For the Duration - Chapter Four

Chapter Four
ANNIE’S STORY

WHILE NATIONS PREPARED for all-out conflict, and populations were being uprooted and redeployed, life on my little home-front remained peaceful. Although I, too, had been transplanted into a new environment, I was content there. The grass was greener. I felt no sense of loss at having forsaken London for the country.
Throughout the land, camps were being established to house the swelling ranks of armed services. Bampton had its share of troops, with one army camp at the start of the Station road, on the very edge of the village, and another tucked away down a side lane, but quite close to the Market Square. This lane ran off Bridge Street, the street where I lived, and it led past a deserted apple-orchard. With its high grass, its nettles and its brambles, the orchard was a wild place, and a favourite haunt of the village children. The trees were straggly and uncared for, but their fruit was sweet.
The army camp was in a field just before the orchard was reached, and we had watched the soldiers setting it up with interest. Not that the buildings were unusual: far from it — just the regulation stained wooden barrack blocks, with separate mess block, latrines and stores. But soldiers! From the earliest days of the army in Bampton, men and children were on friendly terms. Naturally, some of us annoyed some of them sometimes — and they soon let us know — but, on the whole, the soldiers’ attitude was of good-natured tolerance towards us youngsters.
We pestered them for their attention. We looked up to our favourites and hung on their words. They gave us sweets and cigarette-cards; they told us about their own children at home; they explained their cap-badges and insignia. I think that they genuinely liked the interest that we showed in them, and even our company — in small doses, at least!
The servicemen could hardly have survived the tedium of camp life, and the non-existent nightlife of Bampton, without the occasional diversion. They would organize dances, at which there was never a shortage of partners for the soldiers, with girls from neighbouring villages supplementing the local lasses.
One memorable evening, I was allowed to attend a concert in the Women’s Institute hall in the Market Square. I knew of this concert because of Mary’s involvement in the W.I., and the preparations had generated a tremendous flurry of excitement and activity amongst the ladies. It was a combined effort between them and the soldiers; and both parties agreed that it was, indeed, a rollicking success.
My previous (limited) experience of live entertainment had been in London. The pantomimes “Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp” and “Goody Two Shoes” had been entrancing Christmas treats for us children; and once we had gone as a family to see a circus on ice, all dazzling movement and colour. Bampton’s concert was nothing like these shows. It was much less spectacular, much less polished; and the venue was much more crowded and much more smoke-filled. But the noisy, good-humoured audience thoroughly appreciated the evening.
In vaudeville manner, act followed briskly upon act, the initially polite applause soon becoming warm and spontaneous. A stiffly formal piano recital came first, and then a mock ITMA sketch showed just how popular “That Man” Tommy Handley and his associates were. The plot was immaterial. The familiar characters simply had to knock, enter, and deliver their catch-phrases. Much clapping, guffawing and cheering — instant fame. The sinister-looking fellow who kept starting off “Dis is Fünf speaking...” never got any further than that; and Tommy’s answer to Mrs. Mopp’s persistently delivered question: “Can I do you now, Sir” was never heard amid the din.
A lady from the church choir sang a bracket of sentimental songs of the time, accompanied at the piano by a Corporal from the Signals Corps, after which a men’s chorus sang “Bless ’em All” with gusto. This was so well received that they just had to sing it again. This time their admiring public sang too and, as the song neared its end, the tempo speeded up — then dropped as the last few words were deliberately thundered out.

“So we’re saying Goodbye to them all,
As back to their billets they crawl.
You’ll get no promotion
This side of the ocean,
So cheer up, my lads — BLESS...’EM...ALL!”

The lady from the choir provided the finale. Her rendering of “There’ll always be an England” was delivered to a still and silent hall. Blatantly patriotic, this song left no-one unmoved, and the applause that ended the singing was not just for the singer; nor was it just for the evening’s entertainment: it was also an expression of a deeply felt national pride.

“Red, white and blue — what does it mean to you?”
The audience that evening knew what it meant to them.

*

And so Bampton accepted as part of its new day-to-day fabric the sights and sounds of the military. We became accustomed to the bugle’s evocative notes, playing out the morning and evening ritual in the Market Square. Sunday morning Church Parades doubled the vicar’s congregations. At virtually any time of the day, one or two army lorries would be parked near the Town Hall. The Wheat Sheaf, The Bell, The Swan, The New Inn and the rest all welcomed the soldiers’ trade in their bars, and the girls of the village — to varying degrees — welcomed their advances. The men knew that their stay was temporary, subject to the whims of some distant HQ, but they allowed their roots to explore, and to take tentative hold.
Scouting had lapsed for want of leaders, and an earnest young Private revived first the Cubs and then, with the help of a soldier friend, the Scouts in Bampton. The earnest one’s name was Frank Phillips, and it so happened that one of the newsreaders of the day had the same name: “Here is the nine o’clock news, and this is Frank Phillips reading it.” A tiny coincidence, of no significance: yet I found it important.
In the Cubs, we practised tracking, and we tied knots; we played British Bulldog, and we tried outdoor cooking; we sang songs, and we worked for our badges. For a Christmas present, someone gave me a battery-operated buzzing device, designed for sending messages, and at home I did my best to master the Morse code. My dah-dah-di-dahs and di-di-dah-dis of an evening were surely very trying for Mary and Meryl, for we all spent most evenings in the same room, the lounge in the front of the house.
“Tony! Do something else! How can I concentrate on these schoolbooks with that awful noise going on and on? And Mary can’t get her letter to Bertie written, either. Stop it — or go somewhere else!”
“But Akela says we have...”
“I don’t care what Akela says! If you must do it, then go up to your room and practise. If I hear that buzz, buzz, buzzing a moment longer, it’ll drive me absolutely dotty!” Meryl was not trying to be funny, and I did not know what a pun was, then, but I appreciated the aptness of her response to my dots and dashes.
Frank Phillips stressed the serious nature of the step that we would take, when graduating from Cubs to Scouts, and several of us made this move together, late one afternoon, upstairs in the old Grammar School where the meetings were held. During the ceremony, we stepped symbolically across a chalk-line drawn on the floor, and were impressed by the occasion’s solemnity. A few weeks later, Private Phillips was posted, and that was the end of the revival of the 1st Bampton Scout Troop.

*

One weekend, the army cooperated with the village in the running of a fete, at which a major attraction for us boys was the display of military vehicles, and the chance to be driven in them. We spent our pennies on rides, the most popular being a tour of the village in a Bren gun carrier. The route was actually very short — hardly a tour — but the journey was thrilling.
As a rule, Bampton’s streets were relatively free of motor vehicles. There was the day-to-day traffic of the local camps, and sometimes R.A.F. lorries from Brize Norton added shades of blue to the drab browns to which we were so accustomed. Occasionally an army convoy would pass through the village; a monotonous column of identical lorries, bored driver at the wheel of each, and equally bored mate at his side. Dispatch riders accompanied these convoys, bustling importantly and noisily back and forth on their motor-cycles as they gathered in any stragglers, and manning intersections with authority.
I still think of Bampton as a village. It has a town hall, and so I know that I should more properly refer to it as a town; but that would spoil it for me. As a child, and a Londoner, I grew up thinking of Bampton as a little village in the country, a long way from London. Size and distance are relative, and distinctions between hamlet and village, village and town, are frequently blurred. Bampton remains that “little village in the country”, and it really was, for me, “a long way from London”.
Brize Norton aerodrome was about two miles from Bampton. In 1940, a railway branch-line operated from Oxford, with “Brize Norton and Bampton” as one of its stations, and the hump-backed bridge there over the railway line was a good vantage point from which to survey the aerodrome. Roughly half-way along the Station road from Bampton stood The Buildings — two farm-houses with their associated cottages and barns — and a school bus brought a handful of children from here every morning to Bampton, returning them when school was dismissed. A girl from this group was in my class — her name was Annie — but I did not really know any of the children from The Buildings. One morning, Annie had a terrible story to tell.
The previous afternoon, the school bus had left Bampton as usual to deposit its school-weary load of youngsters at their respective homes. The first stop was The Buildings. Annie and the others tumbled out of the rear door of the bus with the usual clatter, hitching their satchels and gasmasks over their shoulders as they dismounted, and waving and calling their goodbyes to friends still on the bus. School was not really a bad place, but home generally seemed better, and now they could not wait to shed the trappings of school, and immerse themselves in the informality of home. Just across the road were their cottages, and the youngest children dashed ahead of the others, determined to be first home.
The driver could not prevent his lorry from slamming into the little boy and girl; their appearance in front of him from behind the bus was too sudden. Annie did not witness the impact, but her description of the horrible mutilations suffered by the little ones’ bodies was clinically graphic.
Her detailing of how far the torn bodies were flung, and of the exact facial injuries of the young lad; her account of the lorry driver’s ashen face before he vomited, and of how the bus-driver kept repeating — to nobody in particular — “I should’ve warned ’em! I should’ve warned ’em”: these things I heard next morning at playtime.
I remember that her manner and tone were unemotional, detached. But, surely, the grief welled up from deep inside her a little later. Had I known the two young victims from The Buildings, had I been present when the army lorry so viciously cut short their lives, I should have borne up far less bravely than Annie did.
On the day of the children’s funeral, the school assembled solemnly in their memory. The headmaster chose that occasion, quite unnecessarily, to speak to us of road hazards. From time to time during the coming months, the fearful image of a mudguard slicing up under a little face would surface as I lay in bed. My flesh would go prickly, and I would wonder if Annie’s sleep was untroubled.

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