War as a child

Early history

I was born in 1937 at Newhaven
Both sides my family owned a building firm that was much the same as most jobbing builders at that time. They did everything, painting, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry and even funerals.

As a young child I always had the run of the workshops.

When the war started my grandfather was left to run the business with the older members of staff, whilst all the others went off to do their bit in the forces.

My father went into bomber command.

My first real recollections of war was the aftermath of the Dunkirque evacuation. We lived on the main road from Newhaven to Brighton and I can still well remember the troops coming home.

War is a terrible thing but for 4 year old its all very exciting. There were tanks, soldiers, landing craft and dozens of Naval ships in the harbour. One of my grandfather’s was the bridgeman and ferryman at the harbour and whereas it was a restricted area for most, I often used to go with him when he toured the ships collecting requisition papers for victuals.

He was the equivalent to a day nursery for me, and my mother often left me with him while she served in the NAFFI at the Harbour Station.

My father proved not to be a very good air crew because at that time bombers did not use oxygen as a rule and he had a heart condition that meant he would black out when a certain altitude was reached a minor problem that he has passed on to his son.

He was then posted to coastal command at Tangmere which had suddenly risen in importance as a fighter station.

Whilst there, in his spare time he was still helping to keep our building firms going by drawing plans for submission to the council etc. and while he was drawing in the officers mess one day the CO came in and asked what he was doing.

This was very good timing for my father because the CO had just received orders to appoint a Clerk of Works and to upgrade the airfield to a large degree with concrete runways and more permanent buildings. Up until then it had been a grass strip and tents for accommodation.

This is where things took off for me. As with many wars there were camp followers, so my mother and I joined their numbers. My father had been appointed the Clerk of Works for the whole of Southern Command and was allowed to live away from base. He arranged accommodation for us all at Queen Street in Littlehampton where we shared with a lady who had five children. It was a little crowded but for me great fun. I was just one more child in the family.
My father went on to develop the airfield at Ford and several other emergency landing strips in the area until one day he came home at lunchtime and said that tomorrow we were all going to Scotland. Unfortunately we couldn’t travel with him since he was flying there but he had arranged for us to go by train.

This I think is where my love of trains and steam engines started. How the railways kept going despite bombing still amazes me. The trip to Forres was not without its problems. Firstly we missed our connection in London and my mother had to scrounge overnight accommodation for us at the RTO(Rail Transport Office) where we literally slept under the counter in the front office. Then somewhere north of Crewe our train was shunted into a siding for 2 days. The reason for this was never discovered but it was here that the British stiff upper came into play. This particular train had no corridor or toilet so other arrangements had to be made. Those who had food shared it with those who didn’t and on the whole considering the circumstances it was quite a jolly party atmosphere.

Forres

At Forres my father had been able to get us lodgings on a small farm where I was in my element. They has cart horses and pigs, chickens and goats, and being summer there was the visiting traction engine which was brought in to do the threshing. The farmer also used to go to Lossiemouth to buy fish direct off the boats which he would sell around the town from his pony cart. He also used to smoke his own kippers, and that smell always reminds me of those times.

From Forres we went to Wick and then back to Ayr then one day my father announced that we were all going overseas.
We boarded the ship at Liverpool and eventually landed at Ramsey on the Isle of Man It still seems strange to me that there was not much evidence of rationing there and food did not seem to be a problem. We used to spend sunny days on the beach at Douglas but much to my disgust we had to clear the beach at 4.00pm every afternoon. All the hotels along the seafront were used to house German prisoners of war and at 4.00pm they were let out for exercise on the beach.

We had only been on the Isle of Mann for four months when the upgrading
of Ronaldsway airfield had had been completed. They had been using it for test flights of new aircraft and in particular to test a new clockwork bomb site. This bomb site was not a success though. Instead of bombing a float out to sea they somehow managed to kill three cows. The farmer was compensated though and the officers mess (and accompanying families) were not short of prime steak for several weeks.

On the question of rationing I sidetrack slightly. As many of you will remember rationing was extremely tight and certain things were very hard to get. However if you knew the right people you could usually get most things from the Black Market. My father however went one step better and managed to get us as much sugar as we could handle…and some to spare, quite legally.
At that time the firm employed an old bricklayer who was also a bee keeper. Now for those of you who don’t know too much about the subject I will explain the advantages. Bees make honey to see them over the winter period and if a bee keeper wants that honey in order to maintain the colony he must replace the honey he takes with something else. The alternative was liquid syrup made from Sugar. My father set up a honey farm whilst on leave, which his brick layer maintained. He then claimed his sugar allowance which was delivered in CWT bags from Tate and Lyle, so for a few years we didn’t take too much honey so we didn’t give the bees too much sugar.

On another occasion when we kept some hives on a pig farm one of the pigs knocked over a hive and the bees stung the unfortunate to death. At that time meat was on ration but the farmer told the food ministry that it had died of natural causes and had been disposed of. In actual fact my father did a sugar deal with the farmer and we finished up with half a pig. A real luxury then. Children today cannot have any idea cannot have any idea of the restrictions placed upon our parents by food rationing.

This was all very well for a time until he came home on leave and found that the bricklayer had been ill and hadn’t done some maintenance on one of the hives, so he set to and decided to do the job himself. He had the full gear, white boiler suit, gloves, veil and smoker, however he forgot to put cord around his trouser legs. This resulted in me finding him up to his waist in a rain water butt desperately trying to remove bees from his nether regions. The bees went shortly after that.

One year I was given a rabbit for my birthday which I named Lucky. As with most things after a few months I tired of feeding and cleaning out his hutch, then one day he was missing. We had a lovely meal that day, and I later found out that Lucky had not been so lucky after all.

One thing that always sticks in my mind was how well children of all service personnel were treated on the bases. There was always a party on somewhere and most bases had a cinema where children’s films were screened.

From the Isle of Man we went to a tiny village called Cartertion, and at the nearby airfield at Bampton the first experiments with military gliders was taking place. To me it seemed incredible to see these monsters noiselessly coming into land.

Our lodgings were in a very old house with an equally old landlady called Mrs Nibbs. Her husband had died in the first war and I don’t think the house had had any maintenance since then. It was infested with rats. You could hear them scuttling about between the walls day and night. Holes used to appear in the skirting on a daily basis, but all Mrs Nibbs did was to fill them up with newspaper. I think the rats took this to be room service because they doubtless used newspaper as nesting materials.

The war had now escalated and the time came when my father was posted to first Iceland then Italy where we obviously couldn’t follow. So it was back to Newhaven and the family.

Straffing

The fort at Newhaven had been constructed to defend the harbour from seaward invasion and was bristling with guns. However on one occasion when my grandfather was looking after me six German fighters came down the river valley from the direction of Lewes and started to strafe the shipping in the harbour. Their altitude made it impossible for the fort artillery to open up but all the shipping in the harbour suddenly came to life and there was bedlam. Only one plane was shot down though and the damage was not great in the harbour.

Our house was surrounded by houses that had been requisitioned to accommodate Canadian soldiers, and the officers mess was just up the road. Here I made the acquaintance of the cook and was soon accepted as a member of the mess. The harbour was seething with activity in preparation for the Dieppe Landing.

One night there was a great commotion from men and bren gun carriers and then silence. The following morning was eerily quiet and it was then that we discovered that all the men from the nearby houses had gone on the Dieppe raid. Few came back.

Over the war years when we were back with the family at Newhaven we had a number of commando’s billeted on us. Some became good friends and one even became my sisters god father after the war. Another returning from the far East looked us up and presented me, an 8 year old, with a full size Samurai sword which mysteriously disappeared shortly afterwards. One of these men used to go missing for weeks on end and we never knew when to expect him back, however when he eventually turned up he always brought a large stock of French Cheese with him. We later heard that he was a resistance leader and was eventually caught and executed.

When eventually the Normandy Landings came about the things that sticks in my mind most are the vast number of aircraft that came across, and then the V1 doodlebugs which used to be intercepted by the local Spitfire Squadron, turned around by nudging the wings, and sent back out to sea.

Eventually war ended, my father returned to the family business, I was sent off to boarding school, and things got back to normal.

War is a terrible thing and I am thankful that none of my children have been directly involved in one. However I must say that it brings out the best in people. There was far more of a sharing attitude than there is today. People went out of their way to help their fellow human beings even if they hadn’t been introduced. From a child’s perspective these were some of the happiest days of my life and the freedom that I had to go out into the woods and fields unaccompanied is something that today’s children would be very envious of.

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