Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  ‘Yes, I thought so,’ he leered. ‘Do you know what’s happened to your town, eh? Do you know?’ I had never seen such an embodiment of real evil.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said as haughtily as I could.

  ‘No you don’t do you? I’m the one to tell you.’

  ‘Come on, get on with it,’ someone shouted from the other side of the hut.

  ‘Yes, you all want to know, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you. Canterbury has been wiped out, destroyed, blitzed to bits.’

  I felt a wave of relief. ‘The bombing was last June. The damage was terrible, but people carried on. Ceilings came down in our house, but my parents were able to go on living there.’

  ‘Were living there. All gone now. There was a new raid yesterday in daylight, made the one in June seem like a tea party. It was a market day. All the local people in from all round. Huge casualties.’

  I felt that I had been struck with a knife. Yesterday was the market day. What if something had happened to my parents? They would not know how to reach me. They had no address since Leighton Buzzard. Nor did I know how I could get in touch with them. We had already been told that all mail to and from England would be subject to censorship. We had to pass unsealed to the duty officer of the day any letters home. This rigorous scouting of anything crossing the Irish Sea was because southern Ireland was the independent state of Eire. It was supposed to be neutral; but it was widely believed to be passing on information to the Germans and even sheltering U-boats in the many coves and inlets on the rocky south coast.

  And what about my parents? They would wonder why I had not made contact with them. Perhaps they were hurt and needing me. Not being able to reach them was intolerable. Barry, coming from southern Ireland, understood better the peculiar relations engendered by his part of the island being neutral. He suggested we went to the guard room in the camp to see if the Military Police could help. It was from one of the police that Crawford had heard about the bombing.

  So Barry and I set out. A true new friend, he did not ask me if I wanted his company, he just came along. I don’t know whether I could have coped alone. Remember that we had reached the camp only that afternoon. We did not know its layout. It was now evening; a damp mist dripped from the trees and joined the tenuous wisps of fog that hung around the narrow pathways. What lights there were were dim and heavily masked. All the buildings were the ubiquitous Nissen huts, whether they served as canteen, NAAFI, Orderly Room, ablutions, Medical Office or toilets. At this time of the evening there were few people about. Later I was to realise that several hundred airmen were living there at the time, and that our living quarters occupied by far the greatest number of the huts.

  Eventually we found the guard house. It was better lit than most of the camp. Two police sergeants were sitting chatting by a window that must have looked towards the main entrance to the park. Their assessing gaze had that chilly regard which tends to go with authority. Barry did most of the talking. He began by questioning whether there had been an air raid on Canterbury the day before. There had; why did we want to know? I explained that my home was there. Was it a big raid? As far as they knew, yes. It had been in daylight and at low level. They didn’t have statistics of how many people had died. The police seemed inclined to end the conversation at this point. I asked if there was any way I could telephone my parents? The police looked sceptical. There was a public telephone box at the side of the main square. It took the coin of the realm, but it was often very difficult to get through to England. However I could try.

  I did try; on and off for three hours without avail. I would get an Irish operator. He would explain how much it would cost and where I should put the money. Then nothing would happen except a sound like the rollers of a mighty sea. Sometimes I would get my money back, sometimes not.

  I came to learn every smudge and scratch on the glass panels of the telephone kiosk. The main square was bordered by what seemed to be a wood. From it gleamed a number of small lights. As I watched, several of them moved and others appeared. They were not lights at all; what could they be? Were they . . . eyes? Ugh, too big for mice. The flash of a long tail gave the answer. They were rats. The camp was infested by rats. They did not seem to mind the rain, which was now coming down steadily. As I trudged back to Hut 64, their scuttling gaze accompanied me.

  Inside, the hut was no less wet than outside. The separate pools of water had become one continuous cataract which ran from one end of the hut to the other, following the natural incline of the hillside. Everyone was busy learning how to make the three separate sections of bedding into a mattress, without getting the blankets soaked by trailing them on the floor. Everyone, that is, except Crawford. His sneer followed me round the hut.

  ‘Did you find out about your parents then?’ he said with mock concern. When I shook my head he could not resist a malicious cackle.

  ‘All the telephone lines will be down, of course.’

  Never had I felt such isolation. Even being confronted with that awful wall on the Skegness battle course had been a challenge that was up to me. Now I felt, as people so often did in the clutches of a war as vast as this one, a helpless pawn in a ruthless game. If I could have prayed, it might have helped, but I had not kept up the momentary involvement in the church that followed my confirmation.

  As I tried to compose myself for sleep on the hard greasy pillow which stank of the miseries of previous owners, I tried to think what I might have done to reach my parents. It was no use. I kept returning to my own separateness: this awful hut; the rat-infested camp; the viciousness of Crawford; the indifference of the Military Police; the hundreds of miles of sea and mountain which lay between me and my loved ones, and beyond them all the innocent millions who were facing destruction not from any fault of their own.

  The next morning we were dismissed quite early having been allocated into various groups called watches. I went into the shopping district nearest to the park, found a post office and sent the following telegram to my parents: I UNDERSTAND THAT CANTERBURY WAS BLITZED LAST NIGHT STOP PLEASE WIRE 1638828 AC2 GILL HUT 64 HEADQUARTERS RAF NI HOME FORCES AND LET ME KNOW YOU ARE ALRIGHT STOP HOPING ALL IS WELL LOVE MICHAEL GILL.

  As I wrote to them a day later:

  I became more and more anxious as Monday progressed and brought no reply from you and in the evening I again tried in vain to get you on the telephone for 3½ hours. It is almost hopeless to attempt to ring up people from here – there is often a six-hour delay.

  I should certainly not have got through to you yet but for the fact that I was discussing what to do about it with the other members of C Watch in the canteen at our place of work this morning when our squadron leader happened to overhear us. He asked me a lot of questions without saying anything, then said in his abrupt way, ‘You can try and get through on Fighter Command Priority Line upstairs if you like.’

  So I went on to the gallery among all the big-wigs, liaison officers, etc., and on that priority line got through in ten minutes! That was the reason I could not say much. I should have paid for it, because the call had to be booked as a personal one to an officer. One of the WAAF officers offered to have it in her name and would not let me pay her for it. That is typical of the officers here, though, they are a very decent lot; as are the other ranks.

  It is very difficult to tell from the newspapers how bad the damage at Canterbury was or how heavy was the raid. Was it worse than the June blitz? Were you in at the time?

  In fact, my mother had been gardening. The immediate danger warning sounded at the same time as the German planes flew directly overhead at treetop height. Looking up, my mother saw the black crosses on the wings. One pilot waved to her. Other onlookers were less lucky; thirty-two people were killed, including six children, and fifty-five seriously injured. Ninety Germany fighter bombers took part; far more than I was ever to see on the plotting table at Stormont.

  II

  Every third morning at 12.30 the airmen in C Watch assem
bled in front of the guard house. If it was raining (as it often was), there would be a small camouflaged bus waiting to take us to the Filter Room. If it was fine, Corporal Esmond got us into line and marched us off. It was only a twenty-minute walk out of the lower gateway to Stormont Park, along a pleasant country road, turning right up a small hill to the village where the RAF had taken over the local school and converted it into the brain centre of the air defence of Ulster and the western approaches to Britain.

  Considering that most of us had just recently been on the introductory square-bashing course and loathed it, it was odd that we took the march to work as a pleasure. There was no steely flight sergeant to nag at our heels. Corporal Esmond was, like most of us, an air-crew reject and hence a friend. But it was also enjoyable to swing along in unison. Being over six feet tall, I was usually in the front rank with my new pals Barry Shepherd and Jim Blair, a bank clerk from Liverpool. When the sun shone, and the birds were a-twitter in the hedgerows, we often sang. It helped to keep us in step and expressed our general feelings:

  There once was a troopship

  Just leaving Bombay

  Bound for some blighty shore

  Heavily laden with time-expired men

  Bound for the land they adore.

  Bless ’em all. Bless ’em all,

  The long and the short and the tall,

  Bless all the sergeants and W O ones,

  Bless all the corporals and their blinking sons;

  For we’re saying goodbye to them all

  As back to their billets they crawl.

  You’ll get no promotion

  This side of the ocean

  So cheer up my lads: bless ’em all.

  This lively ditty was said to express the feelings of the ordinary service man in the inter-war period, when the greatest danger was picking up malaria or VD in some far corner of the Empire. But it enshrined one uncomfortable legend that was still believed to be profoundly true: no promotion on the far side of the ocean, east of Suez. If you were hustled overseas before you had the time to establish your value, you would have little opportunity for field decorations in the Burmese jungle or on one of the Pacific Islands engulfed by the Japanese. More likely, an uncomfortable and lingering death in a prison camp. We didn’t know how bad conditions were for Japanese prisoners. But some inkling had trickled through. Enough to make us look anxiously at the notice board in the Orderly Room every few days. Sure enough, after we had been in Stormont about three weeks, a brief typewritten list gave seven or eight names as the nucleus for a forthcoming draft overseas. My name was one of them.

  Well, wherever it was going to take me, it could hardly be wetter or more uncomfortable than Stormont. Yet oddly enough I felt quite sorry at the prospect of leaving so quickly. Why was this? Follow me past the wooden sentry box that was the only outward sign of any change in the school playground. The entrance hall was still lined with pegs about two feet off the ground for the children to hang their coats on.

  Beyond that, the entire school had been turned into one big room, two storeys high. It was dominated by a huge table about twentyfive feet square. On it was painted a map of the whole of Northern Ireland and the Atlantic approaches. It was squared off like an Ordnance Survey. Round it crowded some fifty men and women – airmen and WAAFs. At first sight they appeared to be playing an abstruse form of tiddlywinks. Some, wearing headsets, were leaning across the table putting down a path of small counters; they were either red, white or black. Every thirty seconds the colour changed in accordance with the two large synchronised clocks that hung on opposite walls.

  Those headsets were connected directly to one or other of the RDF stations which were scattered around the coast of north-west Ireland and the Irish Channel. There, on some lonely headland, the engineer on duty looking into his radar screen would spot the blip which might be a flight of seagulls or an approaching aircraft. He would speak into the microphone which connected him to one of the airmen clustered round the Filter Room table. His message would be terse; something like this: ‘North West. Irish J for Jig, 54 32, one unknown at 8.’ The direction told you which way the blip appeared to be going; the letters and figures synchronised the radar sweep with the grid on the Filter Room table; the description told you this unknown blip seemed to be on its own and at 8,000 feet. How quickly it was travelling would soon become apparent from the plots put down on the table at the command of the engineer watching his radar screen. Their change of colour every thirty seconds made it possible to get an accurate assessment of the unknown’s speed. This would eliminate the flight of birds; and upstairs on the balcony the squadron leader who was the duty officer of the watch would look through his flight plans and decide that the relatively slow speed meant that this was a Catalina from Coastal Command that had been blown off course by the high early winter winds. (On the other hand, it might be a Flying Fortress or Liberator of the USA Air Force. Streams of these four-engined American bombers were flying to England at this time, signifying the decisive change in the balance of power which was coming with America’s entry into the war.)

  Everything that was flying at any time would be picked up by the radar stations and represented on the Filter Room table. As soon as the squadron leader in command had decided that in this case it was not a lonely German bomber looking for a suitable target, he would call out: Unknown Friendly. That would be put in a little metal dish that went on the table beside the leading edge of the plots.

  A continuous flow of information was broadcast to the two Operation Rooms, which actually had command of the fighter wings whose job it was to defend Ireland and the northern approaches. This was exactly the sort of job I would have volunteered for had I known it existed. There was an element of theatre about it and really tense drama when some Unknown Friendly turned into Hostile One at 10 and a fighter flight scrambled to attempt an intercept.

  It suited my temperament to have an overview on one not inconsiderable area of the war, and to feel I was looking down, like some minor god on Olympus, at the tangled fortunes of the actual contestants. I knew, too, that the speed of my response could have a brief impact on these far-flung waters. It was also a very sexy job. Moments of excitement were interspersed with periods of quiet. There were more WAAFs than airmen round the table jostling to get down the latest counter. The leading arrow of each identified plane was put down by a filter officer. They were all attractive, clever and emancipated young women. Often they would be humming the latest Gene Kelly number as they brushed past you. ‘Swing your foot way ’round and bring it back, now that’s what I call Ballin’ the Jack,’ or, ‘I’ve got spurs that jingle jangle jingle,’ murmured almost in your ear, accompanied by a whiff of perfume and a reminder that you had to call her Ma’am . . . No wonder that on our days off we would make for the nearest dance hall, where there were girls you could touch and who would be happy to follow your steps in the latest foxtrot.

  The year 1943 was my great year for dancing. It was aided by the watch system which gave us twenty-four hours off every third day. It went like this: the first shift was 1–6 p.m., followed by five hours off, then back on duty at 11 p.m. A night’s work might give you a couple of hours’ snooze in the rest room, but might not. If you were sensible, when you came off duty at 8 a.m. you would have a late breakfast in the canteen, then go to bed for four or five hours so as to be sprightly and ready for the evening shift which was 6–11 p.m. Another short night’s sleep and then you would be marching through the early morning mist to relieve the watch that had been up all night. You took over from them at 8 a.m. and were on till 1 p.m. Then began your twenty-four hours off duty.

  The trouble was that every two or three weeks you had to spend a night guarding the entry gates to Stormont Park. Again, there were four of you and you got some time to relax on a camp bed between the two three-hour shifts marching up and down and stamping your feet in the mud to keep some feeling in them. There was little to keep you alert except the odd drunken airman whom you ha
d to keep out of the sight of the Military Police Sergeant. Once, there was a rifle shot from the woods quite near by. It sounded like a whip crack against the fungoid dripping of the everlasting moisture from the trees. Perhaps it was the IRA. They were not very active in those days.

  I was much more alarmed when nodding off in the sentry box another time I nearly dropped my rifle and hastily pulling myself together saw the whole road oozing and crawling towards me. For a moment I thought it must be an earthquake or the magma from a Celtic volcano (I had just been reading The Story of San Michele). Luckily, I now saw that the flood was crossing the road and was not going to engulf me. And the next moment I realised it was an immense army of rats. They were several deep and moving in an entirely purposeful way. There must have been thousands of them; I have never seen so many.

  Usually one or other of the guard would find the opportunity to bayonet too bold a rodent; I never wanted to kill them and they rarely came near me. During the summer, guard duty could be quite a pleasant change with its smells of the damp earth and the rustle and twitter of the woodland.

  We also had to guard the Filter Room itself. There in the village we only had an ancient .45 revolver to protect our plotters. Quite often, one of the off-duty WAAFs would come out with a cup of tea, and chat for a while.

  Someone it did not suit at all was Crawford. Like me, he was down for the overseas draft. As time went on he became more and more edgy, shut off in a world of his own. This was literally true for guard duty. One evening, I went out to take over from him. It was a moonless night. As I neared the back of the sentry box I had the sense to call out. In response there was the metallic click of the revolver being cocked.

  ‘Hey Crawfy, it’s me: Gill from Canterbury,’ I shouted as loudly as I could. I had a torch and shone it on my own face.

  In its reflected light I saw two things. The twisted, fearful and fearsome face of Crawford peeping round the sentry box and just below it the gleam of the revolver, wavering, but pointing in my general direction.