大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education鈥檚 reminiscence team on behalf of Peter Manley and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I lived in Essex during the war, in a place called Burnham-on-Crouch. I was about eight when war broke out and can remember the day as I was old enough to listen to the news and Chamberlain鈥檚 announcement. The sirens went off about ten minutes later.

I remember getting my gas mask in a cardboard box. The box soon got very battered and we bought canvas carriers instead. It wasn鈥檛 long before we got fed up with carrying them about. Everybody was a bit blas茅 about things with no sense of fear. If we heard gun fire, we wouldn鈥檛 run, but would look to see what was going on.

Burnham was en route to London so we saw lots of bombers going over. Sometimes they would bomb us rather than going all the way to London. The worst things were parachute mines which exploded when they touched the ground. They could blow down a whole street. One day I was sitting on the table being washed by my mother when the windows blew in and the walls cracked. We dived into the cupboard under the stairs and were unhurt apart from a few little cuts. The windows were taped up with roofing felt and we had to live in the dark for the next three or four months before getting new glass.

In 1940, at the time of Dunkirk, some of the boats from Burnham went over. The Guards Brigade were stationed in Burnham after Dunkirk and lived in old houses. They dug trenches to practice in which we played in for the rest of the war.

There was a battery of 6 inch naval guns at Creeksea which would practice firing over the town and my school. We were warned about this at school because it made a horrendous noise.

Every class at school took part in the National Savings campaign, and there was competition between the classes to see who could raise the most for a Spitfire. My father provided me with some 2 shilling pieces to contribute.

During the Battle of Britain we saw lots of aeroplanes crashing, vapour trails and dog fights. I remember going for a walk one morning and finding that a container of incendiary bombs had been dropped in a field. Only about 60% of them had gone off and even they hadn鈥檛 done much damage because it was a green field. The others were just sitting on the ground and we took them home. They were about 3 inches in diameter and about two feet long, and were really heavy for us to carry.

It was decided that we needed extra protection and we were given the choice between a Morrison Shelter and a blast wall. We had the latter, and found it a great place to sit to watch everything that was going on. At first we collected shrapnel, but there was so much of it that after a while we didn鈥檛 bother any more.

Burnham-on-Couch became a naval base called HMS St Matthew. They kept landing craft there and used to practice for D-Day in the river. They used to fire smoke floats to create a smoke screen. The float was made of balsa wood, and we would collect them down the river where they were washed ashore at Essex marshes. We weren鈥檛 supposed to go near the sea wall, but did via the marshes. Below the sea wall was a mine field. The cattle would stray across and get blown up, so we could find our way across the field via the craters, and collect the balsa wood. Using this, me and a friend would make little aeroplanes and sell them for 6d.

There was a youth scheme which taught us the basics of sailing and signalling and gave us a chance to go on the river. Most of the small boats had been taken out of the river and distributed around local farms and sand pits. This gave us a great place to play, but most got sunk in the end.

Eventually I went to Grammar School in Maldon. We got school lunches and I remember there being lots of prunes. The bus on which I travelled towed its own gas generator behind it and was slow getting up hills because it didn鈥檛 have much power. One morning the bus was machine-gunned, but nobody got hurt. The windows had black cloths up them, with just a tiny slit to look out through, so we relied on the conductor to tell us where we were.

The local boat-building yards were converted to war work, and once I reached the age of thirteen I was allowed to work there in the holidays. Unfortunately I got dermatitis from the ropes, and so had to give it up. Most families used to bring work home from the boat yards, such as making hammocks, ammunition slings and kitbags.

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