Читать книгу Braver Men Walk Away - Peter Gurney - Страница 7
ОглавлениеThere would have been no reason to target Farmer Bowker’s bicycle had Farmer Bowker not gone on the attack first. Shooting people just for pinching a few apples was a bit much. It wasn’t as if anyone had been doing anything seriously wrong.
Jimmy and I had gone in quietly, carefully, weaving this way and that amongst the fruit trees. The essence of scrumping was speed: you picked the apples as quickly as you could then stuffed them inside your open-necked shirt; your trouser belt or waistband prevented them from falling out. When the front of your shirt was full, you pushed the apples around to your back, then filled the front again. Jimmy and I prided ourselves on our expertise but when we’d completed our harvest Farmer Bowker suddenly materialized, shouting, and brandishing a twelve-bore.
Running away isn’t easy when you look like a Michelin Man; somehow we made it back to the boundary, bouncing and ballooning along until we reached the old wooden fence. We were astride the crosspiece when the shotgun blast split the air and pellets from the cartridge actually peppered the backs of our shirts and the apples within.
It was, we later agreed, an act of war. For honour to be satisfied some response would have to be made. Unfortunately when you’re eleven years old your options for wreaking vengeance on a rural warlord are limited. So we decided to attach some rockets to Farmer Bowker’s bicycle, fire them, and send the contraption hurtling across the countryside.
The idea was mooted at a council of war called in Stewart Smith’s garden shed. We were, in the main, children of the camp; army kids whose home, Netheravon, housed the Small Arms School. To the north, the camp was bounded by the Salisbury-Netheravon road. Accommodation consisted of two terraces of brick-built houses, one brick-built detached, and a long row of corrugated iron huts (which, according to my mother, constituted the most uncomfortable married quarters in Britain). The operational centre lay to the east of the married quarters area. To the south stood the ammunition storage zone on ground which shelved gradually away towards the banks of the River Avon.
The camp took its name from the Wiltshire village a mile and a half away. Salisbury Plain, the vast swathe of chalk downs, spread out all around, westwards to Warminster and Westbury, north towards Devizes and the Vale of Pewsey, east towards Andover and south to Amesbury and Stonehenge. It was a wide landscape, and an ancient landscape, and a perfect place to launch a rocket-propelled bicycle.
As befitted children of military households, the operation unfolded with military precision. Intelligence was vital. The girls came in useful here: a small group of them set about a discreet surveillance of Farmer Bowker. In the meantime we attended to the fine detail. The calculation of velocities and payloads was, to us, not an unfamiliar activity. This was an era when boys usually spent their time assembling complete sets of Turf cigarette cards, albums of exotic stamps and lists of Black Five engine numbers; our interests lay elsewhere.
In my case, a preoccupation with bombs and rockets was an inevitable consequence of growing up in Netheravon. Safety procedures, though learned by heart by everyone on the camp, were rarely observed: unused ammunition was frequently left behind after training in the weapons pits. To a small boy the discovery of abandoned .303 cartridges was akin to finding El Dorado; I would break them open, extract the cordite, and use this to manufacture bangers, crackers and rockets.
More useful skills were also acquired, including the accurate recognition of ‘blind’ 2-inch mortar illuminating bombs (a blind is the term for any filled projectile – that is, one containing high explosive, smoke or illuminating composition – which has failed to function as intended on impact or arrival at the target). The mortar illuminating bombs contained a flare attached to a parachute; when functioning correctly, the flare would ignite and was ejected at the apex of the bomb’s trajectory. Suspended from the parachute, the flare would then descend gently to earth. The parachutes were much sought after by camp children for their high barter value; even adults found uses for the cotton fabric.
But this type of munition had a high failure rate: bombs frequently fell back to earth with flare and parachute still intact because of malfunctions of the ignition and ejection system. If you knew where to look you could soon find them, for although the bombs usually buried themselves in the ground, their tail units remained visible. To a child this was a valuable but potentially deadly harvest: many hours of careful study were needed to learn the difference between useless smoke bombs, the much-prized illuminating bombs, and the lethal unexploded HE (high explosive) bombs.
As time went by I progressed to larger and deadlier bombs and became adept at removing the safety mechanisms from the fuzes of various projectiles so that they would explode when dropped on to hard ground (usually by suspending a prepared bomb from a piece of rope and then arranging for the rope to burn through).
My confidence grew, but others, particularly my mother, were not so sanguine: relaxing quietly one evening at home, she heard a heavy thump from my bedroom, hastened to investigate, and discovered me sitting on my bed practising catches with a Mills hand grenade.
‘Peter! What on earth d’you think you’re doing?’
‘Me?’ I stared blankly. ‘I’m not doing anything. I was just throwing this up and down.’
‘But it’s a hand grenade!’
‘I know.’ Realization dawned belatedly. ‘Oh. Sorry about the noise. I just dropped it.’
‘You just dropped it?’
‘It’s all right, it’s not dangerous or anything.’ I smiled the smile that children display to reassure adults ignorant of the finer points of modern technology. ‘Look, you can see it’s empty …’
By way of confirmation, I began to unscrew the bottom of the grenade, certain that this informative demonstration would calm as well as clarify.
‘Stop it!’ Mother moved nearer, angry now. ‘Get this thing out of here right now! I am not having a hand grenade going off in my married quarters.’
I took the grenade away and reflected, not for the first time, that though parents were all right, they were not a lot of fun.
Fun, of course, was what life was all about, and explosions were caused for the sheer joy of it; it was not our intention to harm either people or property. This meant we couldn’t risk hurting Farmer Bowker, and we decided to concentrate our attention on his bicycle.
But theory was one thing and practice another. As the senior explosives expert in the group, it fell to me to construct several home-made rockets and attach them to a bicycle generously loaned by Jimmy. But though the rockets fired satisfactorily, the bicycle refused to move: we simply hadn’t enough motive power to shift its mass.
This was particularly irritating because the girls had finished target reconnaissance: they reported that Farmer Bowker, who worked a section of land between the camp and the Larkhill firing range, regularly at the same time on the same day of each week cycled out to the edge of the range, left his machine behind, and went off shooting with his twelve-bore.
The operation had now taken on a painful urgency. Not only was it necessary to redeem our honour; there was the imminent prospect of being humiliated by a gang of girls. Problems were compounded because there was no guarantee that you would find what you needed when scavenging around the base.
But then we discovered a large cylindrical device out on the ranges: 4 feet 6 inches long and 3 inches in diameter, it was marked TAIL PROPELLING U3 ROCKET. It was fitted with a replica concrete warhead and appeared to be electrically initiated: two wires trailed from the venturi. Although at first sight this looked a little daunting, we’d all seen smoke generators with their attendant wires and had watched them being set off; we trusted that the rocket’s ignition system would function in similar fashion.
We repatriated the U3 and lugged it across five miles of undulating downs. We hid it as near to the target location as possible, covered it with loose earth and leaves, then trudged back home on aching legs.
The day of the attack dawned like any other summer’s morning, the sun climbing lazily up from the horizon, limning the dense stands of beech and horse chestnut cradling the camp. We were already in position when Farmer Bowker arrived. I peered out from between strands of meadow grass, feeling the hardness of the ground, listening to the drumming of my pulse, thinking that at any moment Bowker would hear the same tattoo and come to investigate. But after setting his bicycle down he merely hefted the shotgun and strode off towards the ranges.
One minute. Two minutes. And then we sprang from cover, dragged the U3 from its hiding place and carried it over to the bicycle. Eager hands steadied the frame while the rocket was attached, nose pointing out beyond the handlebars and wicker carrier basket, tail unit resting on the rear carrier tray. Within seconds it was lashed into place front and back; extra cable that had earlier been connected to the original venturi wires was run out, snaking back across the grass to a firing position we’d established behind a nearby concrete pillbox.
The original plan – to launch the rocket at the moment when Farmer Bowker reappeared on the scene – had had to be scrapped because none of us were sure whether we’d mastered the technique of electric ignition. If the thing didn’t go off, then we’d either have to run away and abandon our prized weapon or retrieve it but risk being shot at in the process. We therefore thought it best to push the ends of the cable into the sockets of our army radio battery and see what would happen.
I don’t know what we were expecting, but the explosion wasn’t like anything we could have imagined. The rocket ignited in a great gout of flame, made the most appalling – and frightening – noise, and then screamed off into the sky, taking the bike with it. Thrown completely off balance by the unorthodox load, the U3’s flight path abruptly degenerated into a series of agonized bounds. It managed to clear about 200 yards before smacking into the earth, shedding large chunks of the bicycle on impact, then took off into space at breathtaking speed only to screech back down and shed a few bits more. Again it bounced up, and again it crashed down, until like some strange incandescent kangaroo it finally disappeared from sight in the heart of the ranges, pieces of bicycle spraying out in its wake.
There was a moment of dumbstruck silence – I think it was silence, we were all so deafened we couldn’t have heard anything anyway. Then slowly, hesitantly, we came out from behind the pillbox to survey the launch site. Where the bicycle had stood only moments before there was now just a patch of dark scorched earth. Wisps of smoke hung languidly in the air.
Later, I confessed to my father. There was no alternative: there were bound to be questions about a low-flying bicycle suddenly exploding across the Larkhill firing range. Someone would have to carry the can and, as I was the ringleader, it was me.
To my surprise, my father literally fell about laughing. He went on laughing for what seemed like a very long time. And then he gave me an Almighty Bollocking, Grade I, concluding it by saying he would visit Farmer Bowker and offer both explanation and financial compensation.
I was amazed. ‘You’re going to pay for it?’
‘No. You are.’
So my father regaled Farmer Bowker with a lengthy and apologetic tale of a mishap during manoeuvres; and I found myself having to meet the cost of restitution by lifting sugar beet for countless days and weekends afterwards.
According to my Birth Certificate, I was born on 12 December 1931 in Greenwich. According to my grandmother, I was born on 12 December 1931 in Limehouse. There was a world of difference between the two boroughs: trim, leafy Greenwich, a respectable suburb on the south bank of the Thames; noisy, dilapidated Limehouse, almost directly opposite on the river’s north bank: a teeming outpost of London’s East End. My mother registered my place of birth at her parents’ address: in an era when respectability was all, Greenwich clearly made for a superior pedigree.
I remember neither Greenwich nor Limehouse from my earliest years. What I do remember are the camps, the succession of married quarters we inhabited as we followed my father’s regiment from one barracks to another.
Father was an infantry soldier with the Royal Hampshire Regiment. Slim, athletic, and of average height, he had dark brown wavy hair and a moustache as trim and as rakish as Douglas Fairbanks Junior’s. He called my mother ‘kid’; she called him ‘Ed’. She seemed to me to be tall in comparison to other mothers, full-figured, very upright of carriage and bearing. She always walked with head held high, her movements imbued with a dignified gracefulness.
Despite its unsettled nature, family life in the different camps and barracks was probably as good as anywhere else in 1930s England, especially as Father was only away for short periods. Even one of the furthest duties, Palestine, did not seem to require a prolonged absence.
Our nomadic existence eventually ended when we moved to our tin hut at Netheravon. The army proclaimed them to be the latest thing in corrugated iron, but they were ugly and flimsy. Thankfully, in time we progressed to better things: first a bigger tin hut with three bedrooms, and finally to a house in one of the brick-built terraces.
In its early years Netheravon was the army’s Machine Gun School and, later, the Support Weapons Wing of the Small Arms School Corps. Finally it became the Infantry Heavy Weapons Wing, a centre of specialist activity and a tight-knit community itself.
Once we had settled into Netheravon I was sent to Figheldean Infants, a two-roomed schoolhouse ruled by a small and bespectacled lady called Miss Berlin. She had a presence that belied her size and a speed that denied her age. Her energy did wonders for one’s concentration; the camp children and the village children were united in absorbing the four Rs of reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic and retribution. The school lay two miles from the camp; we walked there through field and woodland and over the three bridges that spanned the River Avon and two of its tributaries.
Spring gave new impetus to what we called the Big River, the Small River and the Stream. The Avon quickened its pace, racing with us as we sped along the riverbank in search of new adventures.
In summer we chased each other round narrow grassy verges of wheat-filled fields then flopped breathlessly down, air rifle in hand, to wait for rabbits to pop their disbelieving heads from their burrows. We swaggered home with our treasure for ‘the pot’ much to the delight of our mothers.
By autumn the rabbits had learned to keep their heads down. Instead we turned our attention, and our rifles, to vermin: rats and grey squirrels whose tails brought us a one penny bounty.
Winter had little impact on our carefree lives. We cheered when snow fell hoping only that it would fall long and fast enough to leave a worthy toboggan run. It crunched underfoot as we tramped to school with light hearts and snowballs flying past our ears. Christmas came, and Christmas went, and the seasons unfolded around Figheldean, a picture-book village in an enchanted landscape.
Eventually I transferred to senior school at Netheravon, a brief and featureless sojourn that ended when I passed the entrance exam to Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury. This, because it was on the register of public schools, greatly pleased my mother; it demonstrated the kind of scholastic progress to be expected of a child of Greenwich.
Salisbury was almost fifteen miles from Netheravon. Unfortunately the only means of getting there was the eight o’clock bus, a public transport renowned more for the attractiveness of its rural route than the accuracy of its time-keeping. I so often missed morning service in the school chapel that Mother began to wonder if the Wilts & Dorset Omnibus Company was seriously intent upon turning her son into a heretic.
Classes at Bishops ran only from 9.10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Such was the intensity of the teaching regime that to be even a few minutes late was to be left like a runner at the starting block while the rest of the field forged far ahead. The school day was so severely truncated because Bishops had to accommodate both its own intake and another from Portsmouth, boys who slipped into our desks in the afternoons (what they did in the mornings was and remains a mystery to me). Displaced pupils from a city under attack from the Luftwaffe, they learned in one shift and we in the other.
For war now raged, a war that was changing everything, yet which at its outbreak had meant surprisingly little to the children of the camp. The summer of ’39 had been like all other summers; the world of the adult and the world of the child had continued to maintain their separate orbits. There was much to do, even on wet days, for that was when we gathered together to discuss future projects that usually never amounted to anything or to plan tree houses that most impressively did.
With the rain beating down outside it was a good time to resort to conventional pursuits, to barter carefully hoarded copies of comics such as the Hotspur and the Rover, to entertain each other with silly impressions of Tommy Handley and Dick Barton. When the sun shone again we were back outdoors, playing football according to rules that were few and simple: stay within the lines and don’t hit anybody.
Though outdoor life was preferable to indoor life, of all the pleasures of that era, one was arguably supreme: going to the pictures, either at the camp or at RAF Netheravon, a three-mile walk away. The RAF had a plush and proper affair with pull-down seats, a projector that always worked and a twice-weekly programme change. By contrast our cinema existed more in spirit than substance; a giant Nissen hut normally used for lectures and training sessions, it offered but one film a week on one day a week, though disconcertingly rarely on the same day each week because screenings were scheduled around camp exercises. The screen flickered and shimmered and frequently managed to do no more than depict grainy white blobs against an uncertain background to the accompaniment of an equally shaky soundtrack. Intervals were frequent due to the primitive projection equipment: when a reel had to be changed, the film was stopped and the lights turned on while the projectionist frantically struggled with the spools and cogs. The film would frequently break and the ‘cinema’ erupt in a chorus of booing and catcalls.
The giant hut was cold, too, in spite of the two coal-fired stoves. A seat near either was to be desired, except on the occasion when someone threw a handful of 9mm cartridges into the fire and the things started popping and banging all over the place.
That summer slowly turned to autumn, and shadows lengthened early across the fields. My father was not in the British Expeditionary Force and thus remained at home; my sister Maureen, born in July 1936, had at last become interesting after what seemed an unending period of babyhood. Even the anticipated arrival of another baby sister or brother – I couldn’t have cared either way; all they did was make a lot of noise and demand a lot of attention – did nothing to undermine the serenity of family life. Days of laughter were followed by nights of content, and I slept unaware of faraway death. And then, one quiet afternoon, death was no longer so distant.
The purpose of the Small Arms School was to teach infantry men to use weapons other than the traditional rifle and bayonet. Because of the war everything was now geared to getting the maximum number trained in the shortest time possible.
Speed was all: out went the practised rituals of drill parades and kit inspections, in came a new urgency, an acceleration of tempo that achieved more yet overlooked much. Safety was no longer given the attention it required; though rules were not deliberately waived, the pressure on training schedules was such as to narrow the margin between discretion and disaster. That afternoon the margin narrowed fatally.
I was going to get some flour for my mother from the NAAFI, yet another of Netheravon’s ubiquitous tin huts with a canteen at one end and a shop at the other. The canteen was frequented by soldiers who could purchase everything they needed – beer, Blanco, shoelaces, cigarettes; the shop was more of a general store with a long counter, old-fashioned till and goods stocked on ceiling-high shelves. The place was popular with the thirty or so families quartered on the camp because prices were low, stock was reasonably comprehensive, and it saved you a two-mile hike to the nearest village shop.
That afternoon there was no reason to hasten, not with the sunlight still warm on the grass and the soldiers unwittingly providing an outdoor entertainment – a training session featuring the 29mm Spigot mortar, the unconventional ‘Blacker Bombard’.
A conventional weapon is aimed by sighting its barrel and firing. The propellant charge ignites and pushes against the base of the projectile which then travels up the barrel and flies away in the direction of the target. Unusually, the Blacker Bombard had a spigot instead of a barrel, a machined steel rod inserted into the end of the projectile’s tail tube. The propellant – a cordite charge – was contained in a cartridge at the inner end of the tube; on firing, a striker on the spigot would hit a percussion cap on the cartridge and ignite the propellant. Gases generated by the burning cordite would then force the projectile off the spigot and send it towards its intended destination. Lacking the heavy barrel and recoil mechanism of conventional weapons, the spigot type was much lighter and therefore much cheaper to manufacture. Although it also lacked range, it could accurately lob a 20-pound bomb containing 8 pounds of high explosive over a distance of around 450 yards.
I watched the soldiers as they formed a semicircle around the instructor and the Blacker Bombard. Voices carried clearly on a strengthening breeze. From their actions it seemed they were using a dummy mortar, one where both warhead and propellant were totally inert, rather than a practice mortar, where only the warhead is safe. Obviously they were rehearsing aiming and firing procedures; when they pulled the trigger, nothing would happen. The bomb was black and hooped with a yellow-painted ring. It was loaded on to the spigot. At the instructor’s command, the trigger was pressed.
From my vantage point on the perimeter grass I watched with disbelieving eyes as the bomb hurtled from its spigot, the crack of its cordite charge splitting the air. The dark, frantic blur struck one of the soldiers, and threw him aside like a rag doll. It careened off into another, shredding tunic and flesh as it tore out most of his chest. It felled a third victim, then veered away towards a nearby building, slammed against the wall, bounced back, rolled over and over and lay still.
The figures remained where they had fallen. The others stood in frozen profile, matchstick men pinned into place. Inert, incongruous, the bomb lay negligently on the grass; sunlight now added a paler stripe to its bulbous form. The breeze stirred the trees around me. Into a vision of searing lifelessness, horse chestnut leaves came fluttering down like ragged stars.
Eventually I moved away, bought the flour and walked slowly home, neither thinking nor feeling.
My mother chastised me for taking so long. She chastised me again later, when the news came out that I was the boy who had witnessed the accident, that day when a spigot mortar had been mistakenly loaded with a practice round.
We sat in the reverberating gloom of the Anderson shelter, Old Bill, my grandmother and me. The rubbery smell of gas masks mingled with the dank scent of moist cold earth. Another night raid was under way; the ground shook and shuddered as bombs rained down on both sides of the Thames.
Because my mother had thought it would be good for me to get away from the dangers of the camp, I had spent part of my school holiday at my grandparents’ home, arriving at roughly the same time as the Luftwaffe. Though no blame for this unfortunate coincidence could be attached to my mother, it seems strange that at a time when children were being sent out of London to safe havens throughout the English countryside, I should be evacuated from the countryside and packed off into the Blitz.
London had moved from peace to war with little fuss or drama, at a pace so gradual yet so remorseless that what was unreal on one day passed unremarked on the next. To a child it was very exciting: air raid wardens, black-out curtains, streets without railings, whistles and sirens in the night; and especially the aftermath of bombing, when spent cartridges and steel splinters from anti-aircraft shells could be collected and, best of all from my point of view, unexploded incendiary bombs hoarded for future use.
None of the names and places meant much to me, but my grandmother remembered the autumn of ’38: Hitler’s threat of war on 1 October if Czechoslovakia failed to return the Sudetenland, Chamberlain’s flights to Berchtesgaden and Bad Godesburg, the high anxiety of the weekend of 24 and 25 September, the dawn of Monday 26 September when the first sandbags appeared outside office buildings and posters printed in big black type advised of respirator distribution points (three sizes were available – large, medium and small; you were measured by voluntary workers who told you to take good care because each gas mask cost the Government two shillings and sixpence).
Everywhere, she recalled, Londoners had a new phrase: ‘Just in case’, taking comfort in the fact that what was being done was more of a precaution than a necessity. When the KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs were removed from Hyde Park that Monday, and civilian labourers arrived in shirtsleeves, braces and cloth caps to dig deep trenches, it was ‘just in case’. When keepers and hostesses were photographed at Regent’s Park Children’s Zoo shovelling sand into maize sacks the newspaper headlines said the same thing: JUST IN CASE. Even when a dozen stations on the London Underground simultaneously closed, everyone said it was ‘just in case’; a spokesman testified to the sudden discovery of an urgent need for unspecified ‘structural alterations’.
But then Chamberlain made a final visit to Hitler and returned from Munich on Friday 30 September with a copy of the pact which guaranteed that Britain and Germany would never again go to war. ‘I believe it is peace in our time,’ he said. ‘Go home and sleep quietly in your beds.’
And now here we were, in an air raid shelter in a back garden in Greenwich, my grandfather complaining in a voice heavy with irony about how good it was to be at home, sleeping quietly in our beds.
The darkness jarred again as something thudded near by. Bright light suddenly flooded the shelter and our shadows stood out in flickering relief. Grandmother pulled me to her, shouting: ‘It’s an incendiary!’
Grandfather glared at her. ‘I know, I know!’ Pugnaciously: ‘Stop yer yelling, will yer?’
‘Aren’t you going to do something?’
‘What, now?’ He looked at her as if she’d gone mad.
I stared from the one to the other, mesmerized by the sudden slanging match. The ground trembled again; sound came drumming as distant bombs fell. I was too old to be frightened but too young to appreciate what might happen next.
Grandmother stubbornly refused to yield. ‘You’ve got to put it out, right this minute!’
‘If you think I’m goin’ out there in this,’ he said, rather as one might point to the folly of setting forth in a rainstorm without an umbrella, ‘if you think –’
‘Oh I see, I see! Let’s all just sit here and wait for the next one to drop! You know very well they use incendiaries as markers. They can see our house clear as day now.’
A momentary pause, then: ‘Bloody Huns!’ and he clamped his bowler hat to his head and lunged outside.
We watched him from the shelter entrance, shovelling earth on to the blazing incendiary. The first shovelful made the thing erupt in a spectacular shower of sparks; like a figure from a surreal fantasy, he hopped this way and that, frantically brushing at his shirt and trousers, all the while keeping one hand clamped to his hat.
Old Bill’s bowler: the hat was inseparable from its owner. He wore it at breakfast and he wore it at suppertime and no one, not even the bloody Hun, was going to part him from it. In the neighbourhood he was regarded as a fierce old rogue, a description not entirely inappropriate. He was a self-employed plumber and used to bring home sections of lead piping which, for reasons never disclosed, he found it necessary to hide. By contrast, Grandmother was smaller, almost frail, yet each of them knew who ran the household, for her stubbornness usually defeated his bluster. If that failed, then downright guile was used.
‘They need help to clear up,’ she said, when one particular night raid had finally ended and volunteers were being sought in a door to door appeal.
‘They can manage without me,’ Old Bill said, shuffling deeper into his fireside chair. ‘Some of us ’ave already ’ad an ’ard day.’
Grandmother smiled sadly. ‘What a shame. They’ll be wanting all the able-bodied men they can find, down at Lovibonds.’
‘Lovibonds?’
‘Mmmm. The brewery. It’s had a direct hit.’
Old Bill briefly considered, then hauled himself out of the chair. ‘I’ll just get my coat,’ he said.
As the war years slowly passed, and the Luftwaffe ceased to threaten London’s skies, Greenwich became more and more a place for holidays, a time for staying at Grandfather’s side as he laboured in his workshop or, even better, for walking together along the riverside, watching the sailing barges beating up and down the Thames.
These holidays provided a welcome break from the rigours of school life at Bishop Wordsworth’s, and the interminable hours of homework. Scholastically, I was lazy; although I would eventually end up with an Oxford Schools Certificate, consistent underachievement disappointed both my teachers and my parents.
However, where explosives were concerned it was a different story. By now I was skilled in the manufacture of weapons from various spares left lying around the camp. The most common were 9mm Sten gun barrels, which when fixed into a standard 1-inch signal pistol barrel could be used as a single shot weapon. Unfortunately they only lasted for a few admittedly hair-raising rounds, after which the material holding the Sten gun barrel in position finally failed and blew the barrel out of the gun. I lost count of the number of such weapons I managed to fabricate; I’m told that one such gun, allegedly made by me, is today on display at a Wiltshire police college.
The war was bringing finer treasure, too, notably a crate of Maschinen Pistole 43s, a German assault rifle. A brand new weapon, its arrival for evaluation at Netheravon generated a flurry of interest that was not lost on the children of the camp.
Several instructors, including my father, had an MP 43, but no one worried about leaving the weapons lying round – what little ammunition existed for them was safely locked away in the stores and could only be drawn by authorized users. I decided to make some of my own.
It took time as well as practice but eventually I modified a couple of dozen conventional German rifle cartridges to suit the new weapon. Hopeful though not certain that the ammunition would work, I purloined Father’s MP 43 and then led two senior members of our gang out of the camp and across the Salisbury-Netheravon road to the firing ranges.
About 400 yards in we found a set of old trenches. We crouched down while I took aim and fired at a trench wall twenty feet away. Unfortunately, though the rifle worked perfectly, the rifleman did not: a child’s strength was no match for the weapon’s ferocious kickback. The barrel lifted and the rounds went over the top.
My companions were decidedly unimpressed. ‘Just look at him,’ said one. ‘Can’t even hit a bloody wall.’ He reached for the rifle. ‘Give it here.’
But then someone landed in the trench. ‘What the hell are you lot doing?’ White-faced, shaking, the Orderly Officer pushed us aside and scooped up the ammunition. We were so dumbfounded by his arrival that it took a few seconds for his words to register: the bullets had not only sprayed over the trench wall, they’d also gone over the road, passed through the trees in the Top Wood – clipping off leaves and branches en route – and then whistled over the camp. For a few brief moments Netheravon thought the Germans were very close indeed.
This time there were not only wrathful parents but a wrathful army to contend with. A couple of days later we were all taken before the Colonel. We had, he said, behaved in an extraordinarily irresponsible fashion. Yes, sir. We had put people’s lives and safety at risk. Yes, sir. Did we now realize the seriousness of what we had done? Oh yes, sir.
Having identified me as the ringleader, the Colonel glared more at me than at anyone else. How, he enquired, had I managed to come up with ammunition for the MP 43? Haltingly to begin with, but then more fluently as his attitude seemed to soften, I explained the research and development programme that had preceded the firing. Despite himself, he couldn’t quite hide his fascination. Finally he said: ‘And now I’ve something to tell you, young Mr Gurney.’
‘Yes, sir?’ My face must have been bright with anticipation – after all, I had made the weapon work. That had to be some kind of achievement.
‘We’ve examined your ammunition and we’ve rechecked the rifles. And d’you know what?’
‘What, sir?’
‘If you’d fired that thing just one more time it’s very likely it would’ve blown up in your face.’ The Colonel hunched forwards over his desk. His smile was humourless. ‘What d’you have to say to that?’
I swallowed hard. I had nothing to say.
As a lesson, it was well worth the learning; certainly, it was more readily absorbed than anything at school. My affinity with explosives should at least have stimulated an interest in chemistry, but unfortunately the subject was taught in such a way that it was about as fascinating as watching paint dry. Only on the playing field did I excel: after carrying off the Victor Ludorum, I was made School Captain of Athletics.
When Grandfather learned I was a promising sprinter he borrowed a stopwatch and off we went for a time trial in Greenwich Park. He paced out what he claimed to be a hundred yards and sent me on my way. When I’d finished he was staring at the stopwatch and shaking it. I skipped over to him. ‘How’d I do?’
‘Under nine seconds.’ Old Bill frowned. He shook the stopwatch again. ‘Nah. Can’t be. Bloody thing’s obviously wrong.’ But when he looked up, he was smiling.
The war that had dawned unrecognized was now ever-present, first in Greenwich and then in Netheravon. In June 1940 troops evacuated from Dunkirk arrived at the camp. Exhausted, disorientated, they crowded into tents. We watched and wondered at their sallow faces and shuffling movements, at the absence of smiles and the dullness of their eyes. They gave us handfuls of French coins. At first the NAAFI wouldn’t take them, but then relented, so we spent our francs and centimes on condensed milk and squares of jelly. I used to think the soldiers gave us the money because they didn’t need it any more, but as time passed I began to sense a different reason. Eventually I understood what had been meant by a soldier who handed me a souvenir – a leather belt to which had been carefully stitched a line of shining centimes, the thread sewn through the holes in the coins. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anything to remind me of France.’
We continued to live at Netheravon beyond war’s end. Finally, when I was seventeen, Father transferred to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and was posted to the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). The rest of the family went with him – my mother, my sister Maureen, and the two others whose arrival seemed to have come out of the blue: brother John, born in November 1939, and Diane, born in January 1943.
Because it was important for me to finish school at Bishop Wordsworth’s, I stayed behind in Netheravon Village, lodging with a couple whose son was at Sandhurst. Towards the end of that last term I was warned of my liability for National Service call-up and asked to state in which arm of the forces I would prefer to serve. After enquiring into the options available, I discovered that the army offered a trade as an ammunition examiner, it seemed a very interesting way of spending eighteen months. Luckily this was a Royal Army Ordnance Corps trade; I pointed out that my father was already in the RAOC, knowing full well that the selectors paid more attention to family ties than to anything else.
Eventually a brown envelope popped through the letterbox. Headed ‘On His Majesty’s Service’, it contained orders to report to Aldershot, a postal order for one day’s pay – four shillings – and a rail travel warrant. It was 25 May 1950. I was in the army now.
