大象传媒

Tin hats and toy guns
chapter six

Guarding German prisoners !
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I was very happy doing what I knew best.
I had, by now, grown tall enough to harness my big docile friends , the two carthorses and I spent a lot of time out in the fields,
harrowing and re seeding.
The heavy work was now done with the new tractor driven by one of the Land Army girls.
I enjoyed the company of my big, tame giants very much. They were so gentle with me and were always careful where they put their feet !
The Land Army girls had moved to the next farm to where the milking took place.
The two farms were owned by the same family.
Looking back, perhaps the farmer thought that English girls should not be working alongside Germans ?
In fact, the two groups seemed to be totally unaware of each other.
The girls had families, and no doubt they had boy friends away in the forces.
The Germans , I soon realised, had families at home and couldn't wait to get back to their homeland and live in peace.
Where were the monsters I had been told about ? I am sure that they did exist, but not among the chaps that I came into contact with.
But, the soldier who guarded the Germans was in love !
The object of his affections was a young lady who worked on the nearby barrage balloon site. They were members of the W.A.A.F.s ' women's air force'.
The Germans knew all about the young Tommy's love for this young blond vision in air force blue and gave the lad a hard time.
He never got to visit his young lady although she was only a few fields away.
She used to come to where the Germans were working and chat with her soldier.
He was well within sight of the Germans and he had his rifle with him.
Things got relaxed., as things always do when nothing ever happens.
Our soldier used to exchange cigarettes with the Germans sometimes, and they drank tea together.
When I was needed, I worked with them these days. The busiest time was haymaking.
In those days there were no bales and certainly no big plastic balls standing in the fields !
The grass was cut by the tractor towing an ancient Bamford mowing machine that Had been converted from its original horse drawn origins!
Then. everyone was bust turning the hay and raking it into rows. then into ' cops', ready for the hay cart.
The day was hot.
Our soldier had not seen his young lady for some days. She had gone on leave and forgotten to tell him .
Suddenly, he slid up to me and handed me his rifle ! " Hang onto this son , I'll be back in half an hour'.
He was gone !
There I sat in the hay, clutching the rifle.
It was as big as me!.
Of course, it wasn't long before one of the Germans glanced in my direction.
" Where soldier gone?", he shouted in my direction, His shout attracted the attention of the other Germans.
With big smiles, they slowly walked over to me.
They sat down in the warm hay.
One of them, I knew his name was Carl, winked at his mates.
" We have new Tommy looking after us".
He held out his hand for the rifle.
I knew I was in no danger. I handed him the gun. Grinning, he stood up.
" I'll show you how we do in German army", he grinned.
He put the rifle to his shoulder and began to march up and down across the field.
The other three laughed and shouted comments in German.
Carl did a smart about turn and came to a halt in front of me.
He spoke to his mates and they all stood up. They didn't look very military standing there in an assortment of bits of various German uniforms with big coloured patches sewn on the back of their jackets and covered in hayseeds.
" We do it properly for you Arnold". said Carl.
They could hardly stand in a line because they were laughing so much.
Finally , Carl gave a command and they set off across the field, arms swinging and suddenly looking like soldiers !
Then, they burst into song.
'ITS A LONG WAY TO TIPPARARY' !.
They sang in English.
'TO THE SWEETEST GIRL I KNOW '.
Off they went over towards the woods/
'" Oh heck', I thought.
'perhaps I shouldn't have given them the gun !'
But, all was well. Suddenly, my little squad of German soldiers came marching back towards me in a cloud of dust.
Their faint voices got louder.
They were singing "Were going to hang out our washing on the Siegfried line"!.
They arrived back and sat down.
You have the best songs', grinned a chap called Helmuth. He was wearing the remains of a Panzer uniform.
Carl was idly inspecting the gun.
He slid back the bolt and suddenly burst out laughing.
" No bloody bullets in gun". He showed the others.
" I think that the British have no bullets left" he grinned.
Suddenly, our hero, the soldier came running back across the field.
Red faced, he took the rifle and sat down.
Carl took a battered old tin from his pocket and offered the soldier a rather crumpled cigarette.
" Did you find young lady?", he asked.
" She's gone on leave2, the guard replied.
I never guarded German prisoners again .
I decided that I was not very good at it.
The Germans decided that 'TOMMY' was not very good at it !
But, it didn't matter. No one wanted to go anywhere.
We watched as a crowd of American Liberator bombers flew over, very high and leaving little white trails behind them.
Carl was chewing a stalk of grass, he seemed to be deep in thought.
I asked him what he was thinking about.
He looked at me and suddenly ruffled my hair.
"I too have children", he said quietly.
" I see all those Americans and I think about my children ".
I looked again at the little silver dots high in the blue sky.
At that time. I didn't really fully understand what this big German was telling me.
Only in later years have I really got to know how he was feeling at that moment.
Fags out, tea drunk. Time to get some hay turned.
It was just one of those little moments that happened in wartime.
Soon, the tractor turned up with its big hay trailer.
In no time, it was loaded with sweet hay and chugging back to the farm.
The sun was low in the sky. The Germans returned to the camp and I trudged along the lane towards home.
Soon, there were no guards with the prisoners. It made no difference.
Later, they didn't even return to the camp in the evenings.
Near the farm were a couple of little wooden bungalows.
No doubt, they had been holiday homes before the war.
Now, they became home for the Germans.
Much better accommodation than the lads on the Bofors gun had !
As often happened during the war, one day, some contractors arrived and finally erected a fine ' nissen hut with a stove and a proper cook house for the lads who had spent most of the war living in the old, leaky buses. As soon as the work was completed, the army decided that the threat to Manchester had disappeared !
So, they closed the site.
Overnight, all that was left was the empty gun pit and all the new unused buildings !
They just rotted away over the years .
think that the gun and crew were re located south of London.
Very few people knew at that time, but a new threat was looming for the people of London !
So, my friends had gone.
I had new friends at the farm, but they were the OTHER army !
It was all very confusing to a lad of twelve.
Something happened that has stayed in my memory over the years.
Helmuth had been a member of a tank crew. He was a big rugged looking chap. He looked just like one of Hitlers master race.
But, one day, something happened that showed the real Helmuth!.
I arrived at the farm one day, to find Helmuth sitting in a corner of a room cuddling a little duck wrapped in a blanket !
Carl told me that he had found the duck
with its head stuck in a rusty old can the previous night. Hemuth had sat up all night nursing the little duck!
The duck recovered, but , I wondered whatever became of Helmuth ? His home was in a part of Germany that became the Russian zone. After the war, he was sent home.
If he survived, he would remember his duck !
All the Germans seemed to be on the farms now. There were none in the northern skies.
Still, blackout was very strict. It would remain so until the very last day of the war!
I still played with my mates in the trench , in our garden.
Now, I had been promoted from Cub to 'Boy Scout'. I was very keen on the scouts.
We met each week at St Paul's chapel. We went into the woods and made bridges out of rope.
We got very competitive about our little groups. We forgot the war for a couple of hours each week as we went to the little first world war hut that was our scout hut and learned how to become regimented and have pride in our country !
Subtle stuff. A lot of good in it !
Yes, I enjoyed being a scout and never saw any attempt to get us kids back to the old colonial way of thinking.
It wouldn't have worked on us kids. We were in the middle of World War Two. and even then, kids were thinking differently.
I suppose that the young lads who managed to survive, and came crawling out of the mud of Flanders at the end of the First World War, did some serious thinking ?
But, we were not emerging ! Far from it.
Most of Europe was occupied by the Nazi lot.
Looking back, I will not say 'the Germans'
We were certainly pushing the Germans back across the desert very fast.
But, a lot of our soldiers were fighting in the jungles in the far east.
The Americans were very much in it over there, but, it all seemed so far away !
Almost like a separate war.
We were sending convoys of supplies to the Russians, and, losing even more ships and sailors
There was a lot of good feeling and sympathy for the Russians at that time .
That's where our Heinkels had gone.
We got very few now.
But, why had they been so quick to move our guns and balloons away?
It must have been a quick decision because new buildings were abandoned.
We found out where our guns had gone.
We found out why......
It was the V1 bomb ! or, as we came to call them 'Doodle Bugs'.
I found out later that we had known about them for some time ' And, where they were aimed at '. LONDON .
So that's what the big rush to get the guns down there had all been about !
We were not the target any more. They couldn't reach us.
More and more of these flying bombs rained down on London.
A lot of them were shot down by our anti aircraft guns and more by fighter planes.
When our fighters had run out of ammunition, some of our pilots used to fly alongside the bomb and actually tip it off balance with the planes wingtip !
That must have taken some nerve !
The Doodle bugs had a noisy sort of jet engine that sounded rather like an old tractor.
The trouble started when some sort of timing device cut out the engine.
Suddenly, there was silence.
Without its engine running, it became a bomb.
Londoners soon learned to listen. As long as the engine was roaring, they were safe, but, if the engine stopped they knew that it was falling from the sky.
Dive for cover... Quickly.
We bombed the launching sites as much as we could, but they were soon repaired.
And the Germans developed a sort of mobile site that was impossible to detect !
So, we were left with our crumbling old air raid shelters and our blackened bomb sites.
Shrapnel was no longer currency. It all seemed so long ago.
I do not think that Mr Bullock would have given anyone the can for not carrying their gas mask now.
We continued to feel our way around in the dark. Rationing became, if anything, even more strict. We kids continued to work on the farms.
I still worked with my 'friends', the Germans ! We still had a few flying pigs about... Perhaps somebody had forgotten to tell them to move south ?.
Eventually, someone did notice them, and they too were moved on.
In the towns, soldiers were everywhere. As well as ours, I saw Canadians and of course, the ever casual ' Yanks'.
They seemed to live in a different world.
They treated their Jeeps like sports cars and tilted their silly little pointed hats to a jaunty angle as they whizzed pointlessly around our countryside, looking like some sort of tourists !
Now, I was almost thirteen . I listened to Glen Miller and all the jitterbugging tunes every night.
I must have been growing up...
But, I didn't know it.
The war had really messed up our childhood.
In some ways, we were stuck with our 1930s innocence In those days, kids grew up fast, but yet we still would have appeared to be a bit childish if seen by our sophisticated
counterparts of the 21st century !
They would have been wrong !
We were allowed what we could get of our childhood in spite of all that was going on around us.
It didn't last long. Lots of kids were in the army at 18, Some were sailing with the merchant navy much younger.
But, still we read the 'Beano' and played in our trench.
We still went to the 'Odeon' on Saturday mornings and we still played out in the darkened streets.
One thing I remember very clearly.
Dad used to repair our shoes. He used to buy little tacks and leather from 'Woolworths', Most fathers did.
During the war, mothers did too !
He had an iron thing called a Last to hold the shes while he tacked on the leather and trimmed it.
But, in 1944, the leather ran out !
I remember making little cardboard patches to cover holes in my shoes.
I was by no means the only one, but I was very aware of it.
When it rained, the cardboard let the water in and I spent a lot of days at my school desk with wet socks.
Trainers ? no, not for a lot more years.
So many things happened.
There were some mysteries, like the day I was walking along , dreaming, 'as I still often do'. I heard the drone of a plane high up. My min registered the sound.
'Lancaster'. It was a very nice morning and the woods were coming alive with birdsong.
The winter trees, showing their buds.
It was very warm.
Suddenly, it started to snow !
I came out of my daydreaming mode !
I looked up into the sky. It wasn't snow.
Millions of little aluminium strips were floating down. I picked one up and examined it. Just a little strip of metal about 10 inches long and quite thin.
Now why would a Lancaster bomber be dropping a little metal snowstorm ?.
What was the point of it?.
My first thought was, Can I swap them for comics ?.
I stuffed my pockets with the little aluminium strips, but no one at school was interested. I don't think that they thought it Had anything to do with the war.
After the war, I discovered what it was all about.
Those little bits of floating metal looked like a big flight of planes on the German radar !
It was codenamed 'Window'.
But, to me, wandering along beside the woods on that nice spring day in 1944, it was just a pretty little snowstorm.
We knew that something big was going to happen, but we were not sure what... or when.
One day, something else was dropped from the sky.
It made us realise that it was not finished yet, and that the north could be got at !
It was rare these days for the sirens to sound. They very occasionally did, but it was usually a false alarm. Or perhaps the chap who's job it was to sound the sirens became bored ?.
But, we automatically reacted. We still had memories of the bombing and there was just a chance.
So, we sat in a corner of the room where we considered we were fairly safe and waited.
Mrs Deakin from next door had arrived. She usually did during air raids. I don't know why she considered our house to be safer than her own? but she seemed to feel safer with us !.
All was quiet. No, i could hear something.
I listened carefully. This was something different. Then, I was sure.
But, how could it be possible?.
My mother heard it too. She looked at me.
" It's a Doodle Bug".
I was amazed. We knew the sound well enough because we had heard it on the newsreels at the 'Odeon', but, London got them.
They couldn't carry enough fuel to get up to the North. But, there was no mistaking that sound.
A roaring coughing sound.
" don't worry, the engine is still running "
my mother reassured Mrs Deakin.

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