About the contributor

PART 1

Wherever we were, we had arrived. And not one of us knew where.
The hush of expectancy was broken only by an occasional nervous whisper as more than a hundred of us crowded into the tiny courtyard at the front of the village school. The throng spilled over the pavement and on to the deserted high street. Each of us displayed a large white label tied to a buttonhole, bearing witness to our identity as a “vaccy.”
It was September 1939, just a day or two after the outbreak of World War 2.
Mr Wynne Jones, our London headmaster, emerged from the school doorway. He carefully hauled himself up on to a chair someone had placed for him, so that he towered over us.
For a moment, he said nothing. Like a general, he surveyed his troops, a motley, questioning assembly, distinguished only by our variety of small kitbags and hand-gripped attaché cases. At last, he spoke.
“Well,” he said, “We’re at war, boys.”
There was a reverential hush as we waited expectantly. For a moment the head appeared nonplussed, as though he had expected some other reaction. One of his teachers whispered something to him. The headmaster gave what appeared to be an embarrassed gasp.
“I’m sorry, boys,” he apologised. “I should have made myself clear.
“This...er, where we are...is Warboys - the village of Warboys, in the county of Huntingdonshire.
“So you could say: ‘We are at war, boys - in Warboys...’”
And at that point Mr Wynne Jones changed the subject. He apparently decided he had laboured the joke enough, or what those who recognised his style of humour strongly suspected was a joke.
What followed felt even less of a joke to us boys. We seemed to be standing in that forecourt for ages while various strangers, women and men, came and peered at us and at our identity badges.
The flimsy, thin, buff-coloured cardboard larger-than-life baggage labels secured to our coats or jackets by white string were a Government regulation requirement, which bore our surnames, hand-scrawled in large letters.
I waited with three others, by chance all from my own class, so around my own age of just nine years. One of them, Freddy Marsh, was my friend.
He was also, by natural selection, accident, and design, forever ‘paired’ with a friend of his, one Dennis Pry. Almost exactly the same height and small for their age, both were blue-eyed blonds. Though not facially alike, they were treated as twins by pupils and teachers, as they were constant companions.
The fourth was Tommy S-----, whose surname I won’t spell out for reasons that will become clear.
Earlier, a small convoy of buses had ferried us, a junior school party, some 8 miles from Huntingdon station and deposited us in this village high street. With our band of teachers, we had travelled sixty-five miles from Finsbury Park station in London, but to us it seemed like a thousand.
Aged between 8 and 11 years, we represented three large classes or about 90% of all the boys of Montem Street elementary school in the smoke-blackened Victorian streets of the north London Borough of Islington.
We learnt later that the Montem Street girls’ school next door had gone to another village or small town nearer Huntingdon (inevitably splitting up some families for the first time).
Finally, it was time for the billeting officer, complete with clipboard, to move in our direction. So many of our companions had already been selected and driven away (as Dennis wickedly put it: “...to the slaughterhouse”).
Now we would learn where our new wartime homes were to be as we waited to be allocated to households of local people who had volunteered or been required to take us in.
“Ah!” he said, pouncing on us as he checked his list, “Four of you. That’s just what I want.”
He called up a volunteer car driver and gave directions. “...To the house of a sweet old lady at the edge of the village,” as he explained to us.
Someone in the reception committee rushed forward as we took our seats in the back of the car and gave each of us a half-pound bar of milk chocolate. It was the largest bar of chocolate I had ever seen in my life.
It was also the last of its kind I would see again for a very long time.
Minutes later we were being greeted by the “sweet old lady,” a grey-haired widow at the door of her cottage, named “Garden Gate.” She invited us and our driver in and carefully studied the scribbled names on our labels, asking us unnecessarily to confirm each inscription.
“I think you will have to wear them for a few days until I know who’s who,” she said, then hastily added when she saw our reaction, mirrored, I have to say, by the expression of our escort:
“No, perhaps not. I was only joking.”
We were finally on our own with her. We had cleared her prepared table of bread, and some as yet-unrationed butter and ham (we hadn’t eaten since breakfast and privately agreed we were “starving”) when someone - I think it was Tommy - produced his bar of chocolate.
But even before he could unwrap it, our hostess reached over and took it from him. She asked if we had any of our own, and innocently we all produced our precious bars.
Carefully gathering them up, she wrapped them together in a paper bag and pronounced: “I don’t think you should have any of these now. It might make you sick during the night. I’ll keep them all safe for you.”
That night was one I shall never forget. Four of us in a small bedroom, probably no more than ten feet square, with one small chest of drawers, the floor covered in shiny Victorian-patterned linoleum.
On that floor, were four very large hessian sacks filled with straw which overflowed through their buttoned openings. Nothing else.
As we stood, dumbstruck, goggling at the sacks, the old lady, who had left us on our own for a moment, suddenly re-appeared at the door with a blanket for each of us.
“It’s warm in here,” she said, anticipating our questions. “I’ll bring you each a pillow. You won’t need anything else.”
“But we can’t sleep on sacks...” That had to be Tommy.
“Of course you can,” replied our landlady. “They’re called palliasses, and they’re very comfortable. You’ll see.”
But we didn’t see, even though I’m sure our eyes were open all night. For none of us slept a wink.
Boys, straw-filled palliasses and a highly polished lino floor simply do not make good sleeping partners.
The hessian irritated our skin. The sharp stalks of straw punctured us constantly. Every time we turned, bunching the mounds of straw with our hands as we tried to get comfortable, we slid on the slippery floor, invariably bumping into someone else.
We moaned, we groaned and we yelled at each other to “Ge’roff!”
Then, in the deep of night, just as we thought we might fall asleep from the sheer exhaustion of remaining awake, I remember we got up one after another from our straw beds to investigate a strange clattering sound outside.
Our window directly overlooked the village road, and we were mystified to see a horse and cart being driven slowly by.
Every few yards the elderly driver climbed down from his seat behind the horse and collected what appeared to be a large metal bin from the back. Then he would disappear into the back gardens of neighbouring houses.
“Whatever is he doing?” we asked of each other as we watched the process repeated at each stop.
Then someone pointed out: “That’s a funny cart. It looks like a big metal tank on the back.”
And we realised that the driver was apparently filling the tank from the bin he carried out from every back yard.
Dawn couldn’t come quickly enough - and it seemed like an age coming. I remember nothing of that early morning, except that one of us (Tommy?)thought to ask our landmlady what the carter was doing in the middle of the night.
She chose to brush the question aside with something like: “Oh, you mustn’t worry about things like that. You’ll be late for school.”
We must have had an otherwise uneventful breakfast because we were at school without wasting time. That may have been down to the novelty of new surroundings. It may also have been down to our attempts to get an answer to the problem of the horse and cart in the middle of the night.
Until a fellow pupil said with a laugh: “I saw it too. They told me it’s known as the honey wagon. The old man has the job of emptying all the lavatory bins in the village.”
I was horrified. We had all discovered that the only lavatory Garden Gate boasted appeared to be that sentry box shed in the garden (we didn‘t use the name “toilet” then, and “loo” hadn’t been invented).
We did wonder then how we were supposed to flush it, but in the rush to get to school put it out of our minds.
Later we learnt that most of the village kids looked down on us evacuees. They had decided we had escaped from what they thought of as the London slums.
As we tried to tell them: “At least we have flushing lavvies.”

We also learnt soon that Tommy, however concerned he may have been about the lack of mains plumbing, also had a desperate need to complain about the overall unsuitability of our new lodgings.
He proceeded to make his complaints known to everyone within earshot - from Mr Wynne Jones downwards.
In general terms the three of us agreed with him, though not with his enthusiastic extremism, as we might have described it if we knew the words.
I felt that we ought to give our elderly foster-mother a little more time to get used to us - and we to her - but I didn’t give voice to my reservations.
And neither did Dennis nor Freddy, if they had any. All I remember was a number of side glances at the four of us and a great deal of whispered discussion between the head, our class teacher and the billeting officer who had magically appeared just after our first morning assembly
The outcome was that we returned to Garden Gate only to collect our few personal possessions. We didn’t see our elderly landlady - or indeed our four bars of chocolate, in spite of Tommy’s frequently and loudly expressed claim that they had been “pinched.”
Now we learnt that we were to be split up into two pairs. Two of us would go to a farm at the centre of the village, and two to another farm a mile or so away at its perimeter, overlooking the “fens,” whatever they were.
The pairings were sorted without consultation with us. The heavenly twins, Dennis and Freddy, would be kept together as always and were packed off post haste to the great and grand Dorringtons’ Farm at the edge of the village.
I was stuck with Tommy - and he with me - at the Priors’ pig and dairy farm within easy walking distance of the school.
I was fascinated with the setting of the farm. Although fronting the village high street, it overlooked open countryside at the rear. Opposite and within sight of its front gate were the village’s two windmills, just a few hundred yards apart and sited well back from that main road behind houses.
One, it is true, was little more than a ruin, and had not been in use for many years. But the other was to me the perfect representation of a windmill, with its white painted sails and revolving summit almost completely intact.
A secret visit to it left me with a fascination for windmills which has lasted to the present day.
Tommy wasn’t the least bit impressed. Indeed, we seemed to have nothing in common, and we barely spoke to each other even at mealtimes. It soon became obvious that the less he and I had to do with each other, the better we would like it.
Even though we shared a room, we went out of our way, literally, to avoid contact.
What was the problem? When the farmer’s wife, Mrs Prior, asked that, I could have said that I didn’t like him because he was seen as the class bully.
But as I had never personally suffered as a victim of his attention, I could only say: “I don’t know. We just don’t get on.”
If she had asked Tommy the same question, I can only suppose he gave a similar answer - but perhaps he had a more logical reason for his dislike of me. I certainly wasn’t going to ask him.
I was more interested in the activities on the farm, and was soon feeding the chickens and helping with the pigs.
I was even proud to learn that the Priors’ was one of the largest pig farms in the country. And slipping on the obligatory white overall-coat, I also enjoyed helping out in the spotlessly clean farm dairy.
Taking over the handle of the revolving butter-maker for short spells, I was fascinated at the way the clouded little glass window in the side of the highly polished barrel suddenly cleared as the liquid inside turned finally to butter.
But most of all I enjoyed walking across to the adjoining 4-acre field and bringing the cows in for milking in the evening.
I had been shown how to stand by a gate, cup my hands and call out “Wup, wup, wup!”
It gave me a wonderful feeling of achievement to watch as the small herd of a dozen or so cows suddenly appeared over the brow of the hill and ambled towards me, halting until I could open the gate. And I looked forward to learning how to milk the cows as soon as possible.
Tommy, for his part, preferred to get away from the Priors’ as often as possible. He seemed not to be interested in the animals or in the farm equipment, and after our evening meal - a high tea we shared with the farmer and his wife immediately we returned from school - he frequently disappeared until the early dusk.
After only a few days I realised he was regularly walking over to join Freddy and Dennis at the Dorrington’s, on the Chatteris road. Although I had been there to visit Freddy just after he moved in with Dennis, I was never asked over with Tommy.
I was puzzled, but not particularly concerned. Eventually, at school I took the opportunity to tackle Freddy on this point.
“Tommy doesn’t want you over with us,” was all he would say. I mentally shrugged and dismissed the subject. I was a little upset that Freddy, and apparently Dennis as well, hadn’t stood up for me.
But overall I was quite happy spending the evening in the farm dairy or talking to the pigs.
The day the BBC and the film crew arrived changed all that.

It had been a normal school morning. Tommy had already left by the time I’d brought the cows in and had my breakfast, and as usual I made my own way to school, arriving just in time for morning assembly.
After prayers and the morning hymn the deputy head made a couple of routine announcements, paused for silence and then said:
“Today we have some special visitors. These gentlemen...”
He gestured towards a group of people standing in a group near the stage.
“These gentlemen are from the BBC. They are here to make some recordings. So we’re going to extend assembly for a little while this morning, and sing for them.”
The visitors bustled about for the next few minutes setting up their equipment and running seemingly miles of cable while we were given a short lecture, which if I remember correctly contained phrases like “no shuffling, definitely no coughing” and “sing your hearts out.”
What we sang, to a piano played on stage by a teacher, Mr Jeans, I do not recall. But the BBC man seemed happy with the results, and told us after a few moments that everything was:
“...OK - even the sound level test at the beginning.” And that would have been the high spot of the day, but for the unexpected announcement that followed.
Cutting through the babble of a hundred kids by suddenly calling again for silence, the deputy head revealed that the sound technicians had another call to make before they left Warboys.
“They have to find a farm at the edge of the village,” he said, “But they don’t know how to get there.
“Does anyone here today know where the Dorringtons’ farm is situated?”
For a moment I sat in silence. But as soon as the question sank in I threw up my hand.
“I know where it is, sir,” I said. “I’ve been there.”
The teacher had a whispered conversation with the BBC technician. He turned to me and said:
“Right then. You’d better go with them. Be off and get your coat.”
I couldn’t have moved more quickly if I’d known what was in store. As it was, I was waiting beside the BBC crew’s car before them. Within seconds we were on our way, with me seated beside the driver, giving my directions.

Continued in Part 2 of “We’re at War, Boys,”