A schoolboy's view of World War Two

This story was written/submitted to the People's War site by Ciara Garland from Reading on behalf of Mr James Rumsey and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr James Rumsey fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

A schoolboy’s view of World War Two

He’s gone!
I can remember the very first day of the war. I was seven years old and I lived in Shinfield, Reading. Right opposite our back garden were the playing fields with the big shute, climbing frames, etc… The park keeper would not even let you put your hands on the bars let alone climb on them. On the day he was ‘called up’ (to join the services), on the first day of the war all us kids went mad, playing like monkeys all over the shute. I can see it now; I sat on the top of the shute and shouted, “He’s gone! He’s gone!”

The Blitzing of Britain…
n 1941, standing by the garden shed you could see the orange glow in the sky from the blitz. My old man would pat me on the head and say, “Son, we are pretty safe here, but London’s getting it again tonight. Of course, in those days there was no television and not even colour pictures in the newspapers, only black and white in the Daily Herald. Even in that not much that was happening was shown and I was too young to go to the pictures on my own so I didn’t get to see it on the newsreels either so to me, a young boy of about nine, it didn’t seem that real or particularly frightening.
Of course, during the war Britain never went back to Greenwich Mean Time (G.M.T) so that meant we had double summertime. The clocks were put on two hours so that we had longer days and so no need to put our lights on. (We were not allowed to show a chink of light obviously to the enemy, which may have been lurking above.) This was great for us kids as we could all play out ‘til eleven in the summer! You would come out of school at 4 pm and it would only really be a baking hot 2pm!

Cowboys and Indians…
It was the beginning of 1942 and I was about nine then. One Sunday afternoon a bunch of friends and myself were playing in the road just before we went in for our dinner. There must have been around 15 -20 of us. All of a sudden, I looked up and saw this plane. An enemy plane. I shouted, “Look! - There’s a German Plane!” It was so low you could see the pilot. So we just stood there watching it. Never gave a thought that it might be dangerous to do so. To us it was like modern-day ‘Cowboys and Indians’! We all watched as he circled around the top of Shinfield twice and he just flew off. Never thought of the risk we were taking out in full view of him like that. It was good fun to young kids. Just like a big game!

Another thing that I remember is that the sirens went off once. This was early in the war and I said to my mum, “We ought to go to the shelter with everyone else!” The shelter was up at my school (Shinfield) about 150 yards away from our house. So we went down into this shelter, which absolutely reeked of wet, stale concrete. It was disgusting. It was so unpleasant in there that when we came out again my Mum said; “We are never going in there again! If Mr Hitler is going to kill us he is going to kill us in our own beds!” From then on if the sirens went off we never got up. We just stayed tucked up in bed!

Much Ado for Nothing…
I then went from Shinfield School to the Alfred Sutton School. It was a laugh for us kids there, because whenever the sirens went off the teachers would get all of us to put gas masks on and march in three lines from the school, down the Wokingham road, across into the park and by the time we reached the shelters the ‘all clear’ was going! The ‘all clear’ went off once and we had barely even got there! So there really wasn’t much point in bothering!

Scrabbling for shrapnel…
Another time it was about 1942/43 and there was a big searchlight battery where Asda is now. It was all fields then and one night they caught a German bomber in the crossbeams. He couldn’t get out so he tried to bomb down the searchlight which luckily he missed by about 50 yards. It blew a big crater out which later all of us kids went diving into it looking for ‘treasure’! I found a very jagged piece of shrapnel, which was about 8”x10”. I climbed out of the pit, which was about 10/12 feet deep in my short trousers and was confronted by another kid that wanted my shrapnel. We started fighting over it (dropping it, of course) and were so engrossed in this that we failed to noticed a third boy pick it up and make off with it!

Reading Bombed…
I know the exact time the bombings occurred; between 2pm and 2:15pm on the 10th of February 1943. I know this because it was my birthday and I had conned my mother into my getting off going to school that day (said I felt ill). We had just had lunch and I remember she had just gone upstairs when all of a sudden she shouts down at me; “Will you stop banging those doors!” So I said; “I’m not banging anything! It’s nothing to do with me!” It was the bombs. The Germans were bombing Reading.
The first bomb caught St. Lawrence’s Church. The second hit the corner of Minster Street, which used to be ‘Welsteads’ and now is The Oracle (where the coffee shops are). The third one hit a place that was called ‘The People’s Pantry’ on Friar Street and it killed thirty-four people. The kiddie from next-door to me who I used to play with was down there that day with his mother. She said to him; “Oh Terry, I really fancy a cup of tea, lets go into ‘The People’s Pantry’” He said, “No. I want go home!” It was decided that he would go home and so she went into the café. Of course the bomb hit then and sadly she was killed.
The next bomb that struck was farther down Minster St. The bomber was lost so he dropped his whole stash of bombs onto Reading. He was shot down and caught before he could reach the coast though.

All eyes on the skies…
Woodley Beacon was the place where all the bombers joined up. We watched when a thousand bomber raids were going over to Germany in 1944. The sky would be black for about half an hour with the bombers all headed southeast . I remember the sound they made. It wasn’t a thunderous noise, more a continuous droning one. I didn’t hear them return as it was during the early hours of the morning and I was nodding off by then.

A P.O.W. and a crafty plan…
When I was 13, towards the end of 1944, us kids were all stacking the sheaves of corn for the farmer over in Mortimer when one of the Italian Prisoners of War (P.O.W.) from a nearby camp, who was working with us, suddenly says to us, “You kids want to burn all this corn!” They wanted us to burn the crops so that it would a signal for enemy aircraft to bomb the area. I told him what I thought of him and went and said to the farmer, “That one there told us to burn the crops!” The farmer said, “Alright son, don’t worry about it, I deal with him.” Which I am quite sure he did!

A day to play…
I can remember V.E day. (May 1945) I was at school, it was the afternoon, and we told that the Germany had surrendered to the Allies in Europe. All of us were sent home. There certainly was to be no more schooling that afternoon. There was too much celebrating to be done!

One of many changes after the War ended was that all the male teachers that had been away with the services returned to replace the lady teachers we were all used to. Suddenly, the classroom became a far more disciplined place!

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