A Boy's War

A Boy’s War

I was nearly twelve years old when the war started and I remember the air raid warnings and hurrying down to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of our garden where we spent many cold, dark, damp nights. The bombers were usually flying on to other targets but we didn’t know that and were always anticipating some nearby explosions. However, a worse memory is that of spending almost every Saturday morning of the early war years in a queue outside a butcher’s shop in the town centre. The queue, formed long before opening time, was for sausages, and when my mother had placed me in position she would depart to join another queue elsewhere to buy some other scarce food. I wasn’t trusted with money to buy the sausages if my mother failed to reappear, so the queuing experience was a mixture of boredom and then panic as the queue advanced without any sign of her coming to take over. In fact she always arrived in the nick of time but I was left with a life long aversion to queues.
When the Luftwaffe wanted a little variety in their target list we reached a prominent position and when it seemed likely that we were to receive their attention on a number of consecutive nights, my older brother decided to cycle to some higher ground on the edge of town where he could safely get a good view of the bomb bursts and fires. Unfortunately, on this occasion he found himself in a shower of incendiary bombs and had to pedal furiously to reach safer ground. This may have been what induced him to join the RAF where he served as a bomb aimer.
At some point I heard that if you joined the Air Training Corps you could qualify for a week at an RAF station and be taken for flights in training aircraft. Although I hadn’t reached the minimum age of sixteen I was accepted, given a uniform and invited to nominate the crew skill I wished to train for. As everyone else wanted to be a pilot I decided to be different and chose wireless operator. It didn’t take long to reach a good level of proficiency with morse code and, with a number of other cadets, I was offered a week at a large RAF base about thirty miles from home. What followed was not what I had been led to expect. It was a week of drill, boring lectures and poorly cooked inadequate food. We hardly ever saw an aircraft close up and there was never any suggestion that we might actually get a flight. I decided that if and when I was called up I wouldn’t be opting for the RAF. On return home I handed in my uniform and taking the advice of some friends joined the War Service branch of the Boy Scouts where we learned things like unarmed combat and military map reading.
After another of my brother’s night-time excursions he returned to tell me that my school had been destroyed and I thought he was joking but it was true. When I arrived there in the morning I found the upper floor burnt out, the ground floor inches deep in water from the fire hoses, and what was left of the ceilings still burning or smouldering. In those days text books were not supplied by the school, they had to be purchased by the pupils’ parents, so I made my way to my classroom to see if I could recover mine from my desk. When I got there I was shocked to see a pile of ashes where my desk had been and a hole in the ceiling above. Most of the other desks which had been pushed to the rear of the room seemed to be intact. Fortunately I found that my desk had also been pushed back, presumably by the firemen, and my books were mostly undamaged apart from some water marks. The firemen had also retrieved a lot of written material from the staff room including piles of exercise books waiting to have homework marked. This had all been dumped in the school yard and some boys were searching for their books just to deface their recent homework submissions. Other boys were idling throwing stones through the few remaining windows and when the Assistant Head, normally a strict disciplinarian, walked by, he took no notice, apparently traumatised by the whole situation.
It was in this raid that a high explosive bomb fell about a hundred yards from the home of one of my aunts. A large chunk of stone which had been hurled into the air from a destroyed house fell through her roof, into the spare bedroom and into the bed where it was it was held by the bed springs. The springs had been distorted but held the stone a couple of inches above the floor. The bed and the stone were left undisturbed and on display to interested visitors for some time after.
When my school was destroyed, some other schools were also damaged and, to ease the pressure on the available accommodation, it was decided that pupils would be invited to volunteer for evacuation to safer areas. I was eager for a new experience and persuaded my parents that I should go.
Many evacuees had unpleasant experiences but I had a marvellous time in a small Welsh mining valley. There was only one pit operating and the surrounding countryside was largely unscathed and beautiful with great scope for adventurous expeditions. The school, with mixed classes and some female teachers, was much more civilised than the one I had left. Although the Assistant Head of the boys’ school was the only master authorised to administer corporal punishment, other masters were not backward in devising their own unauthorised versions. The new school was more relaxed, presumably because the presence of girls moderated the behaviour of staff and pupils. I understand that today girls can be just as aggressive and badly behaved as boys, but then they were expected to be ‘ladylike’ and generally lived up to expectations. During my time there I lived with two different Welsh speaking families who treated me very well. They never made me feel left out by speaking Welsh in my presence and in retrospect I wish I had made some attempt to learn the language myself. However, as I was struggling with French and German at school it is understandable that another, perhaps more difficult language would have been one too many. When listening to Welsh conversations between neighbours it was interesting to hear how many modern English words and phrases like ration book were used because there was no Welsh equivalent.
I left the first family when the wife became pregnant and then stayed with an elderly widow who treated me so well that I feel guilty about not having expressed sufficient gratitude at the time. I still have a letter she wrote to my mother reassuring her that I was happy and applying myself to my school work. The praise she gave was hardly deserved but she obviously wanted my mother to feel better about my absence.
When I finished school, my examination results were almost certainly better than they would have been if I had continued at my old school and when I returned home I took a job as a junior clerk in the Public Health Department of the local Council. I was assigned to a sub office called The School Medical Service where the only other males were one too old for military service and two thers who were unfit. Our office was also designated the Area Casualty Bureau . One of our female clerks spent part of her time keeping records of all service personnel admitted to local civilian hospitals and also records of any civilian air raid casualties. Although Bureau work was not normally part of my duties my boss used to joke that if information about casualties was slow reaching us it would be my job to visit the mortuary and count the bodies. When talking about the Bureau records I heard that there had been an unfortunate incident when a small group of people leaving a public house in the course of an air raid had been killed by a bomb just outside the pub. No identifiable body parts could be found of a man known to have been with them, so there couldn’t be a burial and he couldn’t be officially pronounced dead. Some time later his wife wanted to marry again but was told she would have to wait the full legal term covering presumption of death after disappearances.
The older men in the Department were expected to serve as air raid fire-watchers at public buildings, spending a night from dusk to dawn about once a fortnight at a specified location. Although I was theoretically too young to be on the rota I was persuaded to join ( the more people on the rota the less frequent the duties) and I was allocated to a small children’s hospital. I would cycle to the hospital, which was a couple of large Victorian houses knocked into one, and on arrival I would be shown into the nurses’ lounge where I would read and listen to the radio until 10 pm when I would be given a cooked supper. After I had finished eating I would be shown to a spare bed in one of the wards and after a peaceful sleep would be woken with a nice cup of tea at daylight or 7am whichever was the later. I don’t remember being given breakfast but I was paid for my night’s ‘work’ according to the number of hours between dusk and dawn. Usually I received an amount which was about what I would get for three days normal work. Although I had received some instruction in the Boy Scouts on how to tackle incendiary bombs with a stirrup pump, nobody concerned with the rota knew this and I was never given any instructions or advice on how to carry out my duties. I don’t think I would have been much use if the hospital had been hit in an air raid. Fortunately raids were very rare by then and I think my presence was just seen as a way of meeting the relevant government regulation.
Later on I had a job which involved working in American army camps and one of these was holding thousands of Russians captured serving with the German army. Most of them were Mongolian in appearance, presumably recruited from the Eastern end of the Russian Empire, and with little natural loyalty to the Soviet government. They were very lightly guarded because there was no point in their attempting to escape. By contrast, American soldiers who were under some local punishment routine and detailed to pick up litter from the camp roads, were followed by guards armed with automatic weapons and looking as though they would use them on the slightest provocation. On another occasion I had left a cinema after the evening performance and was walking through the main street in the city centre when a couple of Jeeps filled with American military police screeched to a halt outside a popular dance hall. I waited to see the outcome and a short time later they emerged dragging a few soldiers who they were clubbing mercilessly even though I couldn’t see them giving any sign of resistance. It seemed that the traditions of the gun slinging Wild West with its vigorous law enforcement were still considered appropriate. Perhaps they still are.
I celebrated VE night at a dance in a Territorial Army drill hall in Birmingham and although I was still theoretically too young to buy alcoholic drinks I don’t remember this restraining me or anyone else.

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