A Boyhood in a Wartime England; Part 7

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Lincolnshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of John Chappell and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Chappell fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

It was in 1941 that a British Halifax bomber, returning from a desperate night raid on Germany, in an attempt to reply to what German bombers had done in flying over England, became lost over the Greater Borough and strove to land in a Tingley field presently being worked in daylight by a number of Italian POW’s. The aircraft struck the tip of a house roof I Thorpe Lane and crashed here. All the flyers were killed. The wreckage from the Halifax bomber was strewn about widely. It was believed by the people of Tingley that the youthful pilot of the aircraft had made every effort to avoid causing civilian deaths. A bus driver passing close by the scene of the landing, halted his bus and persuaded his passengers to crouch beneath trees.

My good friend Sonny Bennett had been killed very early in the war, while the sailor Alan Dawson had died not at sea but while on leave in England. Now yet another tragic death struck at our war affected neighbourhood. On his last home leave, Harold Matthews had married his sweetheart, Edith Brown, Edith continuing to live with her parents at no. 23 Troy Hill. My parents, sisters and I occupied no. 27 Troy Hill, while my grandparents, who owned the four modest houses here, lived at no. 25, the larger house neighbouring no. 23.

The news from the War Office was now posted to Edith Matthews, nee Brown that she was from hereon a widow. I came across Edith one day, very shortly after the news of Harold’s death, sobbing in our communal wash-house and removing the buttons and badges from her dead husband’s tunic, greatcoat and hat. Turning y way briefly, I saw her face to be wet with tears. She wiped her eyes, attempted a smile and offered me a number of brass buttons from a tunic. I received these tokens shyly and I still have them this very day, keepsakes once belonging to a man I knew only briefly but like greatly for his smile. Scarcely knowing what words to speak to Harold’s Edith I said nothing, hoping Harold’s tearful widow would understand a boy’s inability to find appropriate words for such a difficult occasion. “You remember Harold?” Edith inquired, and of course I nodded my head. These were moments of great sadness that have stayed with me the passed 60 years.

Sadness lay everywhere. Few people were untouched by the war. Along with many other children I was hemmed in by the fact of death. Death after all formed the daily news on the BBC. It was familiar to all. Day after day sailors, soldiers and airmen together with civilians were dying. As children we realised that natural deaths of older neighbours still occurred as of course they would without the war. It became a habit of some children to visit the homes affected in this way. In these visits we children were welcomed, usually by elderly widows, warmly, though of course sadly:

VISITING DEATHS

Visiting deaths was a sore duty:
The boy I was witnessed whiteness
Of forehead, and small room quietness,
In those lyings-in. Each sad, lost beauty,
Each old indignity of walk,
As all that diffidence in talk,
Lay arrested by death’s pity.

Others joined me in visiting death,
And all the still of death: the wood,
The lawn, those whispering heads, life’s blood
Now fixing. My life’s morning earth
Was shared by death, and by death’s night air.
Some mourners urged their dead to wear
Defiant smiles on tauts of mouth.

In my goings about the hilly borough —Morley was quite often said to have seven hills, “Like Rome” someone said — I was often joined by other boys. Our best “calls” happened to be wherever we were best received. The men at the bobbin works were friendly, and so was Mr Zachariah Bennet, the undertaker. We often watched him polishing a coffin lid or writing an invoice in copperplate. The letterer, in Bruntcliffe Lane, might be welcoming or he might not. If we boys asked serious questions and sat or stood still, we were tolerated. Since he quite often happened to be carving a name we recognised on a stone, we were able to talk to him about that person. Yet we were only able to speak to him between hammer blows. For some reason we valued his words greatly. His occupation was a lonely one, though, and if a wind was blowing, the stone dust often blew into our eyes:

SOMETIMES I WATCHED THE LETTERER

Sometimes I watched the letterer cut
The names of the dead in stone,
Their dates, and if they’d lie alone:
Dusts were sifted out of fine grooves, but
The letterer chiselled them to wind.
Winds often blow those dusts to mind

He’d sit between two small crosses among
Cherubs and angels, once by a stone
Bird held by a child of stone,
And chisel out dad names. The long
Dead awaited each new arrest.
He told me, once, whose names might last.

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