大象传媒

War through a boys' eyes.

Walter Blanchard.

It will not come as a great surprise to anyone to hear that a boy sees things very differently from an adult - any reader of the "William" stories knows that. Things are seen in sharp relief with a tremendous impact of newness they never have later on in life. It is when all sorts of responses, impressions, reactions and prejudices are laid down that never really leave one. I went through that period while a world war raged around me. Not one I really had any part in - except later when I was old enough to join the Air Training Corps. I was just one of the great amorphous mass of British juveniles who were tossed hither and thither without ever fully realising what it was all about.

My young life before the War had not been the easiest - my Father was a Liverpool docker and what with the great 1930's Depression we had often been short of cash. But we had managed to move to a Council house on a new estate and my Mother was very proud of the fact we had all mod. cons like an inside toilet and electricity. We had even scraped together enough money to buy a wireless set; the very last word in luxury, at least by our standards.

Boys of 8 don't know much about international affairs - or about anything at all, really - but in 1938 I had a curious premonition that something was going to happen. The only uniforms I'd seen up to then were on the Parky, who had a magical ability to appear just as you started throwing stones at the ducks on the park pond, and our local Bobby, a huge Irishman called (inevitably) Mick, whose sole mission in life was to stop us lads getting onto the railway embankment to pick blackberries. Then, one day, I saw a soldier in uniform, followed a few days later by another, this time carrying a rifle. He was, poor chap, the object of much curiosity and we boys pestered him to let us "have a go" with his rifle. In the last few months of 1938 we saw many more and I greatly upset my Mother by asking her "was there going to be a War, Mum?". I thought it was rather exciting but she didn't and it made her cry. When I asked what was wrong she said she thought yes, there would be a war and we might all be killed. No doubt the great publicity being given to Air Raid precautions (ARP) about then with its emphasis on aerial bombing had got to her. I didn't really understand this - Dad had been an Army Sergeant in WW1, and although he didn't say much about it he sometimes let slip a story or two on a Saturday evening after he'd been down to the pub. It sounded rather thrilling - all that charging about with guns in foreign parts. He looked very smart in his uniform in photographs and I rather hoped that if there was a war it would last long enough for me to join up and get a similar uniform. The possibility of being killed didn't trouble me, after all, it was well known only old people died.

In early 1939 war suddenly became much more real. At my Elementary School one day my teacher, Miss Bedford, (with whom I was secretly in love) told us a war was coming and there might be bombing raids so we had to learn how to use gasmasks and go to the shelter that was being built at the end of the playground. That was fun and I still remember the unique rubbery smell they had. We quickly discovered that if you lifted the rubber facepiece a little and blew hard you could make a rude noise. And there were huge ones for babies. There were neat little cardboard boxes to keep them in and we were told never to go out without them. Mick the policeman used to send us back home to get them if he caught us out without one. Anyway they came in handy for swiping at other boys and storing illicit valuables like frogs. Miss Bedford told us one day we might shortly be at war with Germany and we would then have to be evacuated to avoid the bombing raids which would start immediately. My main concern was that she should come with us and then it would be all right - always provided my Mum could also come, of course. That Dad would have to stay at home and fight the Germans seemed right and proper and I was sure the Germans would run away when they saw him in uniform.

I don't remember hearing Mr Chamberlain declare we were at war on our wireless; perhaps I'd been lazy and forgotten to take the battery for recharging, but evacuation day followed very quickly. We formed up into classes in the playground and then marched off down to a little railway station, Ford, about half a mile away. It was not much used by passengers being on a goods branch of the old Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (by 1939 the LMS) but passenger trains occasionally ran through it between Liverpool
Exchange, Ormskirk and Preston with a branch to Southport curving off at Burscough. It was quite a
warm day being September which was just as well since the train came in several hours late. It was made up of the usual old smelly and dirty suburban coaching stock and hauled by an ancient LYR 0-8-0 goods
engine which was the centre of attention for us lads. Even at the tender age of 9 I thought it looked
awfully old and wondered whether it would last out the journey, a fear I've read subsequently in
railway histories was not misplaced. The really big deal on this trip was the rations we were issued.
Unbelievably we were given a free bar of chocolate amongst other useless rubbish like biscuits and a sandwich and the great game was to see if you could pinch someone else's. I put mine into my gasmask box and told everybody I'd eaten it. Nobody knew our destination; it was "secret" and to this day I don't know whether that was because nobody really knew where we'd end up, or just excessive bureaucracy. In the end we got to Chapel St station Southport about tea-time and straggled down the road to a small hall where we sat around for ages while billeting ladies tried to persuade the local landladies to take our rather scruffy families. No-one seemed to have made any arrangements in advance and it seemed as if they had done nothing until we actually arrived. I believe they had powers of requisition if nobody volunteered. In the end my Mother, baby Margaret (age 2) and Veronica (age 7) were taken into No 10 Saunders St while sister Rose (age 8) and I went into No 12 next door. They were terribly grand Victorian mansions with steps up to the front door and three stories high. Rose and I were put into the attic and ate our meals next door with Mum. I don't think the beds were all that great and we were surrounded by all sorts of clutter. My main memory of this period is that one of the ladies of the house, a Miss Rigby, was quite a good piano player and used to practice every evening. I didn't know at the time what it was she was playing but I thought it was very good and quite enjoyed it. She played it often enough for me to remember it for many years and I eventually found it was Beethovens' "Moonlight" Sonata. Now, I can never hear it without a flashback to those days. Mum next door didn't like her landlady at all. She tried to use Mum as an unpaid skivvy and expected her to do all the manual jobs like washing up and lighting fires. Mum also suspected she was sidetracking some of the rationed foodstuffs that were rightly ours.

There were no air-raids - it was the period of the "phoney war" - and once it became obvious the fears of instant obliteration from the air were greatly exaggerated people started drifting back to their homes. We were, after all, only 12 miles away from our home anyway; practically walking distance. Those in high places who made the decisions about where to evacuate people seem to have had far more faith in the accuracy of German aerial navigation than was justified. Anyway, Mum decided to be back home for Christmas and that's what happened. It was nice to be back in our own surroundings and have the excitement of putting up sticky brown tape across the windows so the glass wouldn't come in if a bomb burst outside (a pious hope, indeed).

Standard steel Anderson shelters were being issued but Mum wouldn't have one because it needed a hole digging in the garden and she wouldn't have her garden ruined. In any case, it was obvious there no air-raids so what was the point? 鈥� there was no compulsion to have one. Winter 1939/40 was bad. There was heavy snow that persisted almost until March and school was closed for a time. There was a short thaw in February that melted the top layer of snow but it re-froze overnight which resulted in a layer of ice on top of the snow that was strong enough to take my boys' weight and provide excellent sliding. Our house was heated only by coal fires but we didn鈥檛 often light one because coal was either rationed or extremely hard to get and the result was fantastic patterns of frost inside all our windows as well as the usual frozen water pipes. The frost patterns interested me greatly and I spent hours trying to work out how they were formed. The plumbers seemed to have all been called up and there were several minor fires caused by people trying to thaw frozen pipes with blow-lamps.

Mum resorted to leaving on the gas stove with the door open to heat the kitchen into which we all crowded. We could only dry out our wet feet by sticking them in the oven. A regular job I had was to take an old pram down to the railway sidings to see if I could find any coal from the engines. Quite often, when engines were cleaned and grates emptied there would be usable lumps of coal amongst the cinders dumped at the trackside. Unfortunately everybody else had the same idea and there were fights over particularly choice lumps. But, surprisingly, it stopped at that and as far as I know there was very little outright stealing from the tenders of parked engines. Perhaps we had too much respect for Authority in those days.

It was now getting on into 1940 and there were still no raids but plenty of other excitements. Not far away was an anti-aircraft battery on what had been the municipal golf course. There was a guard with a rifle on the entrance gate, to be sure, but all he guarded was the troops鈥� living quarters, not the guns themselves which were in emplacements some way away. It was easy to sneak up and have a close-up look at them 鈥� any genuine saboteur could have had a field day. They were really quite big, in fixed emplacements and although I didn't know it at the time they were one of the very few batteries of the new Vickers 3.7 inch Mk 1 guns outside London. There were only two batteries to cover the whole of Merseyside. There were also searchlights at this site which sometimes lit up at night. And there were barrage balloons, several in Stanley Park where the parky used to chase me. They were HUGE and wallowed about like great elephants when they were low down. Occasionally they would be let up to what seemed to me to be a great altitude and you could see twenty or thirty at a time. Once, while they were up, a thunderstorm developed and they were hit by lightning one after another before they could be hauled down. It was great sight to see them falling in flames - where the cables fell I never knew.

German bombing of Britain did not begin in earnest until August 1940, nearly a year after the war started, and Merseyside was raided on four successive nights 24th-28th August, dropping on the 28th 103 tons of high explosive and 6800 incendiary bombs (so "Night Blitz, 1940-1941", John Ray, tells me). It was ever so exciting, but upset Mum who took herself and the three girls off to Hereford (where her mother lived) under a "self-evacuation" scheme. I was left behind with Dad because I was coming up to scholarship exams at 11 and Mum thought it was a bad idea to disturb my education. During this period I have a clear recollection of being down at Seaforth Docks with Dad for some reason and Dad pointing out to me three aircraft high overhead which then dived vertically releasing three bombs which fell on Gladstone Dock. As the bombs exploded the air raid sirens went off and we had to rush into a shelter. The only problem with this memory is that it is an unfortunate fact that at no time did Stukas raid Liverpool and there is no record of a daylight raid on Liverpool by three isolated German aircraft. Jumbled memory or over-active imagination?

Dad had joined the Home Guard and sometimes took me down to his Drill Hall in Bootle. They had been issued with some old American Browning rifles which seemed, to a boy, incredibly heavy. On one occasion Dad and I were walking back home when the sirens sounded. He didn't want to take shelter as we were supposed to so we kept going. Then the guns started firing and shrapnel from the shells came down. He had a tin hat and gave it to me to wear so if a piece of shrapnel hit me it wouldn't do any harm (he said).
This hail of shrapnel during air raids caused a great deal of very widespread minor damage and I have since wondered whether, since the AA never seemed to hit anything, it would not have been better to have shut it down and spend the money on better fire services. Shrapnel was very jagged and heavy and falling from a height certainly had the capability of killing or seriously injuring anyone it hit. Strangely, in all the war histories I鈥檝e read this has never been mentioned and I鈥檝e never seen any statistics of persons killed or injured by our own shrapnel although there must have been quite a few. Probably it was all attributed to the bombs.

We had still not got our own air-raid shelter so we used our next-door neighbours Anderson shelter when there was a raid; like Mum, they had self-evacuated themselves somewhere and were not using it. Andersons were made of corrugated sheet iron, half-buried in the ground, and covered with earth. There was no insulation, no solid base, only earth, and as every builder knows (except, apparently, our local ones) this is a good recipe for dampness. Every time it rained it filled with water to a depth of a foot or so and the metal roof ran with water inside. Even when it didn't rain and Dad and I stayed in it for a night it would be running with condensation by morning. The bedding was permanently wet and we couldn't dry it, being winter and no real heating in the house so we never used it unless the raid looked dangerous with the bombs coming a bit close. Once or twice, shrapnel from ack-ack came through the roof of our house but we didn't think that was very worrying. Dad used to rather like it because it meant he could get the roof mended for nothing under the "War Damage" regulations. Collecting shrapnel was quite a hobby and we lads soon found out how different bits of the shell case fitted together. We would hide in our houses during raids until a particularly loud clang indicated a "good" bit had landed in the road and then rush out to get it. At first we made mistakes trying to pick up bits that had only just fallen and were nearly red-hot but
once bitten twice shy. Soon we all had large boxes of bits and would swap bits to see if we could
make up a complete shell. Nobody did. There were also bits of bombs if any landed close by; the fins from incendiary bombs were particularly prized.

There was a lull in the bombing until 28th November when there were 300 bombers over Merseyside, and more heavy raids on December 20th and 21st when there was considerable destruction in the middle of Liverpool. I think it was in one of these that Blacklers' store was burnt out. Blacklers' was considered a very posh store indeed, being built with ascending galleries around a central well rather like Liberty's in London. It was a store Mum could never afford but she liked the things they had and I used to wander round it when she took me there thinking that one day I would be able to buy anything I liked there. It was a real shock to see it completely burnt out and open to the sky and to realise now I never would buy anything there.

There was a lull in the raids after December and they didn't start again until April 1941 when there were several minor raids. They were followed by the infamous "May week" in which Liverpool was bombed every night for a week. The heaviest was on the night of 3/4th May when a ship carrying 1000 tons of ammunition blew up in Huskisson Dock and many dockside installations were burnt out. Whether it was this night or not I don't know but I vividly remember Tate and Lyle's sugar and molasses warehouse burning because of the rather beautiful and brilliant flames, and the real fireworks when Bryant and Mays鈥� match
factory went up. Our house was on a slight hill and we got a very good view over the dock area. It
was in one of these raids we came nearest to being killed. By then we had a brick-and-concrete shelter in the garden about ten by ten feet, just enough for us all to sit down and a good deal dryer than the Anderson. I think by then the Authorities had decided they were getting too many cases of respiratory problems with Andersons and had decided to build overground instead, or perhaps they'd simply run out of steel. Anyway, we had become rather accustomed to raids and it was our habit to stay in bed when the sirens went - Mum said she'd rather die in her own bed if she had to. On this occasion we were half-asleep in the house with the raid going on when there was an explosion somewhere nearby and Mum thought perhaps we'd better get into the shelter after all. We tumbled in and had started drowsing off again when there was another even more enormous explosion followed by another and a clattering like rain accompanied by sundry crashes, thumps and bangs. Mum started crying, thinking all was up and the house had gone, and I gave her a cuddle saying it would be all right. After a bit the raid stopped, the all-clear sounded and we crept out to find a garden full of rubble. Slates off the roof, broken glass from windows, and some quite big chunks of concrete that had hit the shelter. We found out that what was estimated as a 1000 lb bomb had hit a small local fire station about 200 yards away, demolishing it and killing five firemen, and another bomb had wrecked two houses in Patrick Avenue, about 150 yards away. In one of them a school friend of mine was killed. Next morning Miss Bedford announced matter-of-factly that poor Joe had been killed last night and we must all say a prayer for him. None of we 11-year-olds worried about it; in the world we lived in then it was a fact of life that people got killed in air-raids but of course it would never happen to us, only to other people (we were right, weren't we?). Other exciting things happened. There were the mobile guns that were towed about on trailers and fired from any open space that offered. The usual result was that their blast shattered all the windows for a few hundred yards around and they made a good deal more noise than the bombs did, keeping us awake. That's about all they did; there was no radar guidance in those days so they were firing blind and only about 10 German bombers were shot down during the entire blitz.

Then there was the incendiary bomb episode. One night a large number of small incendiary bombs were dropped all over our area; some went off but most didn't because they must have been dropped from a low altitude and were still falling flat when they hit the ground so the fuse didn't work. Incendiary bombs were much prized souvenirs but we rarely got a whole one, usually all that was left was the fins, perhaps with a semi-molten bit of magnesium attached. Burnt magnesium had a never-to-be-forgotten smell. I was delighted when I went out one morning after a raid to find complete and undamaged incendiaries lying about all over the place. The best ones were on the field the other side of the railway, having had a nice soft landing. So I rushed back home, grabbed an old pram and ran back up to the field with it quickly before any of the other lads got there. I loaded it up with the least damaged bombs I could find and proudly set off back home to show Mum my finds. She was making breakfast and I insisted she came out to see what I'd got - 22 unexploded and still live bombs. Not surprisingly she screamed and almost fainted and when she recovered made me shove the pram down the end of the garden and keep well clear while she got the air raid warden. He, in turn, went white and sent for the bomb disposal squad who arrived in a little van and took them all away. I thought this was very unfair after I'd gone to all the trouble of collecting them and they should have left me at least one that I could show off. Of course, I knew nothing then about
unstable fuses that could blow a hand off even if the main bomb didn't actuate. Anyway, a few days
later an Army sergeant knocked on our door and presented me with a defused and empty incendiary
bomb to keep. There are plenty of these bombs to be seen in museums nowadays so it wasn't only me who rescued them.

Perhaps during these raids but maybe in earlier ones two "land mines" fell on the field and made big craters. They had come down on parachutes and large amounts of the parachute fabric was scattered around. I collared quite a lot of this, thinking it was silk, and took it home but it had a nasty smell and Mum threw it out. Of course, we lads climbed around bombed-out houses and buildings quite a bit. The danger from collapsing walls and so on was quite lost on us and officialdom was far too busy with other matters to prevent us. The smell of a bombed house is quite unique, something like wet plaster and damp wood, and I have only very occasionally smelt it since usually when passing by buildings being demolished on building sites.

Not far away there was a huge dump of old car and lorry tyres which seemed to catch fire at regular intervals not always connected with air raids. It may have been workmen's bonfires that got out of hand but it happened so often I've wondered since what sort of scam was going on. Perhaps the owner was claiming war damage losses rather going to the trouble of actually reclaiming the rubber. Whatever it was, it produced great clouds of choking black smoke that made us cough. No Environmental Protection Act then! At one end of the "Backy", as the field was known, there gradually grew a large dump of all sorts of metal refuse. I think it originated in the appeal for aluminium saucepans to make Spitfires, and railings for battleships. The fact was, although we didn't know it at the time, that these types of metal were quite useless for anything except scrap so most of what was collected was just dumped in piles like this one. Apparently it was realised that it made everyone feel good to make sacrifices for the War even if the results were unusable so they were kept going for that reason. Anyway, it was treasure trove for small boys and we spent many happy hours sorting it through. I think it was not until it was decided to develop the field for housing around 1950 that the dump disappeared, or at least was levelled over. I look at some of those
houses now and wonder if the occupants realise they're sitting on a large dump of rusty iron. Also,
whether all the incendiary bombs were actually collected and if some of them are still there under the
houses.

Rationing was a fact of life through all of this and I find it amazing now that a growing boy could exist on the rations we had. Two ounces of "butter", 4 ozs of bacon, 2 ozs tea, etc for a week. It was circumvented by frequent visits to the local fish-and-chip shop, which was not rationed. There may have been 鈥渁llocations鈥� of materials to the shop but there was certainly no need to give up ration coupons. But as the war went on the quality of these fry-ups deteriorated as the shortage of frying oil got worse and worse. At one point it got so bad there was a local revolt and people refused to eat them - I think the chippie was trying to use some awful sort of reclaimed oil. Bread was not rationed at that time (it was after the war) but it became a rather grey tasteless rubbery sort of thing unless you ate brown bread which I much preferred. Eggs appeared only infrequently and some people started rearing hens and chickens. We never had chicken because it was far too expensive and was really a luxury food for the very rich but, surprisingly, a joint of beef was comparatively cheap so we had roast beef on Sundays fairly often. Sweets were also rationed; we were allowed 2 ozs per week but the shops very rarely had any and we spent much time chasing rumours that so-and-so's had just had some in. Chocolate in particular was in very short supply - from what I've read subsequently I suspect most of it was going in flying rations for RAF aircrews! I vowed that when peace came and it was easy to buy I would never eat anything else. Now, at the age of 73, I still have a taste for it, with unfortunate effects on my waistline.

Fortunately, after the May blitz the raids on Liverpool stopped and never started again. Hitler invaded Russia and needed all his aircraft for that. Mum looked upon it as a great blessing but I was rather disappointed. No more shrapnel or bombs to collect! But there were other things to do. The damage was gradually patched over and life returned to as normal as it could be in a war.

Any spare time I had I spent reading up on aircraft and particularly any copies of the "Aeroplane Spotter" that came my way. There were no magazines in the shops and only people who had been subscribing to mags for many years got them. I had a good memory for shapes and could memorise the outline of an aircraft in seconds. I used to enter all the ATC aircraft recognition contests and won every one. In the end I was barred from competing "so others could have a chance". That didn't stop me - I entered competitions run for the whole Liverpool area as long as I could find the bus fare to get to them. They were quite hard - at the top level you had to identify only a small piece of an aircraft, an engine or tailplane perhaps, that was flashed up on a screen for only a second or two. I started winning those too but had to give up because the bus fares cost too much and Mum was getting worried about me going so far at night. I also tried to make aircraft models but being wartime there were no kits and nothing much to make them with.

By now, 1942, I was old enough (12) to start appreciating better what was going on around me in the larger world and while at grammar school I joined the Air Training Corps in the hope I might go flying. My first flight was in 1943 at Burscough Airfield, a Fleet Air Arm station about 10 miles away. It was in a Fairchild Argus single-engined high-wing monoplane and I disgraced myself at the end of the flight by hauling my parachute out of the aircraft by its silver handle, which everybody except me knew was the handle for releasing the chute. So there was yards of billowing silk blowing about and the boys who were due for the next flight had to wait while it was all captured and tied up. I wasn't popular!

The following year, 1944, our ATC squadron went on a summer camp to RAF Lindholme, near Doncaster, which was home to a Lancaster OTU. It鈥檚 now famous as an 鈥渙pen prison鈥�. We were accomodated in tents and our main objective was to go flying in these wonderful aircraft. Our squadron C.O. kept promising us we'd get a flight "tomorrow" but "tomorrow" seemed a bit slow coming so after a day or two waiting I took a chance and slipped away up to the perimeter track round which the Lancs were trundling to reach the end of the runway. By the old method of waving a thumb at the pilots one Lanc eventually stopped, its rear door opened and I was yelled at to "get on board quick". That was the most fantastic flight I ever had. We were up about two hours and I was allowed to wander about everywhere. I remember standing up in the
astro-dome as the aircraft went into a turn and watching its twin fins vibrating back and forth. I wondered if they were going to fall off. Then the navigator let me sit in his seat and showed me the radar. There was a square box over his desk with a green screen and blips on it. He told me if you lined up the blips it would tell you where you were and I thought that that was absolute magic. I didn't realise until much later it was a GEE set and was actually quite secret at the time. But the idea that wireless waves could tell you where you were seemed quite extraordinary and I pondered for a long time on how that could be. Until then I thought they were only any good for listening to Tommy Handley.

A regular bike trip was to the RAF airfield at Woodvale to "see the aeroplanes". They were mainly Spitfires and Hurricanes and some boring old training aircraft like Ansons and Oxfords but one day, in 1944, I saw a whole squadron of a completely new type of fighter come into land. I did not then know what they were but I fixed their outline in mind and some time later found they were Typhoons. I noted the squadron identification letters, US, which meant nothing to me then but I've since found they belonged to 3 Sqdn which had just converted on to Typhoons from Hurricanes. In fact, these must have been the first operational Typhoons, no doubt working up in the by now comparative safety of the NorthWest.

The European war ended on May 8th 1945. We listened on the school wireless set to Mr. Churchill announcing it and we were given the day off. So ended the war for me. I'd learnt a lot, mainly outside school, and I still distrust what the Germans get up to, particularly in the EU.

Walter Blanchard, October 2003.

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