大象传媒

I was 8 when the war started. My home was in semi-rural (at that time) Harold Park, near Romford, Essex only a few miles from the City of London. My father had, however, anticipated the outbreak of war and insisted some weeks earlier that my mother should go with me to the rural safety of her parents鈥� small cottage in a little village called Akeley, near Buckingham. He (my father) and brother, Bernard (aged 16), worked in London and so had to stay behind. This was the first time the family had been split. My mother鈥檚 sister and her daughter (a year older than me) also left their home in Forest Gate (within Greater London) for Akeley. I had to share a bed with my cousin. This was a strange experience, accentuated by strict instructions to turn my back while she undressed. I did not understand why I had to do this until years later. So, unknowingly, this was my introduction to the differences between boys and girls. She also introduced me to competitions, such as colouring pictures in books (Rupert Bear was our favourite). Since then I鈥檝e never believed the story that males compete while females co-operate!
I went to Akeley鈥檚 only school where I was astonished to find that there was only one classroom and only one teacher. Children of all ages were taught in the same place at the same time! There must have been at least 10 of us from aged about 6 years upwards! My first day taught me not to hold up my hand to answer teacher鈥檚 questions when I found I was answering those addressed to the top age group - who didn't seem to know the answers themselves, at any rate mine was the only hand to go up! This was not popular. I might have been made to suffer, but apparently I was considered an honorary village member since everyone knew my grandparents and mother, and I presume the other children鈥檚 parents must have said something to cool their offsprings' ire. At any rate everyone remained consistently friendly as far as I can remember. Little things stick in my memory, like being told off for going to and from school through an adjoining allotment and replying that it was my grandfather鈥檚.
I returned alone to Akeley twice in adulthood. My grandparent's cottage seemed untouched by time on both occasions, the village square and the houses round it appeared the same except that the village pump was chained up to prevent its use. The first time I returned (perhaps 15 years after the war ended) I even found the same pile of sand on the verge outside and residents who remembered my grandparents, I found their grave. This was the idyllic, unchanging face of an English countryside. But my second visit (another 10 years later) smashed that dream. Even though my grandparents' cottage still stood unperturbed the countryside around it had changed drastically. In particular the village church had disappeared! Not a stone remained, and the graveyard was impenetrable. I could not find my grandparents' grave, nor any villagers who remembered them. I鈥檝e not returned since.
To return to my story, I didn't actually stay in Akeley long enough to establish proper school friendships. When nothing happened after the outbreak of war, for the rest of 1939 and into the early months of 1940 - the phoney war - we decided that our several discomforts were unnecessary. So back we all went, home again. When I arrived I found many of my friends were missing! They had, of course, been evacuated! Nevertheless I was able to return to my old school, which still had enough pupils to remain open. How this was possible seemed something of a mystery, although I suspect that other families must also have decided the war did not present sufficient danger to keep them apart any longer.
However, I was soon on my travels yet again. Only a month or two later, still early in 1940, my father's office was evacuated to Hunstanton, on the North Norfolk coast. (I've been able to pay a few nostalgic visits since coming, late in life, to live in Norfolk.) We hired accommodation in Old Hunstanton. I caught German measles of all things! My mother and I used to walk out of our back door (almost on the beach at that time) and collect mussels for tea; huge mussel beds stretched, it seemed, for miles. Are they still there? Later we moved into a cottage in the grounds of the Le Strange manor house.
Old Hunstanton village school was also very small (by my home standards), only slightly larger than Akeley鈥檚, but the Norfolk village school children were sometimes actually hostile. I was frequently chased and stoned on my way home from school. I was never hurt though, so I guess they aimed to miss me. They also seemed to be put off by the sight of me disappearing into the Manor House grounds. But this experience made me sensitive to prejudice against strangers.
No sooner had we settled in Hunstanton than the Germans occupied France and the Low Countries. We were now in the front line! My father's office went back to London, so for a second time I returned to Harold Park and my 鈥渙wn鈥� school. (Bernard had been keeping the home fires burning - his job had not been evacuated). All of my friends were back as well this time, so that was good, and a great relief from Norfolk hostility.
In due course the Battle of Britain started. Harold Park was close to North Weald fighter airfield. We saw much action. My mother and I were singled out for German machine gunning as we walked along the old A12 towards Shenfield - he missed! On another occasion I saw a fighter at a very low altitude seemingly heading straight for our bungalow. I yelled out. My mother called to me to come in, but as she was standing in our glass-roofed conservatory, even at aged 9 as I was then, I decided I was safer staying underneath our flowering current bush! I watched the plane just miss our roof and saw RAF roundels on its wings. It crashed just short of Maylands civilian aerodrome about 100 yards away. I ran as fast as I could to the crash site in time to see the airman being dragged out of his cockpit by brave men. Unfortunately the airman was badly wounded and I was told he died before an ambulance could arrive. I like to remember him as someone who stayed with his plane instead of bailing out, and who, despite his injuries, just managed to lift his plane over our bungalow and so probably saved my mother's life if not mine.
Then came the Blitz, in daylight at first. I remember the blue sky laced with swirling contrails, the distant rattle of machine guns high above, used bullets falling around us. Unfired ammunition and other bits and pieces were avidly collected. We used to fire complete machine gun rounds by jamming them into a tree trunk and banging the end with a nail and hammer. Sometimes we took the bullet out of its cartridge case and the cordite out of the case to set light to it. It created a very satisfactory little blaze. The case鈥檚 detonator could then be bashed to snap back at us in comparative safety. (In later life, during National Service, as an Ammunition Examiner with the RAOC, I did similar things in order to dispose of unserviceable British Army gun cartridge cases. Much bigger heaps and even more satisfactory blazes!) One of my most vivid memories of the daylight Blitz was standing on top of our Anderson Shelter during a raid and seeing three aircraft, in different parts of the sky crashing in flames at the same time. I was convinced at the time that they were all German bombers! The daylight Blitz seemed like fun most of the time. One joyous event was the bombing of my school, my actual classroom taking a direct hit. Fortunately this happened during the summer holiday. On another occasion, walking on my way to school across a field, I found myself passing a parachute mine hanging from a tree by its parachute. When I reported this at school we were all sent home again (those parachute mines held a lot of explosive), so back I walked past the mine again! My mother was not best pleased. I don't remember how the mine was dealt with; didn't hear a bang! In all this time I was not aware of anyone I knew being hurt, or having their property damaged.
The night-time Blitz, in contrast, was not fun! I, in common with many others, spent every night for many months in the garden shelter. It was cold and wet and miserable although my mother brightened things as best she could with candles and games. I remember waking up one night and hearing my father asking my mother to move over so he could squeeze in beside her (into a 2 foot wide bunk bed) because the floor of the shelter, where he was, was flooding. In the morning there was some 10 inches of water inside. By the following night the water had reached ground level (about half way up the sides of the shelter). We were not able to use it again and were given an indoor (Morrison) shelter to use instead. Much more comfortable, but presumably, not so safe. Fortunately the shelter was not put to the test.
Early in 1942 my father was promoted to a job in Ipswich, Suffolk. I remember he had to be very insistent to get me into the local Primary school. Apparently he should have asked prior permission to move me (and my mother) to Ipswich which was a semi-restricted area, being nearish to the East Coast! But if he had asked, he might have been refused! I was less welcome at the Primary School there than at my previous schools, notwithstanding my experiences of persecution by the children of Old Hunstanton. The difference was that in Ipswich I was made to feel unwelcome by the staff; the children were OK! But before long I was lucky enough to be selected to go to the Grammar School (the Northgate). I think the examiners must have given me credit for all the formal schooling I had missed and the different schools I had been to over the previous 3 years. In fact I can well remember that the only exams I felt comfortable with were the so-called intelligence tests, and reading and comprehension. Not many from Cliff Lane Primary School passed the 11+ that year. My class teacher told me that I did not deserve to pass while others who were better than me had "failed". What a confidence boost! But of course, my new fellow classmates, at my new school, were all strangers with each other and I felt at home immediately. There was no presumption of ignorance! Admittedly, my accent was strange, not having a trace of Suffolk brogue, but no one seemed to mind. Only one pupil ever mocked my accent, and that was not until the Sixth Form, by a friend, with great good humour! I still have one of my junior school work books which has a large ink blot on the page we had open when we all had to scramble to the shelters as the "cuckoo" alert sounded. (The cuckoo had a peculiar warbling note to indicate imminent danger. Don't hesitate, just bolt, they鈥檙e overhead.) And the shelters were at the far side of the very large playing field. It's a good job that the German's seemed to have given up machine gunning civilians by that time. Or maybe we were helped by the fact that we had a barrage balloon next door in the girl's school playing field. Come to think of it, I wondered at the time why that balloon was there. Nothing nearby worth defending, just open country. Could it have been that WE were the things worth defending.
I remember my time at the Northgate (and in Ipswich) with gratitude and affection. Most of all I鈥檓 grateful to the senior Sixth Form teachers who helped us to learn the disciplines of effective private study and research.
My brother, Bernard, was called up as soon as he reached military age. He had been champing at the bit for some months, maybe influenced by the fact that our father volunteered in WW1 when he was aged 16. (I have a letter written to him from his maternal grandmother congratulating him on his decision. Can you imagine that happening these days?) But his father, my grandfather, had different ideas. As soon as he found out where my father was he marched off to barracks with dad鈥檚 birth certificate and hauled him back home! Subsequently, well before he reached military age, a young lady in Oxford Street presented him with a white feather 鈥� a common sign of cowardice at that time! He told us that he simply said 鈥渢hank you鈥� and moved on. I wonder?
Anyway, back to my brother (dead now). He ended up in the Royal Engineers, Movement Control. His bit of the army was used to mark out landing zones on beaches with white tape for the following invading Allied forces, and then to see that they went where they were told after they reached the shore. He claimed to have been the first man in the 8th Army to land in Sicily. He wrote home occasionally. He posted a few olive leaves to me (the envelope marked 鈥渂otanical specimens鈥�) in answer to my request to do so following a school lesson about olives. I was upset that the Master did not appreciate the significance when I showed the leaves to him. Understandably his memory, a few months later, of my promise to ask my brother to interrupt his war was not as clear as mine.
And so to the end of the war. We had a big welcome ready when Bernard came home in 1946. 鈥淲elcome home Bernard鈥� said the huge hand painted banner we spread from our upstairs window. But he was not pleased with this public display. We had to take the banner down immediately. Then he went to bed and slept for 12 hours!
I sympathised with my brother to some extent because I myself had found the Street Party (held just three days after VE Day) most embarrassing. I did not want to go and jump up and down in the road with a crowd of singing and dancing mothers. And I did not want to eat jelly and blancmange outside on a cold and damp afternoon. I was 14 and had better things to do! The photograph, was taken before we got going I have put a ring round my head. Note that that no men were there. Why, I don't remember. Anyway, it was some time before the last of those still alive came home. That, for us, brought the war finally and truly to an end. But other problems remained or arose. Rationing and shortages of all sorts, such as cold winters without fuel, became increasingly irksome. Many years, it seemed to me, passed before a semblance of what we now might call normality gradually appeared. If asked, I can perhaps write a few thousand more words about the 40s and early 50s. In retrospect my childhood was impoverished but healthy. My generation experienced war with a unique perspective but, in England at least, many of us were happy most of the time. We must never forget the older generation who made that happiness possible.

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