Читать книгу Pitfalls of Memory - Peter Milward - Страница 8

Sadly, the war put paid to our holiday excursions to the South coast. It was declared a Danger Zone, and what were now called “pill-boxes” – in continuation to the Martello towers of the Napoleonic wars – were installed along the two lines of the North and South Downs, to repel an expected German invasion. It was, to be precise, at 11 o’clock on September 3, 1939, that the Prime Minister, the “umbrella man”, Mr Neville Chamberlain, announced Britain’s declaration of war against Germany owing to the German invasion of Poland. Before, on his return from Munich the previous year, he had seemed so sure of peace as a result of his discussions with Hitler, and on alighting from his plane he had waved his rolled umbrella as a sign of his accord with Hitler. But even then he was derided in the press and even in song as “the umbrella man”. And now that derision was abundantly justified. No sooner had he finished his speech on the radio, than the sound of the first air-raid warning was heard, and we rushed with our recently issued gas-masks to our shelter beneath the stairs, where we waited in fear and trembling. But nothing happened. The all-clear was sounded, and we emerged from our shelter with feelings of relief. It had been a false alarm. It was because of an unidentified aircraft that had been spotted over the North Sea. That was all.

And that was all for the time being, as Hitler was preoccupied with his invasion of Poland, for which he had secured the cooperation of Stalin from Russia. Then it was Denmark, and then Norway, that claimed his aggressive attention. And then it was the turn of Belgium, to which he sent his troops so as to by-pass the Maginot Line in which the French had reposed their confidence. Then it was the end of Free France, as the French under Marshal Petain found they must needs submit to the overwhelming power of the Germans, while the British Expeditionary Force (or BEF for short) retreated to Dunkirk on the Belgian coast. There they were awaited by many ships to be evacuated in safety to England in what was called “the Miracle of Dunkirk”. They were a defenceless target to any German planes that might come and “strafe” them, but for some unexplained reason Hitler held back and allowed the English to return safely home. That was towards the end of May and the beginning of June 1940, when the whole BEF was ferried to safety, leaving only their larger equipment behind. And then, for us at home, the war began. As a boy of 13 when war had been declared, I had been impatient for something to happen, but to my chagrin, nothing happened – except in Poland and Scandinavia. But now at last my expectation was fulfilled.

First, there was the Battle of Britain, when Hitler required absolute control of the skies before launching his invasion of England. It was so thrilling. At that time the main aerodrome for the Royal Air Force (or RAF for short) was Croydon, to the South of Wimbledon, and so from Edge Hill we could command a good view of the battle. It was, I remember, a clear blue sky as the German fighters approached, and the British fighters took off to join them in countless skirmishes, all marked in thin white lines against the blue sky – lines going in and out, up and down, and some of them going all the way down to the earth, as plane after plane crashed. Were they German planes, we wondered, or our planes? But from the newspapers we learned that it had been a victory for our planes against the Germans, and so the feared invasion had been staved off, at least for the time being. What was more, in the midst of it all, my youngest brother John was born in the Nelson Hospital, and from then onwards, with a baby in the house, he was like a gleam of sunshine – more than the proverbial silver lining – amid the dark clouds of war. For by now I had become less enthusiastic about the war, having come face to face with the reality.

From those days of gloom, two events stand out in my memory, associated with the IDs (for Identifying Documents) we were expected to carry wherever we went away from home. Twice I was challenged for my ID by two soldiers, one of whom required my document, while the other pointed his rifle at me. But on neither occasion was I in possession of the document. And on both occasions the soldiers had to let me go. It was too much trouble for them to punish me, a mere schoolboy. In any case, if I had been a genuine spy, I would surely have been provided with such a document. So my very lack of it was a sure proof that I was harmless. In the first case, I was by myself, at the corner turning into Worple Road. In the second case, I had gone on a ramble with Tiny through the Surrey countryside, and we were passing by an army camp – and that was considered more suspicious. Still we were waved on, with a caution.

On yet another occasion, I was returning by myself from the midnight Mass on Christmas, in the darkness of Worple Road. It was the time when I was learning German from Fr Brannigan, and among the many songs he taught us was Haydn’s Deutschland uber Alles, which had become the German national anthem. For all its dark associations with the enemy, I was fond of the tune, which had originally been used for the Latin hymn Tantum Ergo, which we would sing at Benediction, to other tunes. Accordingly, under cover of darkness I sang the tune to my heart’s content, with the German words. Again, I might with more justice have been arrested as a German spy, but there was no one around to arrest me. Only, I might well have given scandal to the neighbors, not to mention irritation at this disturbance of their slumbers!

Of more serious concern to me and the family was the bombing of London and other cities from late 1941 onwards. Wimbledon wasn’t of any strategic importance to the German bombers, being no more than a leafy suburb of the city. But it was in the line of their nightly sorties to the North of the Thames, as the river provided them with a clear outline for the correct positioning of themselves. So almost every night from 6 o’clock onwards we would listen to the sound of the diesel engines invading the night, while an anti-aircraft gun on the tracks of the railway not so far from our house drew down not a few bombs. Once or twice it was even successful in downing one or other of the planes. Whenever one came down, even at some distance from the house, it made a real thud, giving us the sensation of an earthquake – to which in England we were comparatively unaccustomed. Whenever I went to bed in the boys’ room on the upper floor, I would stand at the window looking up at the night sky and enjoying this new kind of fireworks display, without feeling any sense of danger. The following morning on our way to school we would pick up numerous pieces of shrapnel that had fallen from the anti-aircraft shells – making it dangerous for anyone to go outside without a helmet. As a result many boys amassed quite an impressive museum of shrapnel or bits and pieces of bombs.

Also on waking up in the morning, we might see the Eastern sky, in the direction of London, lit up with a rosy red color, as described by Homer in his Iliad, “rhododaktulos eos”, or the rosy-fingered dawn. Only, this was no natural color, but the result of the bombing of London. One morning it was particularly impressive, when the target had been a paper factory between Wimbledon and London, but then it looked as if the whole of London was engulfed in flames – as in the Great Fire of 1666. On the other hand, not a few bombs happened to fall on and around Wimbledon – as often as not when the bombers found they still had a few bombs left over from their principal raids, and then they would drop them on us before returning home. Our house in Devas Road seemed to enjoy the divine protection, as we were ringed by a radius of some 200 meters where bombs had fallen, but none inside that charmed circle. That was because every night we would pray to Our Lady of Quito and St Jude as “patron of lost causes” – also as an apostle who might be less preoccupied than his fellow apostles with the prayers of the faithful. There was one bomb in particular which had made a direct hit on the College, and for which I was particularly grateful, as it had fallen on the gymnasium, and I wasn’t so fond of gymnastics.

But then there were the flying bombs that were specially unnerving, as they made a zooming sound up till the moment their engine was automatically stopped, and then they would fall. One such bomb happened to come over the church just at the time when the priest was giving an eloquent sermon on death, on the text, “You know not the day nor the hour.” Just then the engine stopped, and the preacher had no further need of eloquence. The bomb had taken the words out of his mouth. But by that time I had taken the road to safety in North Wales, where the Jesuits had their novitiate at St Beuno’s College. And thereby, as we say, hangs my further tale.