大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from Lincolnshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of John Chappell and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Chappell fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

A number of my relatives, young uncles and older cousins, were now serving in the armed forces. Since my cousin Thomas was employed by the Blackburn Aircraft company he was not taken away to be fitted with a uniform of Khaki or blue. My Uncle Arthur, my mother鈥檚 youngest brother in a family of 12, was now a sergeant in the Black Watch Regiment. He came shamefacedly home on leave however, on one occasion, with his three stripes missing from his arms. He had defaulted in some unmilitary fashion and though his stripes were eventually restored to him, the faint trace of stitch marks on his upper arms gave him almost the look of a vagrant in my eyes at that time. Testing him thoroughly, for I was a gatherer of military scraps of information, I asked him questions about platoon, battalions, etc. My Uncle Arthur was always a very talkative man and showed me how to hold a rifle while in a lying down position, and how to turn on the march and so on. These were war games that had to last, for this was my Uncle鈥檚 last home leave for some years. His mother, my Grandmother Handley, now began to lose her once excellent memory; my mother suggested as a reason for this the comings and goings of the family鈥檚 young servicemen and their friends.

Certainly, Uncle Arthur was not the only serviceman in our large family. My cousin Ernest was already writing letters home from the Sind Desert in India: to me, his youthful face in a new studio shone like an apple beneath his RAF forage cap, while another of my Scots cousins, George William, captured just out of Dunkirk in a fighting retreat there by an advance German Army unit, was now serving as a POW in a German Stalag. Yet another Scottish cousin, George (Murray), was soon captured by the Japanese in the collapse of the Singapore Garrison. My mother took it upon herself to write letters to all these family servicemen. I remember on one occasion at least striving to read through one of George William鈥檚 much censored letters to my mother which was on very thin paper. My cousin George鈥檚 (Murray) reported death from beriberi, as it was alleged, in Changi POW Camp, Singapore, came as a terrible shock to all of us who had met him. He had been a gentle, intelligent man who was always thoughtful towards others.

Even as children it was clear to us the terrible toll in lives the war was taking. Our 鈥渟chool鈥� was now visited by two elderly wardens wearing tin hats marked with a large letter 鈥淲鈥� who taught us, as young as we were, how incendiary bombs should be dealt with by drawing them forward, one by one, on to a long handled shovel with a long handled rake. As one person carried this duty out, so did another hold up a dustbin lid, or similar shield, across two otherwise exposed faces. Two similarly old, or well-worn, sea captains now paid us a visit. Both of them were wounded, one of them wearing an eye patch, and they talked to us children about the risks the Atlantic and Russian ship convoys were running in the face of the U-boat attacks. One of these captains I found very difficult to understand. Later I learned he was not an English sea captain but a Norwegian. Since I was a boy I, not surprisingly, continued to see the war through the eyes of a boy:

WAR BOYS

As the war progressed, my friends and I
Wrote up ships sunk, ton weights, and names:
Of these war vessels, sunk in flames,
I nursed their deaths unthinkingly,

Unaware of their sailors drowned.
The rite exceeded ocean death,
Burn, burial, oily aftermath.
God knows war boys walk innocent ground.

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