大象传媒

Wartime Memories of a Small Boy

My father was a professional soldier and I was born in 1937 in that part of India which became Pakistan and soon after my birth we came home to England.
My father went to France with the British Expeditionary Force and my mother and I went to live with Army friends in Ludgershall, Wiltshire for a while. Mother must have soon realised that if the friendship were to continue we would become peripatetic by lodging with other friends or my mother鈥檚 sisters for a few months of each year.
I will confine most of my memories to the times when we were in Wiltshire because these are the most vivid.
We lived in a semi detached house at the beginning of a lane which ran down to some woods on the other side of which was the former polo ground belonging to Tidworth Garrison. This had been taken over by the Americans and they used it as a grass airfield for their air observation aircraft, known locally as Flying Jeeps. We boys would often work our way through the wood to our own observation post, a hole in the hedge on the edge of the airfield, to watch the little aircraft landing and taking off. I remember how amazed we were that the ground crews would often move a plane by lifting the tailwheel off the ground and pushing it around like a wheelbarrow.
My father was picked up from the Dunkirk beaches by the Royal Navy and we three went to stay with friends in Derbyshire for a while. Father arrested a shot down German fighter pilot and handed him over to the police. I was very impressed. Soon after my father was sent to the Far East where he was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore.
Back in Wiltshire my mother gave us all a fright when she went missing one day while on a visit to the village branch of Lloyds Bank. She had been recruited by the manager鈥檚 wife to work for the YMCA canteen at nearby Perham Down which was occupied by many American troops. Telephones were a a rarity in those days and she had no way of contacting us to let us know what she was doing. During the school holidays I would accompany her to play ping pong with some of the soldiers who came into the canteen for their morning breaks. One day I had a bad ear ache, and was whisked off in an American Army ambulance to be examined by the MI Room doctor. He syringed my ear and applied some ointment and insisted that I was brought back the next day for a check up. Those trips in the ambulance with my friend the driver were a big thrill.
To get to the YM, as my mother called the canteen, we had to walk past a German PoW camp. They seemed a surly lot, and we hurried by as quickly as we could. After the war my father employed one of them to clear some ground at the back of the house he had bought and he was a very nice man who was not too anxious to return to what was left of his country. He made a very nice garden for us.
At Christmas 1943 we, along with just about every other household in the village it seemed, entertained some American soldiers to a Christmas Day celebration. They were amazed at the cake the ladies had produced using all sorts of ingredients. My memory is of grating carrots for the cake! Our guests brought many good things with them for the children, and my favourites were some fruit sweets with a hole in the middle called Life Savers.
We went to a great fireworks show on VE Day, but my mother and I (I was 8 years old by then) were still anxiously awaiting the end of the war against the Japanese. When it came there was another wait for the news of my father鈥檚 release from the PoW camp in Siam. Then we had to wait for several more weeks while they were sent on a short cruise to 鈥渇atten them up鈥� before they were returned to Southampton. He sent a telegram once he had disembarked and then he somehow organised a Tilly Truck, a small Austin pick up truck, and driver to bring him home. I met him coming along the street and did not recognise him but he knew me. I showed him to yet another lodging where my mother and I lived. On his cruise they had called in to Colombo where he had bought me a lovely book about the animals of the jungle. He had also bought mother some perfume, but he was very angry when Customs at Southampton wanted to charge him duty on a box of cigars he had bought for himself.
His homecoming meant to me that The War was finally over.

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