For the Duration - Chapter Six

Chapter Six
A DEEP PERSISTENT THROB

DURING THE MONTH of August, billboards on the streets and headlines in the daily newspapers shouted the latest tally of downed German and English aeroplanes as loudly as, before the war, they had announced the scores in an England versus Australia test match. A far more deadly and crucial test of superiority was being conducted high above the Garden of England, high over the fields and forests and villages of Kent and Sussex and Surrey.
Bampton was aware of this titanic contest in the sky only through the wireless and the press; “a long way from London”, we were even further away from the Kent and Sussex Weald. We were not among those privileged to see the intertwining vapour trails, the complex patterns in white that evolved against the blue of the summer skies. We were not able to watch as the “Few” engaged the German Luftwaffe, incurring as they did so the gratitude of the “Many” and inscribing their names indelibly in the history books.
A simple scene stays in my mind. A small black Austin pulls up across the road from Mary’s house in Bridge Street; my father has been driving, and my mother and young Barbara are with him. I happened to be at the front downstairs window, and so I saw them arrive. I did not know that they were coming. Nor did Mary, or she would have been making preparations. No, this was unexpected.
“Hello! What a lovely surprise! What are you doing here? We didn’t expect you. You should’ve let me know, and I could’ve had a nice meal ready for you. Just fancy! All the way from London! Did you have a good journey? I don’t suppose it was very busy on the roads, was it? Come on in, Harry. And you, too, Mary. This is nice — we never expected to see you, today!”
It was time for me to cycle to The Orchard to feed the hens and collect the eggs, so any curiosity that I might have had about the sudden arrival from London had to remain unsatisfied for the time being. I was certainly pleased to see my parents. If my father’s smile had been more grave than usual, and if my mother’s kiss to the cheek had been delivered almost absently, I had not really noticed. They were at Mary’s with me: the family was together again, at least for a while. I did not wonder for long as to why they had come.
The British government had not convinced my parents of the dangers of staying put in London. Now the German airforce had demonstrated those dangers. One Sunday afternoon, raiders flew up the Thames Estuary and fanned out over the suburbs. Telegraph Hill, with its parks and rows of semi-detached houses, was no military target. Nevertheless, on that first daylight raid on London, German planes swept low over the streets of our district, bringing the war perilously close to the depleted Robins family in its house on the corner.
In the park directly across the road from our front gate was a barrage-balloon site, less than a hundred yards away: as the crew worked hurriedly to get their balloon aloft, they and their charge were strafed by a fighter-bomber. Diagonally over the road, and next door to the park entrance, was a church — St. Catherine’s. It is still there, actually, but its roof is a different one from that which existed up until that raid. The church was gutted by incendiaries, and remained an unused shell for the rest of the war.
The damage to our house was limited to smashed roof tiles and broken windows. And no one in the family was hurt. My father, however, decided that his wife and youngest child must leave London. He was fortunate in that he had a car, as well as a haven to which he could take them. Next morning they loaded the Austin and drove to Bampton.
My father could not remain long away from London. There was his missionary work, centred on Pagnell Street Mission. This was an impoverished, downtrodden district, not far off in New Cross, and an area soon to be badly hit. And he was loath to leave our home unattended — not to mention his beloved garden! He would also have been thinking of his rostered duties at the nearby A.R.P. post; so far, they had been routine, but who knew what was ahead? Except for occasional very short breaks, my father was in London throughout the war. Later on, other members of the family were at Kitto Road with him, but through the Blitz of 1940-41, he was there alone.

*

In contrast, Mary’s house was becoming crowded. It was modest in size and, thinking back, I find it difficult to recall just who slept where! At weekends, school over, Meryl would cycle home to the village of Little Faringdon, thus easing the congestion slightly. Early in the war, though, a second teacher boarded with Mary, as well — Sybil Smith, who also taught at Bampton. For a while, too, a niece of Mary’s was with us. Sheila suffered from some bronchial disorder, and had a bed made up in the front room, downstairs. She was a few years younger than I was; old enough, though, to know how to torment and thus get the better of a ten-year-old boy.
To ease the sleeping situation at Mary’s, now that my mother and three-year-old Barbara were also in her house, she arranged for me to spend each night at the house of a good friend of hers, a no-nonsense spinster, Miss Salt. Jessie Salt lived with her elderly father, a maid, and a Scotch Terrier, and theirs was a large, roomy home. Each evening, around about bedtime, I would walk through the village to Miss Salt’s, at the far side of the Market Square, and each morning I would return to Mary’s for breakfast — detouring to open up the hen houses en route.
I never minded being at the Salts’ place, nor did the walk through Bampton’s deserted, blacked-out streets worry me. What I did not appreciate, however, was the thought of having to leave the familiar cosiness of Mary’s, the intimacy and warmth of small rooms filled with people and furnishings; the thought of saying Goodnight, and walking out into the black chill.
Miss Salt’s particular pleasure was jigsaw puzzles, and she would let me stay up late, pretending that she forgot the time, if I were trying to complete a puzzle. A spare room had boxes and boxes of jigsaws in it, piled high. I did not have to pretend to like them: jigsaws fascinated me. Her collection of the usual harbour views, cottage gardens and sailing ships was being augmented now by battleships of the Royal Navy, and aeroplanes of the Royal Air Force. A novel type, then, was large and circular, depicting life in wartime: numerous separate scenes in one.
I had never been so organized. “Time for bed” meant just that. Either Miss Salt or Fanny would oversee my visit to the lavatory, a huge room compared to other lavatories I knew. It was a most interesting room to sit in, for its door and walls were covered with years and years of calendars, mostly by courtesy of local trades-people and shopkeepers. Then it was upstairs to the sparsely furnished, large bedroom, where Fanny would have my bed turned back at the corner, a glass of water beside it, and a special pair of bed-socks on top of my neatly folded pyjamas.
From time to time, all manner of goods became scarce, but the rationing of food was not a direct worry for me — except when, later in the war at boarding-school, we managed our own sweet coupons. It was the housewife that had that obstacle to surmount virtually every meal that she prepared. At one stage, crisps were in short supply, and I went around the village several evenings in succession on a sort of pub-crawl. It was common enough to see an impromptu sign outside an inn: “Sorry, no Beer!” Even the higher class Talbot would have to advertise temporary closure through lack of beverages. On this occasion, however, it was those crinkly packets with the distinctive blue twists of salt inside that they had run out of.
“Please have you got any Smith’s Crisps?” was repeated at public house after public house (there were about a dozen in Bampton), for the standard reply: “No, sorry, son. Maybe next week.”
The nightly ritual at Miss Salt’s ended when my father rented a cottage at nearby Lew. It was just large enough to house my mother and my three sisters — just! Lew itself was tiny; one could easily drive through it on the way from Bampton to Witney, and not realise that a settlement had been passed. And the cottage was tiny, to match. It was one of a row of dwellings that had been built for the agricultural labourers on a gentleman’s estate. The “Big House” still existed, but the “Master” wielded much less power than he used to.
There was one small room and a scullery downstairs, and two minute bedrooms upstairs, reached by a tortuous stairway, built for children or midgets. An oil-lamp served for lighting downstairs, and candles had to be carried upstairs to bed. A wood-stove was there to cook by, and for warmth. Water came from a well in the back garden, which appeared at first to be an overgrown tangle, but actually contained a useful range of vegetables, currant bushes and herbs.
I visited and stayed overnight a couple of times, and was enchanted by the romance of it all. My mother was less enchanted, but at least she was running her own home again. She quickly became used to the cramped conditions, and the cottage’s limitations.

*

The Luftwaffe was visiting London nightly. Week after week, month after month, the Blitz continued and, somehow, Londoners adapted to a way of life revolving around the Alert and the All Clear. Our house in Kitto Road survived the 1940-41 raids, as it was to survive the various campaigns subsequently directed against London. There were numerous incidents, however, within a quarter-mile radius of number 77 in this initial onslaught. It was not easy to get windows repaired, and my father resigned himself to the fact that his home could no longer look its old spick-and-span self. The roof was patched, and some upstairs windows remained boarded “for the duration of hostilities”, that most elastic of time-spans.
During the winter of 1940-41, German raiders blitzed provincial cities, as well: ports such as Plymouth and Bristol, and industrial regions like Birmingham and Coventry knew the terror. News bulletins told the rest of England guarded versions of which particular areas had been raided, and the extent of the damage, and stressed how many enemy aircraft had been destroyed. In spells of fine weather, people spoke knowingly of a “bombers’ moon”, and those lying awake beneath the flight-path of the bombers felt a fearful sympathy for the city dwellers under attack.
It was supposed to be easy to tell a German aeroplane from an English one by the engine noise. The enemy’s note had a deep, persistent throb to it that was quite distinctive; or so it was said. Just about every aeroplane that I heard at night seemed to fit the description — menacing and alarming. I lay rigid in bed for much of the night that Birmingham was first raided heavily. Bampton was safe. Even as a scared ten-year-old, I knew that no German was homing in on Bampton, hell-bent on erasing us from the map. Such logic did not help at all. That ominous beat throbbed across the heavens, wave after incessant wave: very high, but grimly audible.
I was to learn that, if there were any danger to places en route, it was far more likely to be during the flight home. The target may not have been found; or reached. The bomber could have been damaged by flak, and the pilot was intent on getting back across the Channel, or the North Sea, as quickly as possible. Jettison the bomb-load: it made sense. This probably accounted for the stick of bombs which was to fall a few months afterwards on Mr. Butt’s land over towards the river. There were no buildings anywhere near the craters left punctuating the fields like a line of ugly periods, marking the path of the home-bound raider.
Next day, after school, we were drawn irresistibly to these craters. Except for those that had been dropped on the day that the aerodrome was raided, these were the first bombs at all close to Bampton. Jimmy Green, Boxer Painting and “Deg” Irons were with me as we cycled out past the Weald (a local hamlet), and down the lane that skirted Mr. Butt’s farm. We had all heard the explosions the previous night, and Derek and Boxer said that they had been listening to the plane, too.
We had heard a lone, fleeing bomber, and one salvo of bombs dropped randomly in some fields about a mile away. We did not try, then, to imagine what it might be like for people in London, Birmingham, or some other big city. We were too busy savouring our own little experience.
We came to a gate, beside which two bicycles leant against the hedge, and knew that our curiosity was soon to be satisfied. Curiosity, though, was only one of our reasons for making the journey. Of course we were keen to see for ourselves what a bomb-crater looked like, and to explore it thoroughly; we knew, too, that there was a good chance of our taking home a souvenir. We might find a twisted, jagged bomb fragment; perhaps even part of a tail fin. Jimmy knew a friend who had a piece of a bomb’s tail fin that had a serial number on it. Yes, if we could add some shrapnel to our collections of service buttons and badges, our day would be made.
Over the five-barred gate we went, vaulting in the time-honoured way: spring onto the second or third bar, lean over and grasp a bar well down on the other side, then swing the legs high over to land on the far side, as the hands let go of the gate.
We were in a long, narrow field, and at the end of it was our objective, looking from a distance like the heaped-up earthworks of a freshly dug trench. Clods of sticky yellow clay littered the grass as we drew nearer, and then we were clambering and slipping on the piled-up, uneven rim of the crater itself. Just a hole in the ground. A large, muddy hole, untidily fashioned, with puddles of water at the bottom.
Two boys that I did not know were prodding the sides with sticks, prising away chunks of clay in search of bomb-splinters. They showed us their prize: a foot-long mandrake-forked piece of casing, one stem gnarled and rounded, the other viciously barbed. We searched energetically, muddying ourselves thoroughly, in and around the crater. We then circled the field doggedly for a while, our optimism gradually fading, until we gave up. No mementoes to show from this outing. Still, we had seen for the first time the crater of a bomb dropped by the enemy.
The previous autumn, in these same Butt’s fields, a most mystifying thing had occurred. Instead of the hoped-for mushrooms, strips of a fine, silvery metallic substance were littering the ground. It was not film; it was not wire; it was unlike any material that we had seen before. It was as though several demented people had coursed over the field, scattering reels of shiny, light tape as they ran. We gathered up armfuls of the stuff, intending to take it home. Very little ever got home, though; it was too much fun to play with.
Back home, neither Mary nor Meryl could solve the riddle, and the pocketful of the unknown substance went presumably into the dustbin. Years later, I read somewhere that both England and Germany had dropped “walls” of metallic thread, experimenting with ways of foxing radar. Thus my memory was confirmed, and what had been a rather satisfying mystery was cleared up.
Another popular activity was to make a pilgrimage to the site of a crashed aeroplane. Security around downed aircraft varied. Sometimes the area was cordoned off, and airforce guards would be vigilant and firm.
“No, sorry, lads. No one at all’s allowed in ’ere, see.”
“Oh, please, Mister! Just us — we won’t touch anything. Promise! We just wanna see what it looks like. Please?”
“No! Can’t you understand English? I said no! Now bugger off, before I get cross!”

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.