´óÏó´«Ã½

From the Blitz to the Cambridgeshire Fens 1940-1945

Part Three

Most of my time was spent outside, except for mealtimes and sleep, and for the rest the exigencies of everyday life took precedence, mainly helping my mother with the heavy jobs.

For entertainment we listened to the wireless: Tommy Handley, Henry Hall’s band, Arthur Askey and ‘Stinker’ (Richard) Murdoch and, of course, Vera Lynn. My mother could sing all the popular songs, Bing Crosby, Lena Horne, Fred Astaire, and I learnt from her. We always listened to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ news at six o’clock. The whole of Britain stopped to sit round their wireless sets and listen to the news at six o’clock and nine o’clock every night. The voices of the newsreaders, Frank Gillard, Alva Liddell, who were the first newsreaders to announce their names, which they did so that listeners could recognise them and know they were not foreign propaganda agents like Lord Haw-Haw, became as well known to everybody as Churchill’s. In our present time with its countless number of radio and TV stations, it is hard to imagine a Britain with no TV and only two wireless stations, the Home Service for serious broadcasts like news, talks and classical concerts (later to become Radio 3 & 4) and the Forces Service for light music, comedy shows and record request programmes for servicemen and women (later to become Radio 1 & 2).

And what terrible news we had to hear, for all of 1941 and most of 1942; Germany overrunning Greece and Yugoslavia, invading Russia and reaching the outskirts of Moscow, Italy taking most of North Africa. All Britain could do was send her bombers from their bases in Eastern and Southern England to give the Germans a taste of their own medicine. In Walpole Highway we would lie in our beds at night and hear the almost continuous dull, heavy thrumming as our bombers passed overhead on their way to drop their bombs on the industrial Ruhr and Berlin. Next morning, on the 8 o’clock news, we would hear what damage they had inflicted on the enemy’s war effort and how many of our planes failed to return.

I never believed that we could possibly lose. We were the most powerful country in the world, had the greatest empire the world had ever seen. How could we lose?

In December 1941, with Hitler at the gates of Moscow and Britain beginning to be starved into submission, with half its merchant fleet sunk by U-Boots in the Atlantic, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and brought the USA into the war. The Japanese overran our Asian empire, Malaya went, then Singapore, Hong Kong, Burma; they were on the doorstep of India, where, among others, my father awaited the invasion. I still, as I listened to the news and pored over maps in the Daily Express, saw all this as tactical withdrawals while we prepared for the great counter-attacks that would finish them off once and for all. Ignorance is a great morale booster and most of Britain simply shut its eyes and listened to Churchill saying how we would fight them on the beaches and never surrender. However, suddenly, as awful as it had all been for the two years since Dunkirk and the fall of France, it began to change: the Americans defeated the Japanese at the battle of Medway in June 1942. In North Africa, where, although we’d managed to defeat the Italians, the Germans, coming to the rescue of their allies under the brilliant generalship of Field Marshall Rommel, had driven us back to the Egyptian border and were threatening the very life-line of our empire, the Suez Canal, we had our first victory at last. General Montgomery and the British 8th Army defeated Rommel at the battle of Alamein in December 1942, and the tide had turned.
Now it was a matter of listening to the good news every day, and we could smile, we could congratulate one another. Hadn’t we all known it would turn out all right in the end? In Walpole Highway, the evidence of our success displayed itself not only by the incessant throb of the engines from one thousand bombers a day passing over to bomb the Ruhr and the submarine bases of northern Germany, but also in the movement of men and materials. We would stand on the corner by the Bell pub and watch bren-gun carriers, staff-cars, motor bikes, lorries full of soldiers carrying rifles, roll past in a steady stream day after day. Where they were going or what they would do, we didn’t know then, but these must have been the troops that beat the Germans in North Africa in 1942, invaded Sicily and Italy in 1943 and then Normandy in 1944. We just stood at the roadside and shouted and cheered them on their way, children, mums and the few old farm labourers who had not been called up. This feeling of national pride and achievement was something unique in my lifetime, and I suppose possibly only comes to a people in times of common hardship overcome. We really did all feel part of a worthy cause, the fight against unmitigated evil, which at last we were beginning to win, even though for another 2½ years we had to suffer the V2s and the buzzbombs. If the Germans had not abandoned their atomic research programme early in the war, doubtless it would have been London that would have had the atom bomb dropped on it in 1945, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fortunately, this was not a danger we were aware of.

I passed the 11+ examination in 1943 and was awarded an LCC scholarship and a place at a London grammar school that had been evacuated to King’s Lynn, and it was there that, under the influence of Dr Day, a charismatic teacher of English, I decided, if I was going to speak English at all, I might as well speak it properly. I may have unconsciously wanted to imitate the excellence of my teacher’s use of language, the clarity of his thought, the mellifluousness of the words he used. Dr Day was the second person to affect the course of my life significantly. He certainly never told us to change our accents or the way we spoke, but I decided that I’d better come to grips with the King’s English and talk properly. At home with my mother I continued to speak cockney, though she may have noticed some refining of the grosser forms - I abolished the glottal stops in such words as ‘butter’; ‘bu’er’ was no longer good enough for me, even at home. The process of turning me into a ‘gentleman without means’ had begun. I very easily lost the Norfolk accent I had acquired for use with other pupils at Walpole Highway school, mainly because with the journeys to and from King’s Lynn, all the homework, Saturday morning school and sport on Saturday afternoon, I hardly ever saw any of them. Life really had begun to change.

I had two quite nasty shocks as a schoolboy in King’s Lynn. We used to be allowed to leave the premises at lunch-time. There were no school lunches, so we could go where we liked to eat our sandwiches, buy buns or a packet of crisps. One of my favourite walks was down to the docks to watch the cargo ships being loaded with grain from the huge silos. The massive tubes would swing out and over the ship and a torrent of grain would pour down into the holds. I had no idea where the ships came from or where they would go, but assume they went with the Great Ouse river out into the Wash and away to other parts of the Kingdom. They’re not likely to have crossed the North Sea to occupied Europe.

So one lunch-time, when the war was going well for us, I was on my way down to the docks, which led via the Market Place to the medieval Guildhall and on to the river. Turning the corner, I stopped dead across the square from the Guildhall. There, standing in front of sentry-boxes painted in the distinctive black and yellow sloping lines of the German army stood two German guards in steel helmets. My God! How could they have captured King’s Lynn Guildhall – they had not even invaded. Then, round the corner came a German staff-car, loaded with German officers and travelling very fast. Unbelievable, until I saw a jeep following with a film camera and crew. They were just making one of the endless war films, in which we beat the Germans to smithereens, and had chosen the King’s Lynn Guildhall, because it had the look of a North European medieval municipal building. Much relief, but it made you realise what might have been.

Another day, I was walking the same route, when this time round the corner, line abreast across the whole pavement, came a group of laughing American servicemen. Americans in uniform were a very common sight all over East Anglia in the second half of the war, but these men were giants and they were coal-black. I had never before seen a black person and I was struck numb with fear. My only knowledge of black men came from films and comic strips, where they were pictured as brutal savages, whose principal object in life was to capture white people and boil them in a cooking pot for their dinner. I’m afraid I turned and ran away. However, black Americans became quite common and we all got used to them eventually, and it was said they’d pay good money for special favours, but I preferred to do without the half-crowns it was whispered could be very easily earned.

When the war was over, all my pals went back to Hackney in London’s East End and I transferred to Alleyn’s School in South London, where Uncle George had found us a flat near him in West Norwood. In the summer term of 1946 I went across London to visit Hackney Downs and was allowed to sit in the same form as my old schoolmates. All of them had grown. One little fellow, a dark-haired cherub who used to come just below my shoulder in Lynn, was now, at sixteen, nearly six feet tall and I had only put on another inch and a half. At the age of fourteen, when I was 5ft 8½", I just stopped growing. It was my legs. They’re too short for my body. I had hoped to reach the mountainous size of my wrestling uncles. That had to be left to my little brother, who grew to be very strapping. No use moaning, but I was quite glad not to be still at Hackney Downs. At Alleyn’s I had never been the tallest boy in the class.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.