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Chapter Three 1939
The War Years
Eleven o'clock on 3rd September 1939. The radio told us that we were at war with Germany. It didn't seem real but it was. I went round to a friend , Derek Jennings, who was a year older than me and already at the Grammar School. We sat on his front step for about an hour but there was very little to say since neither of us knew what war really was.
The first effect was that school was delayed for a few weeks while the air raid shelters were completed. At the end of October my secondary education began. More disappointing was the removal of all metal toys from the shops. I had wanted a Dinky Toy set of warships for my birthday but was promised that I would have them for Christmas. Of course they were not available!
There were about sixty boys in the first year, divided into two forms. I was in Form 1b. The school was organised in four Houses, Strutt, Mildmay, Holland and Tindal. I was in Tindal. It meant little except for inter house games and sports, in which I failed to figure. For the first couple of years we had Wednesday afternoons off but had to go to school on Saturday morning., but eventually reason prevailed. Wednesday afternoons became a games time and Saturday was for two and a half hour long detentions.
Our form room was away from the main building in Westfields House so all the books needed for half the day were hauled around in a bulging satchel. The thought of it makes my shoulder ache almost sixty years later. Our form teacher Mr.Powney taught us Maths and English. At Great Baddow I had been at or near the top of the class. Here I was around the middle . If I was lucky.
To say that the hierarchy of the school was based on the stronger boys bullying the weak would be an exaggeration but it happened. I was lucky. The first week I was going up a staircase to the hall (now the library) and was blocked by a third year boy. He insisted that I had to go a different way and tried to push me down the stairs. I was lucky and grabbed his thumb which, when twisted, forced him to his knees and left me with an undeserved reputation as a judo expert. I was not threatened again.
In 1940 we had a new boy in the class. Edgar Strauss was a refugee from Germany and spoke hardly any English. By the time he left five years later he was so fluent that he could hardly speak German. The only comment on his arrival I can remember was when Mr.Bone, the French teacher, complained that " Now I will have to swear at you lot in Chinese!" Mr. Bone was easily distracted from his lessons and persuaded to tell us tales of his adventures as a travel courier in Europe before the war.
Most lessons have been utterly forgotten but Art and Woodwork remain fresh. Woodwork because of Mr.Danvers insistence on perfection, and my own inability to attain it. For six weeks I planed a small block of wood until it was translucent but still not flat enough for Mr.Danvers. Then Mr.Danvers' perfectionism must have reached the ears of the War Office, for he was called to the colours. Art was very different. I could draw, understood perspective and didn't tap my pencil so Miss Alderton smiled upon me.
Since the war was on we were restricted to pencil drawing on one piece of cartridge paper per lesson. I only remember having pastels once in five years. It must have been when we sank the Bismark. One lasting memory was the sinking of HMS Hood. Boys who lived near the school went home for lunch (or dinner as we called it then) and reported back the latest news from the BBC. H.M.S. Hood was sunk by the German battleship Bismark in May 1941 and a gloom settled over us until a couple of days later the news came that Bismark had been sunk also.
Apart from lessons the curriculum included the Cadet Corps. We wore WWI uniforms with puttees and were armed with carbines that last saw service in the Boer War. We learned rifle drill, marching , map reading and "field craft". One weekend we
launched an attack on a farm near Goldhanger defended by the Air Training Corps. We won. It was in the script.
From the second year my class had Latin but not History so my knowledge of anything after the Phoenicians was sketchy. The "A"s had History but not Latin. Most of the younger teachers had been " gone to war" and their places were filled by retired or female teachers. The latter caused a problem. The boys had always called the teachers "Sir" so the Headmaster, Mr.Squires, (Nobby), ordered that ALL teachers were to be called Sir!. We soon got used to it. Miss Brown and Miss (Connie) Alderton had been at the school some time and were part of the scenery, but Miss Timberlake and Miss Ellis, teaching English and P.E., changed the scenery. Especially Miss Ellis, the spitting image of the "Lady in a Blue Turban" by Vermeer, who insisted on supervising the boys in the showers. I had Mr.Bucknell for P.E. !
We had the occasional air raid but it was soon decided that trooping down to the shelters was a waste of time. An electric line was connected from the school to the Observer Corps spotters on the roof of Marconi factory and when an electric bell rang we all had to dive under our desks. One morning we were in morning assembly in the hall, now the library, when the bell rang. We all fell onto the floor. Except for Tom Harden who looked out of the window and announced "It's one of our's" just before the bombs exploded in a nearby street.
One night raider was shot down by a fighter and I saw it , lit by a searchlight, falling towards Springfield where it crashed into the bishop's garden. The Home Guard had anti-aircraft rocket batteries in the Recreation Ground and village policemen around Chelmsford were instructed to make sure no-one was out in the street when they fired as it would be dangerous. "Except for policemen!" my mother said, bitterly.
In the Battle of Britain in 1940 it was common to see large formations of German aircraft in daylight, usually heading for North Weald Airfield or for London. One summer's day a big group was just south of Great Baddow heading west. A much smaller squadron of Hurricanes came from the north west and dived straight into them .
A few planes went down and the German formation turned and headed for home. I recently read that they turned back because of bad weather over North Weald but I didn't think that at the time.
Also in 1940 a lone Hurricane glided down onto a cut cornfield next to the A414 in Sandon, just opposite Sandon House. The pilot was Polish and he told my father that he had shot down a Messerschmidt fighter over East London and when the German bailed out the Hurrican propellor got fouled up in his parachute and lost all its blades. It certainly had no propellor left! The official story I read recently is rather different again.
Soon after the outbreak of war the triangle of land at the junction of Maldon Road and Molrams Lane, now occupied by a petrol station, became the site of a large concrete blockhouse. It had an anti tank gun manned by a sergeant and six gunners who were billeted in nearby houses. We were exempt from billeting, being a police station, but my mother often supplied tea and cakes to the soldiers. My father was on good terms with the soldiers who wangled an extra rifle which they kept for him to use if the Germans ever arrived. The blockhouse was heavily disguised as a shop with the gun hidden by advertisements. It was part of a defence line which ran from Saffron Walden to Southend. There was a deep tank trap across the fields between Molrams lane and Sandon Brook and the bridges were drilled ready for demolition.
Later in the war I enrolled as a Police Auxiliary Messenger. The idea was that if the telephones were disrupted we would take urgent messages by bicycle . In my case from Great Baddow to Danbury Section Office. Every Saturday I had to do a practice run carrying my blue steel helmet and gasmask. That helmet figured in another adventure in about 1944. The Germans had by then developed the V1 flying bomb and several of them were aimed at Chelmsford and the Marconi radio and Hoffman ball bearing factories.One night my father and I were standing outside the house during such a raid when a V1 "buzz bomb" bumbled its way across the sky from the direction of Maldon and heading for Chelmsford. It was quite visible as its primitive jet engine emitted a flame from the rear. Then we saw the navigation lights of a night fighter catching it up. It must have been a Tempest as that was the only piston engined fighter fast enough to catch the V1 and it didn't sound like the whine of the Meteor. It turned in towards us and fired at the bomb. It missed it but the blast from its cannon shook pebbles off the wall of the house which rattled down on our helmets. The fighter later shot the bomb down just west of the town. The next day telephone engineers removed a pole from just across the road which had a cannon shell embedded in it! Friendly fire!
One Sunday morning I was asleep in my bedroom when I heard my father shouting to me that a flying bomb had cut out. I was downstairs lying on the hall floor before we heard the explosion! It had demolished the Chelmsford swimming pool and with it all our school swimming lessons. I never did learn to swim. I blame Hitler.
At this time I usually cycled to school and one morning I turned into the High Street from Baddow Road to find the whole street covered in broken window glass. The previous night's air raid had broken every window in the street. I got off my bike and wheeled it carefully up the street to the Shire Hall where the damage was less and continued on my way to school. The Territorial Army hall had been hit and set on fire. The school was full of bullets and hand grenades that had been " salvaged" by teenaged souvenir hunters. Several of these hand grenades were thrown off the Stone Bridge into the River Can on VE night! Many weapons were acquired by boys during the war. When a Hurricane fighter crashed at Roxwell at least one machine gun disappeared to be hidden in a boy,s bedroom " In case the Germans try to come down Swiss Avenue!"
One boy in my form, Sanders, tried to join in by drilling a barrel out of a starting pistol to take a .22 cartridge. It didn't and he was lucky to escape with a broken finger.
Sanders was not popular and suffered again when he visited the Mike Hyde's house in Vicarage Lane. The Hyde boys saw him coming and Mike told his younger brother, "Stop Sanders coming in!". So the young Hyde went out to the gate a shot Sanders in the leg with an air pistol!
In 1944 the Germans developed their second secret weapon, the V2 rocket bomb.
These were fired in a high arc and were undetectable until a second or so before they landed when there was a loud bang followed by the explosion of the bomb. I think the first bang might have been the sound barrier being broken. Many landed on London but a few were aimed at Chelmsford. One hit the canteen at Hoffmans Factory killing a lot of people. It was only a quarter of a mile from my school.
Lessons went on as usual unless there was an immediate threat. My high marks in Art were put into perspective (if you will pardon the pun) when Tom Harden , having failed to do his Art homework, "borrowed" my drawing for which I had got 10 out of 10.
He rubbed out my name, substituted his own and handed it in late. Miss Alderton gave it 5 out of 10 before she recognised it and changed Tom's mark to a detention! She obviously marked by reputation. Tom became an Estate agent in later life!
We had three Maths teachers. The headmaster, 'Nobby'Squires , taught Arithmetic, a subject I had always excelled at so that was no problem. Nobby was a remote figure and somewhat humourless . One Christmas it was announced that the holiday would commence at noon on Friday. Alfred Lepper lived in Terling so his journey to school involved a three mile cycle ride and a six mile bus journey. Nobby announced to the whole school at assembly that as Mr.Lepper written to him that it wasn't wor the journey for Alfred to travel to school just for the morning so he would allow him to stay the whole day!
'Beaver' Ross , returned from retirement, taught Geometry. He mumbled into his moustache and made it worse by talking always to the blackboard. As I liked the subject I grabbed a seat at the front and was able to follow his Euclidean proofs. He was the butt of many jokes from less enthusiastic pupils. The blackboard rubber had a tendency to move along the ledge , controlled by a black cotton led through eyelets screwed into the woodwork. He finally worked it out but took it in good humour. He actually laughed when a cardboard skeleton rose silently out of the waste paper bin in front of him. Again a black cotton !
In the fourth or fifth year he remarried. He must have been about 70 by then. When he came back to school after the honeymoon he came into a silent classroom to find written on the board: CONGRATULATIONS BEAVER! He grinned broadly and said " Thank you, gentlemen!" Mr.Purvis, who had no nickname that I ever heard , taught algebra and was a master of sarcasm. I had trouble with Algebra until suddenly in the third year I realised that x could stand for any number! From then on it was easy.
From the second year on our form master was "Birdie" Becket who taught Latin. Well he tried to teach me Latin for five years but he failed. So did I. He also taught first aid and I didn't learn much of that either. Strangely I liked him and he seemed to like me but although I learnt a lot about Julius Caesar I learnt little of his language. He did once give me a Saturday detention but changed it to a hundred lines when I told him I was playing cricket for Sandon Scouts on Saturday. This was true but I didn't let him know that I was out for a duck! English was taught by Rev."Sally" Burton, so called because one of his favourite phrases was "Bally certain!". He was a part time teacher, part time curate. Strangely for a man of the cloth he was also a master of the double entendre. English literature was the domain of Miss "Timberlegs" Timberlake. One of our set books was Lorna Doon, which I never did read. The set play was Merchant of Venice and we staged it in the hall in the fifth year. I was property master and had fun constructing the three boxes of 'gold', 'silver' and 'lead'. The rehearsals were mostly held after school and one evening I was cycling home in the dark with the regulation very dim lamps when the air raid sirens sounded. After five years of war this didn't worry me. However as I got to the top of the Parish Hall hill a dark shape appeared in the middle of the road. I braked but couldn't avoid riding gently into the back of a special constable. He was standing in the middle of the road looking for German aircraft! I recognised him at once as one of the seventeen specials who regularly paraded in our living room each evening before going out on patrol. He was as dim as my cycle lamps and didn't know who I was. "What do you think you are doing?" he cried. (well, almost sobbed). " What's your number" I said "And why are you obstructing the Queen's Highway?" " Oh," he said, " You had better get home, there's an air raid on". I rode silently away. In the upper forms we had Major Brooks for French . Until he went to prison!
There were several collecting boxes for the Red Cross in the school and it was noticed that the contents seemed to diminish rather than increase. The local C.I.D. marked some coins and traced them to the till at the Black Bull. Mr.Brooks was a regular customer there and soon admitted his guilt. Robbing the Red Cross in war time was almost treason.
He had served in the Machine Gun Corps in WW1 and once told us that his trench had been struck by a shell and the only survivors were him and a private. Many years later my grandfather told me that he was in the M.G.C. and a shell hit the trench and only he and an officer survived. I wonder if it was the same trench? Major Brooks was replaced by a large French lady whose name escapes me as she was always known to the boys as "La Vielle Vache". A totally undeserved title.
Two fearsome teachers were "Bruiser"Findlay and "Copper" Smith who taught Physics and Geography respectively , though not in any sense respectfully. Bruiser was a big man , deputy head, and frightened most boys by sheer ferocious personality. Copper's weapon was twisting the hair behind your ear if you were the last one into the geography room. He was an expert archer and won a medal in a pre war Olympic Games. For some reason he was replaced by a witch like lady, Miss Baggs. She taught sitting behind her desk and Mike Hyde discovered that she was reading aloud from leaflets about Russia published by the Central Office of Information and available from Clarks bookshop. We were soon all getting good marks for geography. She didn't seem to notice that we all had similar maps of the oilfields of the Caucasus in our homework essays when she hadn't drawn them on the blackboard. She gave out a record number of Saturday detention in her brief stay. At the end of our final term her car suddenly had three flat tyres. The headmaster ordered the culprits to clean her car which they did very thoroughly. Indeed so thoroughly that when she started the engine a jet of water shot out of the exhaust.
The head was the victim a more subtle joke. At one morning assembly he ranted for some time about a spate of broken window panes and said that any boy who broke a window would be charged half a crown. The next day he came into our form room to find an apparently broken window. "Who did that!" he shouted. A boy stood up and said that he had done it. "That will cost you half a crown" said Nobby. " But its not broken , Sir!" Chorused the class. The boy had very carefully cleaned part of a dusty window so that it appeared broken. After a full minute's silence Nobby gave a wry smile. "You had better clean the rest of it!"
Being the village police station our house had one of the few telephones in Great Baddow. The number was Great Baddow 108. In about 1942 a research engineer called Mr.Peterson moved to a house in Baddow Hall Crescent, about a quarter of a mile from us. As he had no telephone, and was working on secret radio research, He was allowed to use our telephone. When calls came for him I was dispatched to fetch him. He and his wife were a charming middle aged couple . He had been a Marconi wireless operator on ships and they had travelled extensively, especially in South America. Their house was full of books and exotic souvenirs. I particularly remember a big collection of butterflies, some with impressively large wing spans and most with shimmering brilliant colours. They seemed to take to me and I often visited them to have tea and learn chess. Mr Peterson was interested in my cataract and had the instruments to examine my eyes.
They also introduced me to detective fiction. They gave me my first penguin book, a mystery called 'A Bullet in the Ballet' by Brahms and Symon. It also introduced me to the odd world of ballet. the story revolved around a production of'Petrushka' which remains one of my favourite pieces of music. At the end of the war they moved back to London. When I was at college, many years later, I tried to find them in North London but Mr.Peterson had died.
My closest friend at that time was David Wyatt who also lived in Baddow Hall Crescent. We were both in the Sandon Scouts but early in the war the Scoutmaster was called up to the army and we were left without a Scouter. I hadn't taken my second class badge but Fred Wright , who was in my form at school , suggested that I went to Rettendon one weekend where he was also taking the tests. It was a cold, sleety morning and lighting a fire with only two matches was quite a challenge. I passed but I think the Rettendon Scoutmaster had snow in his eyes. We looked for a replacement Scoutmaster without success. I asked Mr.Peterson but he felt he was too old. We wrote to Scout H.Q. in Buckingham Palace Road and got a reply saying that as it was wartime we could run an independant troop by ourselves. An older boy, John(?) Sach, became troop leader although we only had one patrol. We continued to take tests for badges. I remember taking a 'fireman' badge after a visit to Chelmsford Fire Station which at that time was in Market Road. One weekend we three cycled to Thaxted and had tea with John Sach's aunt. Later David and I joined the East Hanningfield Troop who had a Scoutmaster. 1944 was the finale of my school career, at least as a pupil. That summer, while the Allied armies were preparing to invade Normandy I was preparing for the School Certificate Examinations. The mock exams did not go well for any of us. After the English Literature mock exam, Miss Timberlake stormed into the classroom, threw the papers on the desk and said, "Those results are bloody!" the other subjects were about the same. However the exams seemed easier and somehow I got the required six passes needed for School Cert., including five credits for matriculation. I had no idea what that meant at the time! English Language was fine. I picked up marks in the Precis section which had always been easy for me (a man of few words!). In Maths the right questions came up and I got a Very Good. Art was my banker and my aptitude for perspective drawing got me a credit though I can only remember having to draw syringa flowers. The most difficult part of French was 'continue the passage in your own words in French'. We were all helped by Mr.Bone's tactic of making us learn a passage in French which could be used to continue almost anything. Another credit. I also got a credit in Physics but failed Chemistry. Passes in Eng.Lit and Geography and an expected Fail in Latin completed the list. It was time to start my working life.