大象传媒

A Wartime Childhood ( part one of two )

My first wartime memory, though more perhaps a realization that something unusual was going on for I was only three, was sometime in the winter of 1939 when my mother and I spent a night at the Charing Cross Hotel on the way home from Cornwall, a holiday long protracted by the declaration of war in September and the fear that London would suffer an immediate blitz.. Why was the hotel was blacked-out and lit only with peculiar blue lights ?
We lived in South East London on Blackheath and my father, a WW1 veteran in his mid-forties who had joined the Auxiliary Air Force before the war, was already commanding a barrage balloon section somewhere in the city. I remember him visiting us at home one day in his open MG, hitherto red but now painted a dull grey, the mudguards outlined in white and the headlamps heavily cowled. It was all very strange.

More meaningful was a morning in May 1940 just after my fourth birthday. Father phoned from his squadron HQ
鈥� You鈥檒l not have heard yet 鈥� he told my mother 鈥�.. they took out Rotterdam last night. London will be next. Get the boy and your mother out of London at once. 鈥� I remember being packed into the little Morris 8 with Granny, standing on the seat and waving Excalibur 鈥� my birthday present tin sword 鈥� through the open sunshine roof.

Thus throughout the London Blitz we lodged with an elderly maiden great-aunt in North Wales. At first petrol was still available and we could indulge in weekend 鈥榮pins鈥� through Snowdonia and I still recall cameo images of the mountains and lakes and crags with which years later I was to become so familiar. The Snowdon Railway continued running for a while, we could see the distant smoke puffs from the house, but despite the apparent tranquility I was aware of the war, or certainly of specific incidents. I remember the man at the village shop telling my mother that these were the last bananas we鈥檇 see for the duration. Later I recall the tiny dots of barrage balloons and a pall of smoke far away on the eastern horizon 鈥� it was Liverpool I was told. I befriended a neighbour of my great-aunt, a Menai Bridge Sea Captain, a hero who was recuperating after days in an open life boat after his ship had been torpedoed. In the winter I remember my father, haggard and exhausted, arriving in his heavy RAF greatcoat on the steam-snorting Irish Mail express for a hurried 48-hour leave.

In the spring of 1941 I saw my first Germans. By then we were living in a cottage at the foot of the Carneddau mountains. In the woods a good half-mile up the lane lived our neighbours, the Baxters, another ex-London couple.
They were woken early one morning by a Luftwaffe airman knocking on the door. His bomber, hit by ack-ack over Liverpool, had crashed high up on the Carneddau, the survivors were injured but he had managed to find his way off the mountain to the first habitation. Mr Baxter covered him with his shotgun while Mrs Baxter gave him tea before she came hurrying down to our cottage to phone the police. In those days private telephones were few and far between in rural Wales. Later I watched from the window as the captured Germans were led hobbling down the lane by the local bobby aided by a chap in Home Guard khaki, two farm boys with pitchforks and Mr Baxter with his trusty shotgun.

I was five and a half when we moved to a Surrey village to be nearer to my father whose balloons kept him in the London area and later in the South Coast Invasion Ports. Our cottage 鈥� two up, two down, bucket-loo outside, gas lighting downstairs but only candles upstairs, and as such not untypical 鈥� was adjacent to one of the wide heaths or commons surrounding the major garrison town of Aldershot and which served as Army training areas, as many still do. The three of us, my mother and grandmother (who had both been London teachers and were well-traveled) and I were soon joined by my cousin, a girl a year older whose parents were working abroad. We had a world map pinned on the living room wall and followed the campaigns as the armies advanced and retreated; a superb grounding in world geography that has stood me in good stead ever since.

Around Aldershot we came across frequent groups of Italians wearing peculiar flattened forage caps and marked as PoWs by large coloured disks sewn on the back of their uniform jackets . They were obviously work parties and to our surprise at the time they seemed to be virtually unguarded. It must have been in the summer of 1943 that Mother and Granny took us on holiday to a farm they knew in North Cornwall and we were taken aback to find that the lone German PoW farmhand looked like any normal young man although we children kept our distance anyway. Some fifty years later I came across a village church in Somerset with the most magnificent modern stained glass windows and discovered a moving story behind them. A German PoW assigned to work at the nearby farm was treated by the farmer and his wife with great kindness, almost as a son, and he joined the villagers in regular worship in the church. His father in Germany happened to be a famous stained glass artist and after the war in the fullness of time the son took over his father鈥檚 atelier and himself became famous. One of his first actions was to present this set of beautiful windows to the village and the church where he had found so much solace. Indeed, while serving in BAOR myself in the mid-fifties, my German civilian secretary used to holiday in England with the ex-Quartermaster Sergeant Major and family who had befriended him while he worked as a PoW in a large Army stores depot. He was captured, aged 15, in the Battle of the Bulge and had been told that the British shot their prisoners. But back to my own war鈥�

Toys were hard to come by but birthdays and Christmas were no less exciting than they are for youngsters today. Little things, simple things, were prized, a single pre-war toy soldier perhaps, an old penknife or even a cast-off adult鈥檚 watch that would finally stop after a couple of weeks. The most exotic toys were made by local folk in their spare time using all manner of re-cycled items, beer bottle caps as wheels on wooden tanks for instance, or tin ships soldered up from bent cans and given a lick of battleship grey. For my cousin there were home-knitted dolls and Victorian china doll鈥檚 house furniture that would be worth a mint today. As soon as I could read, books became a source of delight. Favourites were anything on King Arthur and such Empire-building heroes as Drake, Nelson, Captain Scott and Mallory of Everest fame. The Puffin Great Deeds of the War (it only covered up to 1941 if I recall correctly) was certainly inspirational and later, more for the many pictures I think than the text, I enjoyed fingering through the excellent official Ministry of Information publications covering such topics as the Desert War, the Bomber Offensive and the US. Eight Air Force. We took a weekly or monthly magazine called, I think, The War in Pictures, which together with the map on the wall, made me very aware what was happening and where. Like most of my little chums I wanted to fly a Spitfire as soon as I was old enough and shoot down Germans.

But it wasn鈥檛 all war, I still cherish a lovely 1930s volume The Country Ramblers Complete Guide given to me by Granny in February 1941 and the latest 1926 edition of the 1910 book Things All Scouts Should Know which Father found in a Weymouth bookshop. It was my present for Christmas 1943 when I was seven and both books are still useful. On my birthday in 1944 I was given a three 鈥榲olume鈥� History of the United States in paperback strip-cartoon format which complemented an earlier and similar set of British and Empire history, several of which I鈥檇 ruined by colouring in the drawings with my crayons. These publications came from Woolworths and cost only a shilling or so but they certainly fired a boys imagination and later provided an excellent historical grounding in senior school and life. Unfortunately I fear nothing of the kind is available today. We spent a lot of time outdoors, picking fruit and vegetables, gathering firewood and conkers, climbing trees, rigging swings, making bows and arrows, building dens and tracking animals in the winter snow which seemed to fall more often than it does today. We learned to swim early on and Mother - wearing rather risqu茅 slacks 鈥� would tie a cushion to the crossbar of a man鈥檚 bike and with me shakily ensconced would ride six miles to the large and exciting Aldershot open-air swimming pool.

There was no imported fruit and no ice cream while the sweet ration was miniscule. Cream itself was the top of the milk which froze in the winter pushing the cardboard cap off the bottle so you had to get at it with a teaspoon before the blue tits did 鈥� there were no 'fridges of course. Ministry of Food instructions forbade putting jam, margarine or the rare butter on one鈥檚 plate 鈥� it must go directly onto the bread - and we were left in no doubt that brave sailors were dying to bring us much of the food that the grown-ups had taken for granted before the war. Lord Woolton Pancake (he was the Food Minister) was a sort of Bubble-and-Squeak dish and a firm favourite especially when well browned and crispy. Apparently as a child I was 鈥榙ifficult鈥� with my food and after several bilious attacks occasioned by eating dodgy powdered eggs and rancid meat my mother obtained a vegetarian ration card for me. This gave plenty of cheese instead of meat, extra margarine I think and access to nuts when they were available. I thrived on it and I daresay it gave my mother more culinary scope when feeding the four of us. In 1943 an Uncle came home from Africa on furlough, making the final leg in from Lisbon on a flying boat, and he bought a pineapple and several oranges, exotic gifts beyond our wildest dreams,

Every week we took a coin to school 鈥� I don鈥檛 remember how much 鈥攖o buy a National Savings Stamp and then there were frequent Savings Campaigns such as Wings for Victory to which we were expected to contribute our own pocket money. Salvage was a ubiquitous word and there were special Salvage Collections when we took down to the village school any surplus aluminium items such as old saucepans, wastepaper and old magazines and were rewarded with a military rank depending on what weight of stuff you were able to bring in ; I reached the dizzy rank of Captain but horrors! one of my girl classmates became a Colonel. There were posters in the school illustrating the various bombs and shells we children might find on the Common and warning us not to pick them up, while every term a policeman came to the school to reinforce the warning in person.

Government propaganda was everywhere, often in the form of amusing and now classic cartoons such as Careless Talk Costs Lives and so on. Hitler, with whose distinctive hairstyle and moustache all children were very familiar, was always hiding somewhere, trying to listen to what was being said. Indeed children would put two fingers under their nose as a moustache to mimic Hitler and as six-year-olds we would prance round the playground as bus-horses (two kids shoulder to shoulder with arms linked behind) chanting 鈥淥ld Hitler went to War / In 1924 / He lost his Pencil in the War / and He never went No More鈥�. 鈥淟ost his Pants in the Middle of France鈥� and other rather less repeatable versions were substituted as we got older. Meanwhile the Squander Bug, a sort of pear-shaped cartoon character with swastikas instead of bristles, presided over everything, glaring out from newspapers, magazines and posters.

The tin bath in our cottage sat in a corner of the lean-too kitchen and was filled from a gas-fired copper; we children used it but the grown-ups went down the road every few days to indulge themselves in the real bath of a friendly neighbour. The son was one of our gang and his soldier father, who must have been of similar age to my own, was a storeman at one of the Aldershot base units. He lived in uniform and cycled home each evening on a huge, upright, khaki-painted army-issue bike with his rifle clipped onto the crossbar. The husbands of two other neighbours were killed in action and we had the children up for the day to allow the new widows something of a peaceful day to mourn.

( more 鈥� continued in Part Two / 2 )

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