大象传媒

A CHILD'S EXPERIENCE OF WORLD WAR TWO

My parents, both steel works clerks in Sheffield, married in 1936, and I was born in 1937. Further children followed in 1940, 1942, 1944, and 1946 - a remarkable pattern considering my father spent much of that time in the army, abroad or in hospital! But my biggest memory is of having to be the man of the house in a growing family whilst still an infant, and the emotional ups and downs my mother went through.

To begin with, my father was a conscientious objector for faith reasons, but by mid-1940 he had decided that he could not stand outside a conflict which involved a genuine attempt to oppose intense evil. He signed up for non-combatant roles, and served first in the Signals and then in the Intelligence Corps. He did many motor-bike duties and twice ended up in hospital as a result.

My personal memories, apart from vague experiences of sitting around in damp, cold air-raid shelters and increasingly abandoning them, include:

a. The Sheffield Blitz of late 1940. We were living on the outskirts and my sister and I were parked under the cold slab in the pantry. We could hear a major bombardment going on five miles away, with the noise of planes and the crump of bombs. A day or two later we were taken across the middle of the blitzed city on the back of a lorry, seeing terrible destruction, to visit our grandparents. They had had an incendiary bomb pierce the roof and end up squarely in the lavatory basin.
b. Standing at the window of our second house in Ecclesall in 1944, with the ground sinking steeply away, and seeing a crippled Flying Fortress come over the house and crash into the woods at Endcliffe Park, a mile away, complete with bombs still on board. The conflagration made a deep impression and I became very afraid to be alone.
c. Lying in the attic of that house and often waking in the night to the sound of aircraft engines, frequently followed by sirens.
d. We didn't get many flying bombs up North, but one night they came across with their characteristic engine noise, and we all claimed next day at school that they had gone directly over our house and that the engines had hesitated!

My father, Ernest Wills, was aged 32 when D-day came. He had been trained to question German prisoners, and had received intensive lessons in German and French, which had enjoyed, having had an interest in languages for some time. He went over on D-day by ship and landing craft and came safely ashore somewhere in Normandy. I would like to have known more about this period, and he did not talk about it much. Certainly he found himself speaking a great deal of French, and used to mention trying to sort out problems between different groups of French, who were at each others' throats: communists, supporters of De Gaulle, right wing underground workers, those accused of having co-operated with the Germans.

His time in Normandy was cut short after a matter of a few weeks: his motor-cycle met an army lorry on the wrong side of the road on a blind corner. He was badly mauled by the barbed wire on the front of the lorry and his leg was badly smashed. He was soon afterwards flown over by ambulance plane and spend the next year and more in Emergency hospitals in Morriston, near Swansea, and then more conveniently Middlewood, near Sheffield. That was on the other end of our tram route, and at the age of 8, for an old penny, I would ride the six miles or so to see him. I remember on two occasions in 1945, coming home and seeing victory bonfires being prepared in the back streets of Sheffield.

My father made a good recovery, thanks to good orthopaedic surgery, early use of penicillin, and the not always welcome attentions of early physiotherapists and occupational therapists. He lived to be 84.

But I will never expunge the childhood memory of standing with my mother at the top of our road as the postman delivered a brown card, saying that he was seriously injured, and of the wait with her until further news came and we knew he was still alive. One of the scars that many families had to bear from that war-time generation.

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