"We're at War, Boys," - (Part 4)

It was in the late 1990s that I first learnt with fascination of the full historical significance and surprising role of Farm Hall.
I was watching a BBC TV dramatised documentary about the interrogation of 10 leading German physicists, who had been rounded up by Allied forces at the end of the World War II in Europe. The scientists, among them Dr Otto Hahn, pre-war discoverer of uranium fission and Professor Werner Heisenburg, who headed Germany’s nuclear research, were brought secretly to England in July 1945 to face an intense grilling by expert military and scientific intelligence interpreters.
The war in the Far East was continuing, and the British and American Governments were anxious to discover how close Germany had come towards building an atomic bomb and whether any of its research secrets had been passed to its ally, Japan. But possibly the most significant information to come out of the questioning was contained in transcripts of private conversations between the scientists themselves.
These conversations were recorded surreptitiously by the intelligence officers on scores of relatively primitive microphones concealed below floorboards, behind walls and in furniture in divided bedrooms, dining areas, sitting rooms and other shared areas of a large former private mansion in Cambridgeshire, where the scientists were detained. Later, it was revealed that when the mansion was purchased privately from the Government in the 1970s the new owner discovered miles of hidden wiring left behind after removal of the microphones.
Although the house was not named in this early documentary, I recognised it immediately in the programme from its filmed exteriors, particularly a view of the conservatory - as those of Godmanchester’s Farm Hall.
The transcripts themselves were fully released early in the 2000s from the official secrets’ embargo. Only then did it become clear to anyone outside the team of interrogators and those controlling them, that the Nazi war machine had not, in fact, progressed very far in attempts to produce a nuclear weapon.
From the conversations they had about their interrogators, from everyday personal comments they made and the way they related to each other it became obvious that the German scientists had no working hypothesis, or even clear theories on how build an atomic bomb. And when in August of that year they heard that the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan, and that an entire city had been completely destroyed, they were at first totally disbelieving, ridiculing the American announcement. When they could no longer reject the news, they were utterly devastated and distraught, both at their own failure and with horror at the weapon’s destructive power .
It seems to have come as a huge surprise to the Allies’ scientists that in fact German nuclear research was at least two years, and possibly as much as five years behind that of the West. Of course I knew nothing of this at the time, and very few did. Any interest was at more of a personal level, worrying over the danger to my brother in Japan.
My memories of Farm Hall were of views over the parkland and its stately avenue of huge lime trees, of the walled garden and its rambling roses and fan-shaped fruit trees. I recall my mother’s “family” of evacuee girls acting out their roles as they staged a play in that garden; the lazy coaxing and teasing of the goldfish in the lily-pond and adventure-filled explorations of the stables and tack-rooms which lined the cobbled courtyard at the side of the house.
I remembered too the masses of overgrown ivy which smothered the weathered red-bricked rear walls of the house, a dense growth which provided a self-discovered ladder for our lovely old ginger tom up - and down - a height of three stories, and I sometimes wondered if someone in the household had read “Jack and the Beanstalk” to him.
After reading the stories of both the German scientists and the Norwegian commandoes, I couldn’t help wondering if they ever thought about who had occupied the house before them. Over almost its 200-year history, there were previous owners, trustees and perhaps tenants. More recently there followed those young evacuees and my mother, even Mickey, our ginger tom; then the scores of British and Continental agents and resistance fighters who followed on to be trained there in basic and advanced communications and self defence.
I thought too about my “Blue Room” and who among them might have shared it before and after my brief occupation. And I thought of the irony of a situation in which those Norwegian partisans who had destroyed Nazi hopes of building a “super bomb” then passed their legacy of a Farm Hall experience directly on to the only group of Germans who might one day have realised those hopes.
I remembered too, my elder brother Harry and his bride Gwen spending their so-brief two-day honeymoon at Farm Hall in December 1940 after a quick visit to me at Warboys. It was to be the last time they were to see each other for nearly five years.
Most of those years Harry spent in a Japanese prisoner-or-war camp in Tokyo, following his capture along with thousands of other British servicemen at the fall of Singapore. He and Gwen were only reunited after Japan capitulated to the Allies with the dropping of the West’s version of that atomic bomb that had so stunned those Farm Hall physicists.
By the end of 1941, as I have described, I had moved on to a new school in Midsomer Norton in the Somerset coal-mining country near Bath. My arrival in the town was hardly auspicious. I was met at the station by the local billeting officer after a long train journey from Huntingdon to King’s Cross, via the Underground to Paddington and on to Somerset, all of which I had to work out for myself, a lone 11-year-old. (How many of that age would be permitted to attempt such a journey alone today?)
My guide told me that I was the only evacuee arrival on that train, so we could make our way immediately to my new address in Midsomer Norton’s St Chad’s Way. “You’ll be interested to hear that it’s the home of a teacher at your new School, Highbury County, so he’s an evacuee - like you.
“He and his wife have two children of their own, but they attend the local village school.” I asked the billeting officer what subject my host taught. I had learnt that at secondary schools, most teachers specialised in one or two subjects. “Mr Chapman?” he replied. “Oh, he takes maths classes.”
My face fell. Maths! I hated figures - couldn’t see the need for them. I always held everyone else up as I asked for explanations of answers I couldn’t understand. And that was just Arithmetic; Algebra and Geometry were to me foreign languages which had no translation into reality. When I put my hand up in maths everyone groaned.
I went silent as I thought about this new development. Eventually I tried to think positively. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Perhaps I might get some help with my maths homework. But now we were turning into the front garden of one of a row of pleasant pre-war homes, a modern house at that time. The billeting officer rang the bell. No one came, and he rang again. We waited. A neighbour appeared and a few words were exchanged. And it seemed the Chapmans were away, and wouldn’t be back for several days.
The billeting officer wasn’t even slightly put out. Casually philosophical, he announced: “Never mind. Can’t be helped. And I do have another family we can move on to.”
He explained that the “other family” had originally said they could accommodate three boys, but that he had only two new evacuees, and that these had been accepted. "All we have to do is to turn up with you as the third." It was a form of mathematics I thought I could understand without question. And that’s how I came to live with the Sperrings.
It was Mrs Sperring I was first introduced to when we reached another house, a Victorian block a few roads away. At least that’s how the billeting officer described her. She didn’t correct him. But my predecessors at the billet did.
Terry Martin and Ralph Ings were of course, like me, new pupils at the evacuated London school of Highbury County. They too had moved in only recently, and as soon as we were alone Terry told me: “Mr Sperring has his own business. The lady's not his wife, she’s his sister, but she keeps house for him.
“But she got tired of always having to explain, so she doesn’t bother any more.”
Mr Ralph Sperring was by trade a carpenter and builder, but we three hardly got to know him. We only met up with the “family” for an hour in the evenings and for meals at weekends. Mr Sperring hardly spoke to us. Also at “home” from time to time were Mr Sperring’s nephew Jack, who was training for the priesthood, and his sister Mary, a former novice at a Bristol convent.
Our living quarters for much of the day was a low-roofed outhouse extension at the rear. I can’t remember if it had a glass roof, or I might have been describing a conservatory, but the outer walls were very thin and certainly half-glazed. I believe it had a small adjoining toilet. The house itself had uneven, natural stone-slab floors throughout its ground floor. We had one very large bedroom upstairs.
My most vivid memory of my stay there was the routine (a chart on the wall listed our shared daily chores, meal and bath and bed-times) and lack of communication with a very pious Roman Catholic family, who nevertheless insisted on our regular attendance at our Anglican church. Fortunately there was one routine all three of us enjoyed. We joined Mr Sperring and his sister, and occasionally Mary, in the sitting room for an hour each evening.
Highlight of the week was listening to Tommy Handley’s ITMA (“It’s That Man Again”) on the wireless as the radio was then known, followed by the BBC’s Home Service News at 9 pm. It’s interesting to recall that many of the catchphrases from that comedy programme are still remembered today.
It was on one of these evenings, in fact on 14 October 1941 (I discovered the date later) that we had the strange and almost unbelievable experience of hearing that nine o’clock news reader being interrupted by another voice, apparently on the same wavelength. I am not sure if at that stage the newsreader, Alvar Lidell, could hear the voice through headphones (if in fact he was wearing them), but he certainly remained unfazed. The interruptions, in English, were by an apparently cultured voice, which tried to comment on or dismiss news items whenever the news reader paused. But he was rarely able to complete more than a few words, and even those were ineffectual.
Finally, Lidell was made a dramatic announcement. It went something like: “You may be able to hear an interruption to the programme. Do not listen to this voice - it is the voice of the enemy.”
Within minutes it seems that BBC engineers were able to virtually drown out the voice, in spite of protesting sneers, with some oscillating sound effects. But further attempts, by several different interrupters, were made over successive nights. Most were in the nature of sarcastic or unrelated caustic comments. One clearly remarked: “Would you like a cigarette - or would you prefer one of Mister Churchill’s cigars?”
The voices continued, according to newspapers, intermittently right through October and on to early December, when the BBC engineers finally defeated the “voices,” which were never heard again.” If the “enemy” had hoped to demoralise the radio audiences in Britain by their propaganda, they failed totally. The interruptions and the voices were ridiculed and regarded as a total joke by the great majority of listeners.

The only time I recall any other social activity at the Sperrings was a weekend when both Ralph and Terry were away, possibly for a day’s visit by relatives, leaving me on my own over a weekend. Mary, who must have been in her mid-to-late 20s, decided to take me to Bristol Zoo. I remember seeing my first gorilla, the zoo’s huge famous resident Alfred. But he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in me as he was apparently fascinated instead by the sight of a low flying aeroplane, following it with his eyes from one horizon to another.
Mary and I spent so long at the zoo, however, that we missed our last train back to ’Norton. She wasn’t worried in the least. Instead she led me off by bus to a convent, where she said we could get a bed for the night. On the way we stopped only to see the magnificent Clifton Suspension Bridge, one of the very few sights I promised myself I would view again some day when peace came. It was a promise I was able to fulfil some twelve years on.
My bed at the convent with a single crucifix above the pillow - was in a tiny cell, with a black floor and stone walls and ceiling painted totally white, seemed to be the most comfortable I had ever known. But I woke at about 3.00am to the nuns’ reciting of matins, which seemed to echo forever, or until I finally went back into a deep sleep.
There was little more to remember about the Sperrings or their home at Berkeley House. Yet on 29 January, 1990, almost 50 years after the end of the war I read in my national newspaper of the death of a Mr Ralph Sperring, at the age of 81. The address was that of Berkeley House, Redfield Road, in Midsomer Norton, and one headline, across six columns read:
“Lonely miser who lived on stale bread leaves £2½m.”
It seems that much to the surprise of his neighbours, Mr Sperring, who if his age was given correctly must have been no more than 32 (not middle-aged as I believed) when he took in us evacuees, had left his entire fortune to the tenants of some 40 properties he owned in the village. His sister had apparently died before him, there was no mention of his niece Mary, and her brother Jack, the story claimed, was left merely an old Bible and a few photographs.

Whilst evacuated to Midsomer Norton, Highbury County School shared a building with the local high school. Compared with our school’s London home, at that time a rambling Victorian mansion in Highbury Grove which had once been a boys’ reform school, this was a relatively modern structure standing proudly on a hill overlooking the town. Somehow the two schools functioned surprisingly well alongside each other and I never understood how, as so many of its facilities had to be shared.
Directly opposite the school, beyond the playground and the road which fronted it, were open fields, bounded on the south side by a large excavated ditch or tank trap, guarded at one point by a concrete gun emplacement or “pillbox”. This, we were told, would be part of Britain’s second line of defence in any invasion attempt, and we were just “inside“ it. It continued right across the country from east to west, some 50-60 miles from the southern coast.
It wasn’t long before I was on the move again. And it came about mainly because first Terry, then Ralph were returning to London. This was the case for many thousands of evacuee children once the German bombing raids diminished. Later it proved to be a too-optimistic and perhaps unfortunate decision as new aerial threats to London took over.
I however moved to another home on the opposite side of the town, which gave me something like a two-mile walk to school each day. Mr and Mrs Burt lived in a semi-detached modern house on the road to a nearby coal mining village of Paulton. They were two of the nicest people I ever stayed with, and were both very kind to me. Once again I had my own room, this time not gas proof, it’s true, but better suited to my needs. And now I had a wardrobe and chest of drawers of my own too, and a small table where I could do my homework.
Taking into account school holidays and half-term, spent in Godmanchester, at school agricultural camp in the summer or in London with my dad, it seems now I wasn’t with the Burts very long. That may be because for some reason I kept no diary for that year, 1943. Or perhaps because life seemed less eventful.
My evacuee days finally came to an end, however. Highbury County School was now functioning fully but unequally in two places 100 miles apart, as so many of my fellow pupils had by now returned to London. And Someone in Authority finally decided to recall the rest of us for the autumn term, and now I joined my father at home; the girls’ school and my mother were staying put in Godmanchester.
The occasional air-raid still kept us awake at night, but was no great threat. Soon I was to experience, at first hand, the terror raids of Hitler’s “secret weapons” the V1 and V2. But I was no longer an evacuee. So that was another story.

The End

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