大象传媒

My father was a teenager in 1900 and always said it was the puerile way grown ups behaved on May 17th that year, Mafeking Night, that cured him for ever of Hurrapatiotismus and stopped him from volunteering in World War I, which he spent repairing ships in London docks, and probably allowed me to be born at all. That happy event occurred just before the stock market crash of 1929 and I grew up among an adult generation so traumatized by their memories of WWI that it was some while before I realized our side had won. Their memories of air raids, food shortgages, casualty lists, looting of German owned shops, the Silvertown munitions factory explosion, etc., left me with few illusions about what we were in for growing up in a world where wars were the principal foreign news. I still recall where I was (aged 6) when they told me Italy had attacked the Ethiopians with mustard gas. In 1936 my primary school teacher told us all how lucky we were not to be at the receiving end of Franco's bombing of Barcelona. In 1937, when WWII really began, I learnt the world "rape" to my mother's horror, reading of the Jap army's entry into Nanking. The Munich scare I recall mostly from my own horror at seeing gas masks designed to take new born babies. The "Phoney War" of 1939, with little beside the blackout to bother about, came as quite a relief, but I was amazed by the official assumption in the Greater London evacuation program that the Luftwaffe's bombs would all fall within the administrative boundaries of Croydon, East and West Ham and the LCC. Did the Germans not know of Hawker aircraft being made in Kingston, or Ford army lorries at Dagenham? In June 1940 our school master gave up his regular lesson to substitute an emotional call for patriotism, threatening us with what would happen if our fascist-leaning representatives in Westminster proved (as was evidently probable) as treacherous as their opposite numbers in Paris. His desperate sincerity was only too evident, but just what a class of scruffy 11-year olds were supposed to do about it was perplexing to say the least. Real adult stupidity came with the first German planes over Tolworth in August 1940. When they were spotted, everyone but me rushed out of our public airraid shelter to see them, only to rush back in as the bombs started to come down. And while the danger from bombs was all too evident, no one bothered to point out to me that being out and about in an airraid would emperil me at least as much from falling shrapnel (which we boys all delighted to collect). Then on to my new Grammar School where, in airraid shelters that did not even have electric light, the masters, yelling into the darkness, tried vainly to teach us, above the noise of the bombs and the guns, the language of the useless, defeated French. Incredulous and disgusted, I went and bought me a German grammar. The winter nights of 1940-41, spectacular at first with the glow in the eastern sky of Docklands ablaze, we passed in a very damp public shelter next to the wife and children of a sailor away in a submarine. The wife was terrified for him, but ironically lost her son instead: a bright five year old, the life and soul of that shelter, drowned one day playing sailors on a lake in an abandoned quarry. On the radio, our spirits were cheered by Churchill, J.B. Priestly and Itma, and by preceeding the 9 o'clock news by playing the anthems of all our myriad and by now almost imaginary allies, alphabetically from Abyssinia to Yugoslavia. I took this for the stupid con trick it was, convinced that a German victory was merely a matter of time until the 大象传媒 morning news at 7 am on June 22, 1941: the happiest moment of my life! The 20 or 30 million dead that would result was something I never gave a thought to, aware only that at last we had an ally, and the very one that had already turned the trick for us before, in 1810! The 大象传媒's reaction was to declare that we now had too many allies for the anthem playing to continue, but who cared? Now at last we might WIN! The grown ups' surprise showed me that far from expecting this, they had just been continuing the war like so many Mr. Micawbers, in the hope that maybe something might turn up. Fortunately and fortuitously, it had.

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