-raid alarm we were to stay in school or travel home; I recall too his impatience next day when one boy with no note said his mother would prefer ‘to leave it to Father’s discretion’. ‘Exactly what I did not want’, he snapped.

The V2s were a deadlier weapon which gave no warning and against which few shelters were effective. I think we must have finished term early and enjoyed an extra long summer vacation, because I can remember spending months in the blessed quiet of Wiltshire.

A drab, grim and colourless world it turned out to be, however. The thrill of victory soon wore off and not only did things not dramatically improve as we had expected, but in fact they got worse. War exhaustion, acrimonious strikes, railway breakdowns and delays, ever-tighter food rationing (I was still carrying my butter ration to breakfast in my first year at Oxford in 1953) — it was a gloomy time to be a teenager, not that we used that term much.

PETER CHESTER

The tide had turned in the progress of the war but we still had reminders in the way that all our classroom windows were criss-crossed with masking tape and one could peep in and see the broken beams and green mould in the bombed swimming pool.

NORMAN MURPHY

One recollection of the year 1939 was hearing Chamberlain’s broadcast that we were at war and being puzzled why my parents were so upset by the news. It must have been soon after that that I watched German bombers circling round and round dropping bombs on Croydon airport.

I suppose it wasn’t till 1Q44, when I was in Figures or Rudiments, that I began to realise what war meant. In June that year, even we eleven-year-olds knew something was happening. I recall standing in the playground with others, trying to count the Allied bombers flying overhead. We couldn’t agree how many there were but certainly we saw hundreds, yes, hundreds, droning overhead in one enormous group. And it may have been that day that the radio in the Hall was turned up loud at lunch and we heard the announcement of the landing in Normandy that morning. The war came much nearer later that year when the V1s (doodlebugs) started arriving. These were set to land on London and should have cleared the ridge/hill whose highest point was roughly Penge/Crystal Palace/South Norwood. Very often they didn’t and Croydon, at the foot of South Norwood Hill, received a third of all the V1s launched on London.

What the war could mean came home to me when I went home one day and my mother told me to sit down and listen carefully.

‘You know where Dr Kelleher lives?’ (a golfing friend of my father’s). ‘Yes. He lives at (wherever it was)’

‘Right. Now, if you come home one day and the house isn’t here, you’re to go straight up to Dr Kelleher’s and he’ll look after you and John. Is that clear?’ ‘Er, yes’.

‘Good. Now, if his house isn’t there either, then you’re to go and tell Mr. Bevis and he’ll know what to do. Is that clear?’

The war wasn’t quite so exciting after that.

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