Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45

Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45 Duff Hart-Davis A rich account of the impact of the Second World War on the lives of people living in the farms and villages of Britain.On the outbreak of war, the countryside was invaded by service personnel and evacuee children by the thousand; land was taken arbitrarily for airfields, training grounds and firing ranges, and whole communities were evicted. Prisoner-of-war camps brought captured enemy soldiers to close quarters, and as horses gave way to tractors and combines farmers were burdened with aggressive new restrictions on what they could and could not grow. Land Girls and Lumber Jills worked in fields and forests. Food – or the lack of it – was a major preoccupation and rationing strictly enforced. And although rabbits were poached, apples scrumped and mushrooms gathered, there was still not enough to eat.Drawing from diaries, letters, books, official records and interviews, Duff Hart Davis revisits rural Britain to describe how ordinary people survived the war years. He tells of houses turned over to military use such as Bletchley and RAF Medmenham as well as those that became schools, notably Chatsworth in Derbyshire.Combining both hardship and farce, the book examines the profound changes war brought to Britain’s countryside: from the Home Guard, struggling with the provision of ludicrous equipment, to the role of the XII Corps Observation Unit. whose task was to enlarge rabbit warrens and badger setts into bunkers for harassing the enemy in the event of a German invasion; to the unexpected tenderness shown by many to German and Italian prisoners-of-war at work on the land. Fascinating, sad and at times hilarious, this warm-hearted book tells great stories – and casts new light on Britain during the war. (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) Copyright (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.williamcollinsbooks.com) This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015 Copyright © Duff Hart-Davis 2015 Duff Hart-Davis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover photograph © John Topham/Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images – Autumn 1940. All eyes on the dog-fight as children in Kent, released from school to help with the hop harvest, take cover in a slit trench. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007516537 Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007516544 Version: 2016-01-05 Contents Cover (#ue3fd96fa-e190-586a-8ba2-b626d6f547c6) Title Page (#ulink_cf9daba9-5175-5c25-86b7-b870f06eeba1) Copyright (#ulink_46bd2e80-d9fb-5d31-8282-41fc0b457012) Prologue (#ulink_d5e73bde-baa2-504c-92cf-5663e1955103) 1. The Old Ways (#ulink_c4150838-8ce7-553d-b2ed-ab4c5740f120) 2. All Hands to the Plough (#ulink_19b7a369-661c-5691-8977-513d6d1902f8) 3. Exodus (#ulink_97701906-7d54-55d8-8cb8-4c211cc048ed) 4. Braced for Invasion (#ulink_fababfef-518e-5b81-82d1-0bf135949012) 5. Going to Ground (#ulink_017a9b6f-d9ba-5cc7-b20d-83b6d7c516bc) 6. Adapting to War (#ulink_3b1117ea-aed7-5380-9e3e-9fc65429e5a6) 7. Rain of Death (#ulink_900916a7-4ea2-53de-8868-b1f63cd9bab9) 8. Food from Everywhere (#litres_trial_promo) 9. Girls to the Fields (#litres_trial_promo) 10. In the Woods (#litres_trial_promo) 11. Laying Up Treasure (#litres_trial_promo) 12. White Elephants (#litres_trial_promo) 13. Rescue Operations (#litres_trial_promo) 14. Plane Fields (#litres_trial_promo) 15. American Invasion (#litres_trial_promo) 16. On the Wing (#litres_trial_promo) 17. Fun and Games (#litres_trial_promo) 18. Field Sports (#litres_trial_promo) 19. Animals Under Fire (#litres_trial_promo) 20. Slate Country (#litres_trial_promo) 21. Evictions (#litres_trial_promo) 22. Far North (#litres_trial_promo) 23. On the Springboard (#litres_trial_promo) 24. Flying Bombs (#litres_trial_promo) 25. Unfinished Business (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Sources (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Prologue (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods … Rudyard Kipling, The Way Through the Woods I was too young to understand what people meant when they said that war had broken out on 3 September 1939; and as our home was some forty miles west of London, we escaped most of the hazards that harassed rural people closer to the enemy. But I do remember occasional fighter aircraft streaking overhead, searchlight beams flicking about the night sky, and, one afternoon, the rough roar of a V-1 flying bomb – like a malfunctioning motorbike engine – which suddenly cut out above us, leaving the doodlebug to crash and explode a mile away. I was lucky enough to be brought up in an isolated farmhouse in the Chiltern Hills, and images of rural England at that time remain vivid in my mind. My family were not farmers: we merely rented the house. But we lived deep in the countryside, surrounded by the woods and fields of a large estate, and joined in many of the farm activities. With five bedrooms, the Victorian house was quite large, and perhaps had been built for a farm manager; but its facilities were primitive, and much the same as those in the cottages round about. We had no mains water, and our supply had to be pumped up by hand from one of the brick-lined underground cisterns built around the farm to collect rain for animals and humans. Our electricity – fit only to light feeble bulbs – came from a temperamental generator in one of the sheds. With my father away in the army, my mother must have had a tough time managing our household. She cooked on an ancient, coal-fired iron range, boiled up the laundry in a copper heated by wood and coal, and wrung out the washing through a mangle before hanging it on a line slung between two old apple trees. She heated her iron on the range, and the only means of keeping the other rooms warm were small open fires. How she did her shopping, I do not know – but as our little Morris Eight was off the road for lack of petrol, I can only assume that she walked the mile to the main road and caught the bus into town, or else that a van from the local grocer made occasional deliveries. We were seldom short of food, for we had rabbits from the gamekeeper, eggs from our own chickens, vegetables from the garden and any amount of fruit – apples for cooking and eating, currants black and red, blackberries in the autumn and huge white-heart cherries from two splendid trees in the paddock. My mother preserved everything she could lay hands on – eggs in earthenware tubs of slimy waterglass, fruit in Kilner jars with clipped-on lids. In good seasons another venerable tree showered down hundreds of walnuts, and in autumn meadows turned white with mushrooms. We children had wonderful freedom outdoors. Petrol rationing meant that my sister and I had to make our own way to school, pedalling our bikes along farm lanes or wheeling them through woodland rides to the point on a minor road where a school bus picked us up. Dense laurel thickets and towering beech trees held no terrors, even in the dark of winter afternoons, for the way through the woods was as familiar to us as our garden paths. No sign or building marked our rendezvous on the public highway: the only shelter for our machines was the hollowed-out trunk of a huge beech tree which stood beside the road – and in that fire-blasted cavern we left them, unlocked and unprotected, until the bus brought us back and we recovered them to ride home. Having been born with a hunter’s instinct, I spent every available minute out of doors. Spring was the time to search for birds’ nests and augment my collection of eggs, which I emptied, in time-honoured fashion, by making a pin-hole at either end and blowing out the contents. I was under strict orders from my parents not to take more than one egg from any nest I found – but the temptation was always strong, and in any case for species deemed harmful, like crows and magpies, the prohibition was waived. Twice I hurt myself quite badly and was carried home with my head covered in blood after falling from a height in attempts to reach the stinking, domed structures built by magpies in the tree-tops. I shall never forget landing face-first in a patch of brambles and ripping my hands to shreds as I crawled desperately through the thorns in an attempt to get breath into my lungs. Accidents notwithstanding, the nesting season was always a time of miracles. How did a pair of long-tailed tits manage to rear a dozen or fifteen babies inside their tiny, vertical oblong of wool and moss and grass? How did wood pigeons stop their bright-white eggs rolling off their platforms of dry sticks, from which they were constantly departing with a great clatter? How did green woodpeckers interpret the messages they sent each other in the bursts of gunfire – brrrrrp, brrrrrp – which they generated when hammering out nest-holes in the trunks of trees? Wandering about the woods, I often made for a clearing in which a gnarled and grizzled ancient, with a filthy pork-pie hat crammed down on his head, sat upright on a section of tree trunk, cutting tent pegs from hazel branches. One, two, three jabs against a long blade fixed upright in front of him – and almost before the chips had landed on the ground another peg went onto the pile. He hardly ever spoke; but as he did not seem to resent my presence, I used to stand and watch him, fascinated by the precision and economy of his movements. I see him now, chipping away in a sea of bluebells every spring. Other choice destinations were the dew ponds scattered about the woods – small, circular pools ten or fifteen yards across, all perfectly round and enclosed by trees or bushes. It was clear from their shape that they had been dug by humans, but there was something mysterious about the way they always contained water. In that high chalk country there were no springs or streams to replenish them, yet they never dried out. Was it rain that filled them, or, as their name suggested, condensing dew? One pool was so thickly covered with algae that we called it the Green Slime – and it was there that I witnessed the magical sight of a woodcock carrying chicks, one at a time, between its thighs. The bird flew low and heavily for about fifty yards, before depositing its freight at a point which it obviously thought safe. On the farm most of the power came from heavy horses, which did the ploughing and drilling, and hauled the wooden-wheeled harvest wagons into the rickyard behind the barns. They were driven and looked after by old Dave Collis, a small, bent man with one rheumy eye, who was reputed to be deaf only when he wanted to be. The farm also boasted one veteran blue tractor – a sign of things to come; but, like the horses, life moved at a leisurely pace. The two great events of the year were harvest and threshing. As the corn ripened in July, everybody available joined forces to bring in the barley, wheat and oats: children, office workers, shop girls, boys from school camps organized by the Government – all came out to help. Our harvesting machine was a binder, drawn by two horses – a weird looking contraption with spinning wheels and unguarded drive belts, topped by a skeletal rotating flail which swept the crop backwards onto a reciprocating knife. Round and round the field it crawled, cutting the stalks, ingesting them and binding them into bundles with heavy twine, the knife chattering and the release mechanism giving a loud clack every time it ejected a sheaf. Great was the excitement as the area of standing corn gradually diminished and rabbits trapped in it began to panic, weaving tell-tale trails of ripples through the ears as they dashed back and forth in search of a safe exit. Boys with sticks and, further out, old farmhands with guns, surrounded the shrinking patch, eager for the quarry to break cover. With the light failing and their shelter almost gone, the rabbits had no option but to run for it – and suddenly all was action: the men firing, the boys yelling, lashing out with our sticks and diving onto individual sheaves as we tried to pin down fugitives which had taken temporary cover. Nobody was squeamish in those days: we knew how to kill a rabbit by chopping it on the back of its neck with the edge of a hand, and how to paunch it by slitting open the skin over its stomach and scooping out the warm entrails with our fingers. Cutting the corn was only the start of the laborious harvesting operation. The sheaves had to be picked up by hand and stood in pairs to make stooks – three pairs for a wheat or oat stook, four for barley, with a neat tunnel along the middle so that air would flow through and dry the grain in the ears. Boys could make good pocket money from stooking – and we earned it, for wheat sheaves were heavy, and the prickly hairs on barley stalks lacerated the inside of our wrists and forearms, as did the spines of thistles. Threshing, which took place in winter, was heralded by the arrival of a majestic steam engine, which gave a couple of saucy hoots as it crawled down the last stretch of the lane, crunching gravel under its steel wheels and towing the great drum or barn worker – the threshing machine itself. In the rickyard the two had to be precisely aligned, so that a long canvas belt could transmit power from the flywheel of the traction engine to the drive wheel on the drum. When all was set, work began. A man, woman or boy on top of the rick pitched sheaves down, one at a time, to a man on the drum, who cut the strings and dropped the loose stalks into the maw of the greasy monster. Standing aloft on the rick, lifting the sheaves with a pitchfork, was exciting work, for every movement might lay bare a nest of mice or rats, which would erupt and make a dash for the edge, launching themselves into space – only to meet their doom among the dogs and boys below. Experienced workers tied twine round the bottoms of their trouser legs to deny mice access, but often a yell or a shriek meant that their defences had been penetrated. As the sheaves were beaten out in the drum, the air filled with dust, sending hay-fever sufferers into paroxysms of sneezing. Wheat was bad enough, but barley was worse, as the spiky ears set floating in the air left faces red and raw. From a tube on the side of the drum golden corn came pouring out into sacks, and these had to be lifted by hand and carried away for storage. The noise was intoxicating: the steam engine hissing, the drum roaring and rattling, the canvas belt flapping, boys shouting, terriers yapping, whippets and collies barking. In spite of the war, everything about the farm seemed comfortably old and settled – the eighteenth-century barns, with their huge beams, red-tiled roofs, walls of blackened feather-edge planks and their fusty smell of rats and mice; the carthorses and their stable hung with leather harness; the wooden wagons, some of them gaily painted; the cast-iron hand pumps, mounted on little brick pillars, for bringing up water from the underground cisterns; the hand-turned mangold-cutter; the huge hay knife, three feet long, for chopping slices from the stacks; the heavy platform scales with their 56-lb iron weights. Yet my favourite emblem of perpetuity was not on the farm at all. Far out in one of the woods was an ancient shepherd’s caravan, with a hooped roof and steps leading up to the door. It stood in a clearing, and although it was still on its wheels in my imagination it had been there for ever: long grass had grown over its axles, and the planks along its walls had weathered to a shade of soft, pale grey furred with lichen. Once a shepherd’s mobile summer home, it was used in my day by the gamekeeper as a store for pheasant food, rabbit traps and so on. But it also had another, more subtle role. In the middle of one board on its south face was a knot-hole, and anyone peering through it, as though through a pin-hole camera, could see a small area of the opposite wall. At dusk on winter evenings the keeper would light an oil lamp, hang it from the ceiling, and, at the point on which any nocturnal snooper’s eye would fall, prop up a crudely written notice proclaiming in big letters painted on cardboard, BACK IN HALF AN HOUR. Whether or not this enigmatic device had the effect of deterring poachers, none could say; but now, seventy years later, I feel it epitomized the simplicity of country life in those far-off days. I was not old enough to realize that change was coming apace. Blocks of woodland were being clear-felled, one after another, to help meet the nation’s desperate need of timber – softwood like larch for pit props, hardwood like beech (for which the Chilterns are famous) for building Mosquito fighter-bombers. Another tractor arrived on the farm. Fields that had always been meadows were ploughed for corn, throwing up flints by the million. Long Field, Marlins, Amos – even Shanty Meadow, traditionally sheep ground – down they all went to wheat. Another field was renamed Searchlight, from the installation built there early in the war, and at night slender, incandescent beams blazed from it, raking the sky for intruders. Centuries-old work patterns were being shaken apart by the growing crisis, and gradually life had to change. One The Old Ways (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke. How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke! Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard The First World War had taken thousands of young men from the land. Farmers paid them such miserable wages that they were virtually slaves, so when they saw a chance of escape from drudgery they jumped at it. In Akenfield, his classic evocation of a Suffolk village, Ronald Blythe recorded that in March 1914 one nineteen-year-old, Leonard Thompson, was earning 11s a week, and later told the author: ‘The village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It was not a figure of speech. I was worked mercilessly.’ When the farmer stopped his pay because it was raining and the men couldn’t thresh, I said to my seventeen-year-old mate, ‘Bugger him. We’ll go off and join the army …’ We walked to Ipswich and got the train to Colchester. We were soaked to the skin but very happy. At the barracks we kissed the Bible and were given a shilling … In my four months’ training with the regiment I put on nearly a stone in weight and got a bit taller. They said it was the food, but it was really because for the first time in my life there had been no strenuous work … We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4th. Leonard survived the horrors of Gallipoli, the Somme and German prison camp, but thousands of his contemporaries did not. When he returned to Suffolk, for a while things were better on the land. The Corn Production Act of 1917, which guaranteed cereal growers good prices for wheat and oats, enabled farmers to pay higher wages, and hundreds of men joined the Agricultural Labourers’ Union. But then a severe drought in the summer of 1921, and a repeal of the Act in August, precipitated a decline which led to a prolonged agricultural slump. In 1938 Britain was growing only 30 per cent of its food, and only nine million acres of arable land were under cultivation, compared with eleven million in 1914. The Government saw that if war came the nation’s essential supplies of wheat travelling by ship from North America and Canada would be threatened by Germany’s U-boats. It was imperative that more corn should be grown at home. Life in the countryside was still largely feudal. Many of the great estates had remained intact, and even if the proprietors no longer flaunted the size of their possessions in their Who’s Who entries (‘Owns 22,000 acres’), they still presided over very substantial areas of the country. Yeoman farmers had their own relatively modest houses and land-holdings, but most farm workers lived in tied cottages – that is, in houses owned by their landlords which went with their jobs. If a man lost his job, he lost his house as well – a system which gave owners an absolute grip of their employees. By the middle of the 1930s huge areas of the countryside had fallen into a state of dereliction. Landowners had lost heart and let their acres go to ruin; tenant farmers, unable to make a living, had simply given up and gone away, leaving houses to decay or fall down and fields to rot. In the absence of grazing animals or cultivation, thousands of acres had been overrun by weeds, brambles and shrubs. In the high Cotswolds huge tracts had been taken over by thorn bushes and stunted trees. In low-lying areas drain clearance had been abandoned, with the result that hawthorn and bramble had spread so far outwards from the hedges that the undergrowth almost met in the middle of soggy fields. Farming was decidedly old-fashioned. Mechanization was creeping in, but heavy horses still provided most of the power, outnumbering tractors by thirty to one. At the Centenary Royal Show held in Windsor Great Park early in July 1939 and attended by the King and Queen, the entries included 150 Suffolk Punches, along with 100 Percherons, eighty Shires and fifty Clydesdales. As Ronald Blythe recorded, the horsemen were always the ‘big men’ on the farm: They kept in with each other and had secrets. They were a whispering lot. If someone who wasn’t a ploughman came upon them and they happened to be talking, they’d soon change the conversation! The horses were friends and loved like men. Some men would do more for a horse than they would for a wife. The ploughmen talked softly to their teams all day long, and you could see the horses listening. Since, in 1939, most tasks were still tackled by hand, farm workers needed to be strong, fit and hardy. A ploughman plodded over ten or eleven miles of ground every day, guiding his team, as did a man broadcasting seed or fertilizer by hand. A tractor driver had no protection from sun, wind, rain and snow except for his coat and hat: winter and summer he sat in the open on a steel seat, sprung on a flat steel tongue, and maybe slightly padded with an old hessian sack. He had no cab to shield him from the elements, still less any ear-defenders. His only air conditioning was provided by nature. Starting one of those old bangers was a labour in itself, especially in winter. Having primed the fuel pump, the driver had to turn the engine over by swinging the crank handle at the front – a procedure that might drag on for ten minutes or more in cold weather. If he failed to keep his thumb on the same side of the handle as his fingers, and the engine kicked back, his thumb could be dislocated or broken. Some farmers had trouble progressing from old equipment to new: one in Cornwall tried to get his new machine to stop by shouting ‘Whoa!’ – and in consequence drove straight through the wall of a shed. A tractor with rubber tyres was rare. The majority had all-steel rear wheels fitted with angled cleats or protruding lumps called spade-lugs. These gave a grip on fields, but made driving along hard roads impossibly rough – on the surface, the machine and the driver – so whenever a farmer wanted to move his machine any distance along a highway, he had to go through the laborious process of fitting protective metal covers round each wheel, bolting two semi-circular sections together. Rubber tyres were much coveted; they gradually became more available, in effect making a tractor a dual-purpose vehicle, equally at home on field or road; but early in the war any tractor passing along a road attracted attention. In March 1940 the law was amended to allow boys of twelve and upwards to drive tractors on roads. But boys of eleven or twelve, who had never taken a test, were already working unsupervised on the land. Francis Evans, son of a Gloucestershire farmer, was eleven in 1941 and frequently went ploughing on his own all day. ‘My father would come with me along the road to the field being worked, and then go home on his bicycle, leaving me to carry on.’ At hay-time, in June, everyone turned out to help make the most of good weather: wives and children as well as men. Round the edges of fields, where the grass might be wet and choke a mechanical knife, the hay was still mown with scythes. The mechanical cutter was a reciprocating knife with jagged teeth, powered by gears from the axle, and (in the absence of a tractor) it was pulled by two horses walking slowly. The cut grass was evenly spread with pitchforks until it had begun to dry in the sun, giving off a delicious smell like that of biscuits cooking; then it was turned and left until it was ready to be collected, either by hand or by a horse-drawn rake with long, curved, downward-facing tines, which could be lifted clear of the ground by pulling a lever. A boy riding jockey on the rake had to pay attention, for if he fell off he might be impaled on the tines before he could stop the horse. Every available person and every available vehicle joined in. In the summer of 1940 the actress, singer and monologist Joyce Grenfell turned out to help at Cliveden, the Astors’ home in Buckinghamshire, driving a twelve-year-old, two-seater Chrysler. ‘Now it is entirely paintless, bonnetless, brakeless, roofless, floorless and hornless,’ she wrote of the car, but still it goes in bottom gear. It is equipped with a giant wooden comb-like device that is fixed on in front. You drive the car along rows of raked hay and this arrangement collects it up. When you have enough you steer off the row into the open and deliver your load in a part of the field near the rick. To unload you merely reverse; in fact, that is the only means of stopping anyway! Loaded onto horse-drawn wagons, the hay was transported to the farm, where, again, pitchforks lifted it onto a rick. The entire process was labour-intensive, and greatly dependent on the weather: for good hay, dry days and hot sun were essential. As one reader of The Farmers’ Weekly remarked, ‘Of course, the ideal is to have ideal weather, but only in the fields of Elysium is the ideal continuous.’ In the rick, during autumn and winter, the hay gradually solidified, so that when it was needed for feeding horses and cattle, slices of it had to be cut as if from a loaf of bread with a knife three feet long. After haymaking, the busiest time of year was harvest, from July to September, when everybody again joined forces to bring in the corn. Cutting and stooking were only the start. The next step was to load the sheaves onto a cart, passing them up one at a time with a pitchfork to a man who had the skill to lay them in overlapping layers so that they bound each other in and did not slip off as the cart lurched towards the farmyard on its wooden wheels. Once there, the process had to be repeated: an elevator ferried the sheaves up onto a rick, and again a skilled operator built them up so that they would hold together and not slide outwards. By the beginning of the war a few early combine harvesters were working, but these were large, inefficient contraptions and needed tractors to pull them – which meant that a good deal of the corn was flattened ahead of the cutter. The first self-propelled prototype, the Canadian Massey-Harris M-H 20, which appeared in 1938, travelled at four miles per hour without running down any of the crop, and cut, threshed and delivered a continuous stream of grain into sacks. Two men were needed to operate it – one to drive, and one to stand on a platform at the back, changing the sacks and sliding them off onto the ground when they became full. As each of them weighed 200 lb or more, and they were scattered about the field, collecting them up and lifting them onto a wagon was no easy task – and then at the farmyard they had to be carried up a long plank or flight of steps and tipped into the barn. Other farm tasks were less dramatic. Ploughing was one of the slowest, demanding skill, patience, strength and stamina. Although even early tractors could plough far faster than horses, many people clung to the old ways. Angus Nudds, who started work on a farm in Wiltshire when he was fourteen, and later became a gamekeeper, remembered, ‘Not many people have had the pleasure of ploughing with horses.’ Instead of the roar of the tractor, there was just the occasional gentle cough of one of the horses, the sound of the soil coming off the plough-share, the jingle of the harness and the constant cry of the seagulls which competed for the worms that were turned up out of the ground. I loved working with horses; they are such noble animals, not asking much out of life, just a warm stable, some good food and a bit of kindness, and they repay you by working for you eight hours a day. No one endorsed those feelings more warmly than John Stewart Collis, an intellectual who worked as a farm labourer in Sussex and Dorset from 1940 to 1946. Already almost forty when the war broke out, he opted for work on the land and wrote two classic books about it, While Following the Plough and Down to Earth, which he later combined into a single volume, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Precise, accurate and never for a moment boring, he described the ancient rituals of farming in a marvellously lucid narrative of day-to-day tasks and events. He scarcely mentioned his wife Eirene and two daughters, whom he packed off as evacuees to America: he referred but rarely to Bindo, the devoted dog which always accompanied him. His whole narrative was dedicated to describing work on the land, and he wrote about the most basic tasks with lyrical grace. Like Angus Nudds, he loved ploughing with a horse: Your feet are upon the earth, your hands upon the plough. You seem to be holding more than the plough, and treading across more than this one field: you are holding together the life of mankind, you are walking through the fields of time. Most farm workers’ language was as old-fashioned as the plough. In many counties ‘w’s were dropped – for example, the word ‘woman’ was pronounced ‘ooman’, and grammar was all over the place. When an old gamekeeper agreed that one of the park deer looked poorly, and said, ‘Arr, I seed one up there crope about fairish’, it was clear that he meant the animal looked pretty sick. No point in telling him that ‘seed’ was not the past tense of ‘see’, nor ‘crope’ that of ‘creep’. One day Jack Hatt, who farmed at Checkendon in Oxfordshire, returned from market to see Olive, his Shire horse, lying prostrate on the field, with the ploughman, Danny, standing disconsolately beside her. ‘Danny! Danny!’ cried Jack, running up. ‘What’s wrong with Olive?’ ‘Blamed if er didn’t go and die on me,’ Danny answered, ‘and I’ve never knowed she do that afore.’ Two All Hands to the Plough (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) His way is still the obstinate old way, Even though his horses stare above the hedge, And whinny, while the tractor drives its wedge Where they were wont to serve, And iron robs them of their privilege. The Yeoman, from Vita Sackville-West’s The Land The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, passed on 1 September 1939, gave the Ministry of Agriculture drastic powers to intervene in the countryside. When the Government announced that it would pay ?2 for every acre of old grassland ploughed up, there was a stampede of applications. By the middle of September 12,000 farmers had applied, and 220,000 acres had qualified for the grant. On 15 September The Farmers’ Weekly declared: Within the last ten days the whole face of British farming has been transformed. The industry … has been brought under a degree of Government control which has never been experienced before, and which only a few weeks ago would have been unthinkable. Maximum prices have been fixed for many of the things the farmer has to buy or sell. Within certain limits he will be told what he may or may not grow. Many of his younger employees will be taken away and replaced by labour which, in many cases, will be less efficient. In a national farm survey owners and tenants were required to record the condition of their land – the nature of the soil, the acreage of arable crops and grass, the areas that were derelict, the state of their cottages, buildings, tracks, fences, ditches and water. They also had to declare if their property was infested with rats or rabbits, and to suggest ways of improving land in poor condition. The survey, which took more than two years, was an enormous undertaking: there were 300,000 farmers in England and Wales, and as one expert pointed out, ‘No two farms were identical in soil, in layout, in buildings or in climate; no two farmers, in temperament, training and experience.’ The agents created for achieving results were the County War Agricultural Executive Committees (commonly known as ‘War Ags’), reincarnations of similar bodies set up during the First World War. There was one War Ag committee for each of the fifty-two counties, made up of seven to ten unpaid local men, experts in various fields, principally farming. These then appointed sub-committees to deal with individual areas. Whenever they were photographed for one of the agricultural journals, attending demonstrations of new machinery or going out to inspect a farm, committee members turned out in uniform of suits and bowler hats or trilbies – although often the Chairman can easily be identified as a landed gentleman from his tweed jacket and plus-fours as he sits in the centre of the front row. The officials were empowered to walk anybody’s land and prescribe what needed to be done, even down to decreeing which crop was to go in which field, and the dates by which crops must be planted. If a farmer agreed to be helped, the Committee would loan him machinery from a pool, and extra labour whenever it could be found. If he refused to plough as directed, or his land was in too bad a state for him to tackle it, the War Ag could take over his whole operation and run it with their own men and machinery, or offer the tenancy to someone else. A leader in the The Farmers’ Weekly warned readers that the Minister might also ‘authorise persons to enter upon land for the purpose of preventing or minimising injury to crops or wastage of pasture by birds, hares, rabbits, deer, vermin or pests, for the purpose of increasing the supply of food to the United Kingdom’. In other words, the Minister of Agriculture has more or less complete power over the farming of this country … County authorities will have a difficult and thankless task. They will be servant and whipping-boy, adviser and master. They will do their best to be friend as well. To men with strong territorial instincts, whose families had always managed their own land, at their own pace, for generations, such draconian intervention came as a shock. Many resented being given orders by strangers, and were suspicious of officials who, having walked their fields in city suits, then told them what to do. Still worse, if a difficult decision had to be taken, the whole of the War Ag committee might turn out in force to assess the position – a posse of interlopers tramping over the fields, and an even greater insult. Yet it was no use arguing. Anyone who rejected the Committee’s suggestions was liable to be fined, and, if he still refused to cooperate, to be evicted from his house and holding. One such was Merriam Lloyd, owner of Dove Farm at Akenfield, in Suffolk. The story was told to Ronald Blythe by Lloyd’s grandson Terry: He was a bachelor who walked about with a gun – you know the sort. He was very independent, and nobody could tell him anything. He knew it all. His farm wasn’t much when he bought it, by all accounts, but it was a sight worse when the Second World War broke out. He hadn’t done a thing except walk round it. Of course the War Ag told him to plough up his meadows – told him! Of course, he wasn’t having that. He took no notice. So they pushed him out. Some men came and literally pushed him out of his own front door. Then they brought some bits of furniture out and stood it round him on the lawn. They wanted the house, you see, for administration. Well, he went to live in a shepherd’s hut in the orchard, where he stayed all through the war, and doing absolutely nothing, of course, and the Dove was given to Jolly Beeston to farm. In a still more extreme case a farmer refused to plough his land, as directed, then ignored an eviction order. In the words of the historian Sadie Ward, The police were sent in, only to find the farmhouse secured against them and the farmer armed with a shotgun. After an exchange of shots and the unsuccessful use of tear gas, the police, backed up by troops, forced an entry. Continuing to resist arrest, the farmer was shot dead. Even minor infringements of the Tillage Act were mercilessly punished. Two poor old farmers in Northern Ireland, both in their seventies, and with tiny holdings of ten and eleven acres, were fined ?20 and ?18 for falling short with their ploughing. The Ministry of Agriculture rejected their appeal, saying that the Act had been introduced in the national interest, and that no breaches of its provisions would be tolerated. Between 1939 and 1945 some 15,000 farmers were forcibly dispossessed – a figure that sounds distressingly high, until one takes account of the fact that it represented only about 5 per cent of the agricultural holdings at that time. A great many farms changed hands: some were sold at auction in the normal way, but at the end of the war land would be offered back to an evicted owner, and if for any reason he did not want it, or if he had died, it would go on the market. Most farmers were glad of help, and many were grateful to be relieved of responsibility. As one former official put it, ‘They looked upon us as saviours.’ When, after struggling with years of deficits, they saw money begin to roll in, they often became positively enthusiastic. In the experience of Derek Barber (later Lord Barber), who was a student at the Royal Agricultural College in 1938, and then a member of the Gloucestershire War Ag committee, ‘the war made everyone realise how important food production was. Simple people were introduced to more sophisticated ways of working the land.’ Seventy years later he was still haunted by the memory of finding a young man dragging dung out of a horse-drawn cart with a pitchfork. The farm was a mass of weeds, and the mother sat in the house all day while her son did what he could to keep things under control. The farm had ‘got into a terrible muddle’, and Barber managed to persuade the family to accept help. The War Ag took over, paid some rent and lifted the family out of their despair. Derek Barber’s mentor was Professor Robert Boutflour, Principal of the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester since 1931, and Chief Executive Officer of the Gloucestershire War Ag. Son of a farmer in Northumberland, he was short, stocky and boiling with energy – a tremendous man-manager: his ability to generate enthusiasm spurred countless farmers into far more effective action than they had thought possible, and he became a symbol of the war effort, in that he made the best of everything given him. One night he telephoned Barber and said, ‘There are a hundred tons of potatoes arriving at Moreton-in-Marsh station at six tomorrow morning. Plant ’em.’ ‘We haven’t got any land to plant them,’ Barber protested. ‘Plant ’em,’ said Boutflour, and put the receiver down. ‘A patch of ground was found on the side of a hill, the spuds were planted, and it became known as “Barber’s folly”.’ Boutflour was nothing if not outspoken. One of his well-known observations was that ‘a farmer with 150 acres is equal to a brigadier-general in the army’. When people started complaining about bacon rationing, he wrote in Country Life: ‘One British habit is causing a great deal of worry, and that is the demand for bacon for an Englishman’s breakfast. Why should we worry? No other man in the world asks for such a breakfast, not even in countries where most bacon is produced.’ He went on to say that the oatmeal from a field of oats would produce ‘eight times as many good breakfasts in the form of porridge as would the same oat-meal converted into bacon … Bacon for breakfast is a habit, almost a vice.’ Ploughing was accelerated by the issue of tractors, of which the Ministry had a pool. Through the War Ags it distributed them all over the country according to the nature of the land: fifty went to Devon, where grassland predominated, but only ten to Essex, much of which was already down to cereal crops. Progress was hampered by violent changes in the weather. The summer of 1939 had been gloriously hot (bringing out a plague of adders in the New Forest), but it left the ground baked hard and difficult to break up. Then October turned cold and wet, and in November frosts set in – the first of a bitter winter which brought cultivation to a halt and, in several places, froze the Thames from bank to bank, so that ice-breakers were working in the river. When the weather eased, and March 1940 came in with two blessedly dry weeks, farmers began ploughing at night as well as during the day: a special amendment of the blackout regulations allowed them to use headlamps, provided they were screened so that they could not be seen from above – and in any case, on moonlit nights they could work with no lights at all. Phenomenal progress was made, and by the middle of the month 1,370,000 acres had been brought under the plough. In Scotland alone, by the beginning of June, farmers had notified the Ministry of their intention to plough 252,000 acres of old grassland, and the War Ags had taken almost 2000 acres from nine farms ‘which were not being cultivated in accordance with the rules of good husbandry.’ Wheat, for bread-making, was the principal crop; but another promoted by the Ministry was flax, or linseed, which was needed to replace the supply of cotton from abroad, cut off by the war. The plants had almost gone out of cultivation in England, though they were still grown in Northern Ireland for their tough fibre; but now, for the coming season, the Government ordered a fourfold increase in English production, from 4000 to 16,000 acres. One advantage of flax – whose flowers open and turn a glorious pale slate-blue when the sun comes on them – is that it grows fast: a crop sown in March should be ready by July. Another bonus is that rabbits do not like it, and will eat almost anything in preference. In the old days flax used to be pulled by hand, but by 1940 pulling machines could be hired; the seed heads were crushed for oil, and the tough stalks processed to make cloth. Earl de la Warr, Chairman of the Flax Board, called flax one of the main munitions of war: when used in the manufacture of wing fabric for aircraft, it was claimed to add five miles per hour to the speed of certain bombers. Potatoes also came under the control of the Ministry, which ordered a far larger acreage to be planted. According to Derek Barber ‘the impact of the war effort on the character of the countryside was quite incredible’. He cited the example of a 2000-acre block of land close to Cheltenham, on the edge of the Cotswolds, which half a dozen farmers had been using as a huge ranch. One of them had a flourishing trade in pit ponies, which he bred, but none did any cultivation, and the ground had degenerated into bush, ‘just like in Africa’. With the thorns ripped out by tractors and winches, the land ploughed and sown, it turned into 2000 acres of wheat, and the change wrought on the appearance of the landscape was as drastic as that caused by Dutch elm disease fifty years later. Similar transformations occurred all over Britain. Every possible piece of ground was ploughed: not just meadows and the lower slopes of mountains in Wales and the Peak District, but cricket fields, commons and golf courses. The parkland surrounding large country houses excited much irritation. Farmers argued that the parks were a conspicuous waste of land, lost to agriculture for the sake of mere display. ‘Private parks,’ wrote one, ‘are now the exercising ground of deer and pheasants … Much of it would grow cereals well. The deer and pheasants could be killed to augment the meagre [ration of] 1s 2d worth of meat a week, which is by no means enough for heavy manual workers.’ Golf courses, he added, ‘should be made to produce food for man or beast … I say we are fighting a life-and-death struggle, and money does not enter into it.’ On 4 July 1940, in the House of Commons, Mr J. J. Tinker, Labour MP for Leigh, in Essex, asked if a survey could be made of the Royal Parks in London, ‘to see whether some parts of them could be used for growing foodstuffs, and in particular, whether the stretch of ground known as Rotten Row, in Hyde Park, could be utilised for this purpose’. The answer was that sixty-three acres had already been devoted to allotments, and eighty acres to the cultivation of oat and root crops. ‘In addition, two-thirds of the greenhouse space normally used for the production of flowers is being used for the cultivation of vegetables.’ As for Rotten Row: ‘It consists of sand up to a depth of six inches on a brick floor about a foot thick, and, further, for a great part of its length it is lined by tall trees.’ The War Ags were certainly proud of what they achieved. A makeshift notice stuck up in a field proclaimed: War Agric 47 Acres Debushed – Drained – Reclaimed WHEAT 52,000 Loaves? Growing more food was essential for the nation’s survival, but so was the harvesting of the crops; and farmers were soon severely handicapped by the shortage of labour, particularly for potato-picking in late autumn. The list of reserved occupations which exempted men from call-up included agricultural workers; but many farm boys, eager to escape the drudgery of life on the land, volunteered for the army, navy or air force, or went to earn better money on the building sites springing up all over the country in the rush to construct new military camps and airfields. All this created a serious deficiency, exacerbated by the fact that the seasonal influx of migratory workers from Ireland had been cut off. In one issue after another The Farmers’ Weekly bewailed the fact that farmers were losing stockmen, milkers, dairymen. ‘From all over the country they are asking for skilled women to fill the abruptly-emptied places. If you have daughters who are clever with stock, or in the dairy, or are good milkmaids, urge them to think quickly about responding to this call.’ The Situations Vacant columns were packed with advertisements seeking ‘foreman cowman … girl calf rearer … young man to work horse … intelligent young Lady or Girl for milk round … cheesemaker man or woman … Respectable youth wanted, improver, general farm work … Strong woman wanted … Strong girl wanted for milk delivery in the City of Oxford. Horse vans used.’ In summer civil servants were given special leave to do farm work, and many rose to the challenge. But a still more valuable source of extra labour lay in the harvest camps for schoolchildren, organized by the Government. At first, in 1941, only boys were allowed to take part, but in 1942 girls joined them, and the number of camps rose sharply from 335 in the first year to a peak of 1068 in 1943, putting 68,000 young workers into the field, for an average stay of four weeks. Boys earned between 6d and 8d an hour, but they had to pay for travel to and from the site, and contribute towards the cost of their food – which left little in hand at the end of a three-week stint. Although the work was tough, the camps were much enjoyed by most of the inmates, who remembered ‘the pleasures of tent life, camp food, fireside sing-songs, the camaraderie with older farm workers and, in particular, the fact that campers found a new freedom and gained a sense of independence denied to many at the time’. Even so, pea-picking was regarded as a ‘horrendous’ job by the girls of Manchester High School, who were sent out to tackle the crop near Ormskirk in 1943, and worked with hessian sacks over their heads to protect them from the rain. Their miserable lot was to move along the rows, pulling up plants with their left hand, and with their right stripping the pods, which they dropped into a skip that held 40 lb when full. That freedom of the fields often extended to the complete absence of safety precautions. Gerald Pendry, who went from a London school to a harvest camp in Warwickshire in 1941, was set to work with another boy on a flax-pulling machine, which had to be constantly unblocked, as the tough fibres kept jamming the rubber belts. Drive-shafts and belts had no form of protection, and the lads were supervised by a Polish tractor driver who spoke no English. With still more harvesting hands needed, in 1943 camps for adults were introduced, and after a series of appeals by Robert Hudson, the Minister of Agriculture, thousands of men and women applied to join. Perhaps it was a sense of achievement, coupled with hope that the war might not last long, which lent buoyancy to the sale of farms early in the war. Estate agents cheerfully reported good business, ‘and plenty of eager applicants for good holdings, either for investment or occupation’. Prices seem ridiculously low. In March 1940 a freehold, ‘highly farmed’ holding of 163 acres in Suffolk, including an ‘excellent residence’ with five bedrooms, ‘splendid premises’ and two ‘superior cottages’, was advertised at ?2500. A 170-acre grass farm in Nottinghamshire, including a cottage, could be had for ?1750. In July Country Life reported that ‘The investor’s quest for first-rate farms goes on with increasing vigour’. The Yews Farm, near Rugby, with 215 acres, went at auction for ?4800. On the other hand, with cement scarce, and bags of it described as ‘precious as gold dust’, repairs were difficult and farm buildings were tending to fall into decay. Three Exodus (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) It’s dull in our town since my playmates left, I can’t forget that I’m bereft Of all the pleasant sights they see, Which the piper also promised me. Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin Even as ploughshares bit into virgin turf, people everywhere were bracing themselves for war. On Saturday, 2 September thunderstorms rumbled and crashed over the south of England; but Sunday, 3 September was gloriously fine and warm. Hardly had the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, made his fateful wireless broadcast at 11.15 a.m., declaring that the country was at war with Germany, when air-raid sirens wailed out, rising and falling over London. Worshippers in St Paul’s Cathedral were ushered down into the crypt, and everywhere in the city householders hastened, as instructed, to stick crosses of brown paper on their windows, to minimize the risk from flying glass. Others hung wet blankets over doorways as a precaution against gas attack, which was many people’s worst fear. On a blustery morning in Banff, far off on Scotland’s north-east coast, young David Clark saw his father, the minister, running up and down the streets in search of a wireless powerful enough to broadcast the news in St Mary’s Church – and when Chamberlain came on: ‘Tommy, my wee brother, and I immediately looked to the skies. Not for heavenly persuasions of any sort, but simply because we thought that German Stukas would immediately appear.’ At Four Elms, a village in Kent, a boy rushed into the church during the service and handed the vicar a message, saying the war had begun – whereupon the congregation stood and sang the National Anthem. On their way home people collected wood from a spinney, assuming that coal would soon be unavailable. Out in the country farmers covered hay and corn stacks with tarpaulins, to prevent gas sprayed by low-flying German aircraft, or dropped in bombs, from contaminating the precious stored crops. Over cities and large industrial sites barrage balloons floated in the clear sky like silver whales tethered by steel cables. The threat of air attack seemed so real that on Friday, 1 September the Air Ministry had ordered a countrywide blackout, in the hope that the suppression of all lights on the ground would make identification of targets harder for the German air force, the Luftwaffe. The new regulations laid down that after dark all windows and doors must be covered by heavy material, cardboard or paint. The rules were strictly enforced by Air Raid Precaution wardens (ARPs) – easily identified by the white W painted on the front of their steel helmets – who adopted an aggressive approach during their rounds, and if they spotted a chink of light would come hammering on the door. Persistent defaulters could be reported to the police and heavily fined. Anyone showing a light was liable to be besieged by neighbours, angry that one selfish or idle person was endangering everyone else. Total darkness was considered so essential that one night Sergeant D. M. Hughes of the Caernarvon police felt obliged to put out a light left on in an office building by shooting it with a .22 rifle. Outside, street lights had to be switched off, or screened so that they shone downwards. Traffic lights were fitted with slitted covers which filtered signals towards the ground. Car headlamps at first had to be blacked out entirely, but so many accidents occurred that restrictions were soon relaxed, and shielded headlights were allowed. The blackout was exceedingly tiresome, indoors and out. Unless householders were prepared to live in permanently darkened caves, they had to take down the window covers in the morning and fix them up again in the evening – a time-consuming chore, especially in large houses with multiple windows. Outside, the restrictions put pedestrians in danger, not only of tripping over drain covers and pavement edges, but of being run down by vehicles feeling their way through the streets. White lines were painted along the middle of roads, but even to walk along them was dangerous, when drivers could hardly see ahead of them. Townspeople were terrified by the threat of air raids. Householders hastened to fill sandbags to protect their properties from blast, or put finishing touches to the Anderson air-raid shelters in their gardens. More than a million and a half of these sturdy little huts, each of which could hold six people, had already been distributed across the country, free to those with an annual income of less than ?250, ?7 to others. Made of corrugated steel sheets bolted together in hoops, and covered with a fifteen-inch layer of soil, they could withstand the impact of shrapnel, but not a direct hit from a high-explosive bomb. Indoors, Morrison shelters – in effect reinforced steel tables – gave protection against falling masonry. Country people were less alarmed by the idea of bombs, which they imagined would fall mostly on industrial centres. For farmers, a worse scenario was that of invasion. They could hardly believe that Germans would take over their land or slaughter their livestock. Nevertheless, some of them took precautions – like one man in Dorset who said to a friend: ‘Bloody old ’itler’s coming. I’m going to start saving money. I’ve got one churn buried, full of half-crowns and two-shilling pieces, and I’ve started to fill up another one.’ Five years earlier Winston Churchill had predicted that, in the event of war, three or four million people would be driven out into the open country around London. The exodus of 1939 was not as drastic as that: nevertheless, it was a huge movement, planned with skill and care, which drained the cities and deluged the countryside with a flood of urban children. ‘The scheme is entirely a voluntary one,’ the Government’s Public Information Leaflet No. 3 had announced, ‘but clearly the children will be much safer and happier away from the big cities where the dangers will be greatest.’ The leaflet struggled to reassure everyone that the scheme would be for the best: The purpose of evacuation is to remove from the crowded and vulnerable centres, if an emergency should arise, those, more particularly the children, whose presence cannot be of assistance. Everyone will realise that there can be no question of wholesale clearance. We are not going to win a war by running away. Safer – yes. But happier? That was wishful thinking. The diaspora began on the morning of Friday, 1 September, the day Germany invaded Poland. Children streamed out of London – and not only from the capital, but from other cities that were potential targets for the Luftwaffe – Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield. From Manchester alone 66,000 unaccompanied children dispersed to farms, villages and towns in the surrounding country. On the morning, in London, outside schools all over the city pupils lined up with an escort of teachers and marched off to the nearest bus stop or Underground station. Each child had a brown identity label pinned to its jacket and carried a case containing a change of clothes, as well as a cardboard box holding a black rubber gas mask. For security reasons – and to prevent them following – the parents had not been told where their children were going: they would not know until a message came back to say that the travellers had arrived. Mothers, in tears, waved from behind iron railings, and most of the evacuees were sunk in misery – torn from home, and mourning their cats, dogs, mice, guinea pigs, canaries and parrots, which had either been exterminated or, on Government orders, left behind. Some of the children from Central Park School in the East End of London were elated, but most were frightened and downcast. The carriages of the Underground on the old Metropolitan line to Paddington were so packed and stifling that some of the young passengers were sick over their neighbours, and when they reached the main-line station they collapsed, slumping to the floor of the concourse, which was thick with noise, black smoke and steam. Others put down their pathetic luggage and cried. In spite of the crowds, one boy felt ‘very alone in a world going horribly mad’. While the children of ordinary citizens waited on station platforms, better-off families were pouring out of London by car, in such numbers that roads became, in effect, one-way. Every vehicle was packed with people, luggage and pets, heading for safety in the west or north. A train took the Central Park contingent of children to Shrivenham, then in Berkshire, where buses ferried them through the town to a school, for dispersal. After a sandwich lunch and a period to recover, they all had to strip and stand in line, for inspection by an elderly nurse, to make sure they were clean and free from head lice. Later, as they laid out mattresses for the night in neat rows on the floor of an assembly hall, two small girls appeared wearing headscarves. One stopped and stood with her head hanging, but the other turned round and ran, overcome by the shame of having had her hair shaved to get rid of nits. To city children the country at first seemed hostile and alarming. One batch from London, taken to a Welsh mining village, arrived in the blackout-intensified dark of a wet, foggy night. Billets were found for most of them, but the last eight had nowhere to go, and their teachers were forced to knock on door after door, beseeching people to take one in. The same thing happened to twelve-year-old Eileen Ryan, sent from London to Weymouth with her three-year-old brother Gerard in tow. Groups of children were led along the streets, with their leader knocking on doors and asking if the occupants would take any evacuees. ‘I can’t have the little boy,’ said one householder after another – but because Eileen’s mother had told her never to let Gerard go, they had to persevere until somebody let them both in. Billeting officers, appointed by the Government, tried to rely on friendly approaches, but when persuasion failed they had the authority to compel householders to accept children if they had space enough. An eight-year-old Jewish girl called Sylvia was taken from Liverpool to Chester, but at first no householder would have her. She and her mentor walked round the city for hours before, at about midnight, a family took her in – but they put her into a storage room with no light, and left her there alone and terrified. In Scotland 120,000 children left Glasgow within three days, spreading out into Perthshire, Kintyre and Rothesay. From Edinburgh some 50,000 headed north for the safety of the Highlands or down to the Border country. From Merseyside 130,000 dispersed into North Wales and northern England. As in the south, some fared better than others. Sara Cockburn, a young teacher from Glasgow, volunteered to accompany a group of evacuee children to Lochmaben, in Dumfriesshire, where they lived on a farm and were royally fed: We had what I will have in heaven if I am spared – pin-head porridge with cream every morning. Usually I weigh about eight-and-a-half stone. When I went back to Glasgow, I weighed ten-and-a-half stone. I was spherical, and I couldn’t get into any of the clothes. All that was due to the boss’s cream. Good food remained a lasting memory in the minds of many evacuees. Eleven-year-old Ray Fletcher was sent with his two sisters from Margate, in Kent, to the Staffordshire mining village of Landywood. The families on whom they were billeted were ‘kindness itself’, even though at first Ray could not understand a word of what they were saying, as their ‘broad Midlands accent’ seemed like a foreign language. But he never forgot the first meal he had with them – ‘the most enormous plate of egg and chips I had ever seen’, or the little potatoes which he fished out of a boiler as he sat in a barn, cooking up vegetable scraps for the pigs: ‘There were a lot of Oohs! Arghs! and Hars!, for they were hot – but that didn’t matter: they tasted delicious.’ In many villages the sudden arrival of extra children overwhelmed the facilities. At Orwell, near Cambridge, there was no room for new pupils in the school, so the evacuees sat on the floor and were kept separate from local children. ‘We were not accepted by them as friends, and we were often bullied by them,’ remembered James Kilfoyle. ‘As there were no teachers, my sister, aged thirteen, used to teach the younger ones.’ At Badminton, a small village near Bristol, on 11 September 1939 the school roll leapt in a single day from ten to seventy-seven – the result of an influx from Birmingham. A shift system had to be adopted: indigenous children were taught by their own teachers from 12.15 to 4.15, but had to surrender their classrooms at other times. The immigrants inevitably brought unwelcome fellow travellers with them, and a week after their arrival a local report recorded that ‘Nurse Brown visited and examined the heads of the seventy-two children present’. Many urban children were already used to simple ways of life, but of a different kind. Some were poorly house-trained, if at all. Refusing knives and forks, they ate with their hands. Rather than use a lavatory, with which they were unfamiliar, they persistently relieved themselves in a corner of the room. One boy sent to the middle of Wales landed at an old-fashioned farm ‘with a two-seater loo over the edge of the hillside, and when you looked down, it was like a giant precipice’. When Bangor, in North Wales, was invaded by 2000 children and their teachers, most of the evacuees could not understand a word or read the notices in schools, for half the population spoke only the native language. Landing in a strange environment could be highly alarming. A five-year-old girl placed with a mining family near Doncaster screamed when the man of the house returned from work ‘all black, covered in soot, with just his eyes peeping out’. Some city dwellers found the country ‘a place of vast loneliness and fearsome terrors’. There was too much open space in the fields, and too many big animals which might bite or kick or knock little people down. Cows were particularly frightening – their size, their horns, the loud bellows they emitted, to say nothing of the mess they left behind them. One six-year-old girl’s nightmare was having to walk home from school along a village street thronged every afternoon by a jostling, shoving milking herd on its way to the parlour (she never shed her fear of cows, and many years later her son recalled ‘some pretty strange evasions over hedges and once along a railway line to avoid herds in fields while we were walking’). To a five-year-old from Walthamstow, a seventeen-hand carthorse was a threatening monster, and the screams that pigs gave out were blood-curdling. Another London girl sent into the country felt she was going ‘on a journey to oblivion’, convinced that all the people at her destination would be ‘thick and dirty’. In Kent the writer H. E. Bates ferried families to their appointed destinations in a huge, old, borrowed Chrysler, and was dismayed to discover that all they wanted was ‘shops, cinemas, pubs, buses, pavements to walk on … It was incredible to find that a huge section of our population were producing children who did not know how potatoes grew.’ The sudden arrival of evacuees sent many a rural community into a spin. The leading lights of Tolleshunt d’Arcy, a village on the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, had made elaborate preparations, including a census of houses with space to spare. Among the organizers was the thriller writer Margery Allingham, who recorded how they had carried out a survey, making comments on various properties and proprietors: ‘Good for nice girls’, ‘Good for tough boys’, ‘Good at a pinch’, ‘Would, but not keen’, ‘Could, but wouldn’t without a row’, ‘Impossible’, ‘Never on Your Life’. The villagers had been promised, and had prepared for, ninety children – so they were appalled when eight London double-decker buses rolled in, ‘as foreign-looking as elephants’, and disgorged 300 exhausted, irritable women and babies. Frantic efforts were made to place as many of them as possible that evening, but it was only the arrival of another bus, sent to take some to another destination, that solved the immediate crisis. In another village, suddenly landed with seventy more children than expected, one of the organizers commandeered an empty house and herded the whole lot into that for the night. Officials charged with the task of dispersing evacuees had a nightmare job. Twenty-three-year-old Alan Stollery, a traffic trainee, was sent to Norfolk to arrange the reception of 16,000 children coming from London, about 1000 (including their attendants) on every train: My job was to assess the number of coaches required to meet each train, then to check the receiving villages to which each coach should be routed … For a train carrying 1,000 children, probably a minimum of thirty coaches was needed [but] for each train there were probably a hundred or more villages, each to receive a differing number of children. As a retired army officer testily remarked, ‘We have all got to realise that the Englishman’s home is no longer his castle’; but many householders were dismayed by the idea of being required to act as foster-parents – and the higher up the social scale they were, the greater the difficulties they created about taking in urban children, shamelessly pleading lack of servants rather than lack of space. It was the poorest families, especially those with no children of their own, who were readiest with hospitality. Children sent to the country were liable to be treated like the cattle they dreaded. When a bunch from Liverpool arrived by train at Ellesmere, in Shropshire, they were indeed put into cattle pens in the market, where people came and chose the ones they liked. Five-year-old Audrey Jones was similarly humiliated at Bletchington, near Oxford, along with her sister and two younger brothers, when locals looked them over critically in the village hall, selecting and rejecting. Her brothers James and Bernard were chosen quickly, as they were big boys, aged twelve and ten, and would be able to work for the farmer who picked them, but the two small girls were left until last. Many local people fancied Edna, who was six and a half, blonde-haired, blue-eyed and sweet looking; but they were put off by Audrey, who by her own account was a plain redhead with protruding red cheeks, and crouched under a table wetting herself. In the end the Jones girls were taken by a Mrs Denton, with whom they spent their time ‘reading the Bible and being very clean’. When their mother came down to see them, she was denied access to the house and had to speak to her daughters on the doorstep. ‘Mummy could not believe her eyes on seeing me,’ Audrey remembered, ‘as when I left London I had long ringlets, but Mrs Denton had cut them off, saying long hair was sinful.’ The girls went to the village school, which they enjoyed, and after enduring only a month of Mrs Denton’s cruel eccentricities they were moved to another house in the village – but this turned out to be even more unpleasant. Insecurity still made them wet their beds, and for this they were ‘continually thrashed’ by their new guardian, Mrs Taylor, sometimes with holly branches. Small wonder that when they found some brown paper and string, Edna tried to roll her little sister up in a parcel and find a post box big enough to post her back to London. Later they were moved again, this time to a Mrs Harris, who had a backward daughter, Christine, and lived at the end of the village in an old house with no running water or sanitation. The girls’ daily job was to walk to a well a quarter of a mile away, to bring back buckets of water for the house. When Audrey was nine she decided to run away – but of course she was found and brought back. Out of doors, things were better, and gradually they learned about the country. One winter day they came across a dead sheep: it was stiff as a board with frost, but they took off their coats and covered it, hoping to bring it back to life. Years later they realized that Mrs Harris was not really the demon she had seemed. The strain of coping with Christine (who ended up in a mental institution) and two London girls was more than she could handle – but, like other householders, she was paid 7s 6d per evacuee per week, and in those poverty-stricken days she desperately needed the money. After the war she showed that she must have had some affection for her young visitors, by always wanting to keep in touch. The occasional child was insufferably bumptious. One six-year-old from London confronted her foster-mother at first meeting with the words, ‘Who’s boss here, Auntie?’ The woman, taken aback, replied, ‘I am the boss of the house, and Uncle (my husband) is boss of the garden.’ To which the child retorted, ‘Well, God and me are the boss of the lot.’ Little horror! But it is hard to believe that any evacuees were as poisonous as the three Connolly children who, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Put Out More Flags, are found ‘lurking under the seats of a carriage’ when their train is emptied at a country station. Acknowledging no parents, they speak only of ‘Auntie’ in London, to whom, it seemed, ‘the war had come as a godsent release’, and in the country they prove so rebarbative that they are passed from hand to hand by increasingly desperate householders – none less scrupulous than the smoothly dishonest Basil Seal, who, with his power as billeting officer, resorts to bribery and extortion to move them on. Most new arrivals presented less of a problem – and many positively welcomed a move to the country. A youth sent from Surrey to the Yorkshire moors was delighted by his new environment: ‘One begins to realise after frequent moves from one place to another that all town is monotonous and boring and that every strip of country has its collection of vital interests.’ He was thrilled by the speed with which the mountain becks rose into rushing torrents after rain, and by the sight of snipe ‘flying off in their peculiar corkscrew motion’. Bob Browning was similarly delighted to exchange the inner suburbs of Birmingham for the Gloucestershire village of Uley, on the western edge of the Cotswolds. With fifty other children, including his sister, he travelled by train to Dursley, and thence by coach to the village hall in Uley. There he was met by a smart twenty-five-horsepower Wolseley, driven by the local garage owner, Chris Bruton, and taken up a steep hill to Lampern House. High above the valley, the two Misses Lloyd-Baker, daughters of a land-owning family, lived in style, and for Bob it was astonishing to be waited on at table in a house with stone-flagged floors, oil heating and lighting. This sybaritic existence lasted only a few days; but when he moved down to the village and lived with the Bruton family because their modest house was closer to the school, he was just as happy. To him the countryside was a revelation. The beech woods which cloaked the flanks of the valley were turning to copper and gold, and to be able to go straight out into green fields was ‘a miracle’. Mad as he was on football, he did not care if the grass was plastered with cowpats. The woods were ideal for hut-building, and Uley Bury – the biggest Iron Age hill fort in England, surrounded by a Roman race-track on an outlying ridge of the escarpment – made a thrilling natural playground for army games: boys would disappear up there after breakfast and not come back until lunchtime, having had a glorious, adult-free morning. A system of barter helped fill gaps in the food supply. Since Birmingham enjoyed soft water, and people there had more soap than they needed, parcels of washing materials would come down to Gloucestershire, and freshly killed rabbits packed in moss would go the other way. Besides, there was pocket money to be made. Bob delivered milk from a churn on a round with a pony and trap, and with his friend Bill Bruton hunted cabbage white butterflies, of which there was a plague, swatting them with tennis rackets and filling jam jars to earn rewards at school. The only member of the community who had a car was the doctor. Some houses had gas, but there was no electricity and people used oil lamps. Nevertheless, the village was lively: shortage of petrol (which limited visits to the nearest cinema) combined with the blackout to stimulate community life. There was a whist drive once a week, and a dance in the village hall on Friday night, from eight to one. Dennis Swann, who lived near the Elephant & Castle in London, ‘where all was buildings and pavements and street noise’, landed at a farm near Colyton, in east Devon. Aged eleven, he had ‘never seen cows, nor even a green hill’, so he had never considered where milk came from, and found the sight of a cow being milked ‘astonishingly exciting’. John Swallow wrote from Kidderminster, in Warwickshire: ‘I broke my record by eating eight pieces of bread’; but then, asking if he might come home, he went on gloomily: ‘If we have to go, we might as well all go together – you have got to die sometime, and it might as well be painlessly by the bomb as by a long illness or something.’ Some city-based mothers, unable to bear the separation from their children, forged out into the country to reclaim them, only to find that the foster-parents had become so fond of them that they were reluctant to let them go. Most children were too far out for regular visits, but one father who worked for the Post Office in London sometimes cycled seventy miles in each direction to see his son in Northamptonshire. When several evacuees landed in the same place, they tended to stick together, to protect themselves from gangs of village boys. This happened at Ditchling, in Sussex, and Diana Ansell still has all too vivid memories of being posted, as a five-year-old scout, to keep watch while her companions scrumped apples in orchards and gardens, among them that of the Forces’ Sweetheart, the singer Vera Lynn. Being a shy, quiet girl, Diana did not relish her role, but was forced into it with threats of dire tortures by her elder brother and his friends. A legitimate activity was working in the fields, for which they were paid pennies, and one day, as they were raking up hay, they were machine-gunned by a hit-and-run German pilot. By flinging themselves to the ground and burrowing under the hay, they escaped unhurt. London and the northern industrial centres were by no means the Luftwaffe’s only targets. Belfast was also evacuated – and Emily Cathcart, who ran a small country store and post office in the village of Bellanaleck in Co. Fermanagh, vividly remembered newcomers arriving: These city people were completely disorientated in the country. It was difficult to look after them. They rolled themselves in any bedding they could find. Although there was water laid on, some of the mothers made no effort to wash themselves or the children or provide for them in any way. Some of the evacuees wandered off to make their own way home. Altogether it was a terrible experience for anyone trying to help. One young lad was discovered with a stick in his hand, beating ducks around a house in a yard at his billet … Children in many cases couldn’t get used to the food provided. You would find food stashed away in a bedroom or maybe in flowerpots – anything to avoid admitting they didn’t like it. Evacuees found the intense darkness of a country night alarming; but for country people the blackout brought little change. It may have encouraged them to stay indoors at home after nightfall, but it also stirred deep feelings, evocatively described by the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, who lived in Kent: The moon has gone, and nothing but stars and three planets remain within our autumn sky. Every evening I go my rounds like some night-watchman to see that the black-out is complete. It is. Not a chink reveals the life going on beneath those roofs, behind those blinded windows; love, lust, death, birth, anxiety, even gaiety. All is dark; concealed. Alone I wander, no one knowing that I prowl. It makes me feel like an animal, nocturnal, stealthy. I might be a badger or a fox … I think of all the farms and cottages spread over England, sharing this curious protective secrecy, where not even a night light may show from the room of a dying man or a woman in labour … I wander round, and towards midnight discover that the only black-out I notice is the black-out of my soul. So deep a grief and sorrow that they are not expressible in words. One magazine commentator inadvertently made himself ridiculous to later generations by remarking that ‘the countryman is accustomed to going about in the dark, and, alternatively, to staying in at nightfall’, then adding: Townsmen at present may still be, on the whole, a race of gropers after nightfall; but they are undaunted gropers, and will develop the sense which enables them to find their way in the dark. Even undaunted gropers found nocturnal sounds disturbing. The mellow hoots of a tawny owl were enough to scare East Enders witless, and, as winter came on, the dry triple bark of a dog fox on his nuptial round, or the scream of a vixen mating, might terrify anyone who did not know what creature was creating the disturbance. The boy from Surrey who found delight in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors remarked on ‘the weird, cackling laugh’ of grouse: ‘Had I been a stranger walking on the moor at night, I might have thought it was some evil spirit leering from the darkness.’ There was an awful lot to learn. One boy who had never been in a car before was driven up to his foster-home by the vicar, and noticed a strange diagram on the knob of the gear lever. When he reached the house, he reported that the driver had a swastika in his car – with the result that the local bobby was alerted, and went round to interrogate the priest. Hardly any cottages or farms had telephones, and soon communication became even more difficult, for, under the guise of maintenance, General Post Office engineers began cutting subscribers off so that most of the system, such as it was, could be reserved for essential purposes of defence. Householders who lost their line were compensated, but had no right of appeal. Telegrams were much used, and boys could earn useful pocket money by conveying them to their destinations – 7d for a bicycle trip out to a distant farm, 2d for a shorter ride. If a message contained bad news, the postmaster (who, of course, had read it) would tell the boy not to wait for an answer. Besides the difficulties of communication, another annoyance was the suspension of weather forecasts, which were suppressed indefinitely for fear that they might somehow help the enemy. Many boys turned out to be natural country lads. One, from Finsbury Park, in north London, and from what he described as ‘the sort of street people lived in when they couldn’t afford a slum’, was translated to the head gardener’s house on an estate in Essex, where he and two friends quickly attached themselves to the gamekeeper ‘like leeches’. Rough shooting in the mornings, rabbiting in the afternoon, we learned more about the countryside in six months than we ever learned before or since. Can you imagine an eleven-year-old kid from a London slum recognising the flight of a snipe, feeding pheasants and partridges on their nests, handling a .410 shotgun, gutting and skinning rabbits, moles or anything else that came within range? Few wartime children can have been luckier than the boys of Dulwich College Preparatory School, in south London, which was closely allied to the college of the same name; for their headmaster (and sole proprietor of the school) John Leakey was a man of exceptional resource and determination. In 1938, expecting London to be heavily bombed the moment war broke out, he decided to construct an evacuation camp of his own in the grounds of a manor house owned by his father-in-law at Coursehorn, near Cranbrook in Kent. There he built six big wooden huts and put up bell tents. The boys, aged from eight to fourteen, loved being in the country. They helped farmers, rode around the lanes on bicycles and learned to read Ordnance Survey maps. Soon they became extremely fit, and Leakey ‘felt a great surge of life and activity pulsing through the camp’. In spite of flu and German measles, they survived one of the coldest winters in living memory, and then revelled in the lovely summer weather of 1940 – until the fall of France suddenly rendered Kent unsafe. In an urgent search for another site, Leakey’s wife Muff explored possible houses in the West Country, but all were too expensive or had already been requisitioned by the Government. Hearing of a hotel in the far north-west of Wales, at Betws-y-Coed, among the mountains of Snowdonia, she sped thither, only to find that it too had been requisitioned. Then her luck changed, and she hit on the Royal Oak Hotel, in the same village, which she managed to rent for ?1000 a year, the landlord to retain the bar. On a baking hot day a special train brought the whole school from Kent to Betws, only to find the hotel still partially occupied – but as soon as each room became vacant, the boys stripped it to make space for their own furniture. When a new scare flared up – that the Germans would seize Ireland and invade England from the west, through the Welsh passes – bloodhounds were trained for tracking parachutists or other infiltrators. Joining the defence initiative, the Leakeys worked with the Home Guard to hide caches of emergency rations in remote caves, and the boys were briefed to make for prearranged rendezvous in the mountains. Between lessons, they lived a wonderfully free outdoor life, walking, cycling, fishing, going for picnics and rock-climbing on Tryfan (one of Snowdon’s neighbouring 3000-foot peaks). Parties went out into nearby Forestry Commission plantations to brash the lower branches of young conifers; they also dammed a stream to make a pond for fire-fighting, and themselves put out two forest fires. So useful was their work that at the end of the war the Commission named a new plantation after the school. They helped the war effort even more directly by collecting sphagnum moss (which is four times as absorbent as cotton wool and contains iodine, making it ideal for use at forward dressing stations, as it can be applied to wounds without being sterilized). One of the boys reported, ‘We are collecting stagnant moss for use in the hospitals’. Their foraging also brought in male fern, foxgloves and nettles (useful for medicaments and dye), and rose hips for the production of syrup rich in vitamin C. One evening Leakey took some of the boys into the graveyard of St Mary’s Church and, as they sat among the ancient tombstones, continued his reading of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: an experience they never forgot. Many of the poet’s rolling cadences – ‘Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,/The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep’ – stayed with them all their lives. As in Kent, the boys became self-reliant and tremendously fit (even though contaminated now and then by new evacuees from Liverpool), and Leakey derived enormous satisfaction from comparing the ‘splendid specimens’ which he had at Betws with the white-faced children with dark lines under their eyes who had remained in London. Later in the war, when the threat of invasion had evaporated and the Blitz on London had died down, the Betws boys went south on overcrowded trains for their holidays, but always rejoiced when they returned to the mountains. The Government had realized that, in the event of war, it would not be possible to evacuate all schoolchildren to private homes, and the Camps Act of April 1939 prompted the creation of the National Camps Corporation. The aim was to build fifty camps in attractive, wooded country, but in the event only thirty-six were completed, thirty-one of them in England and Wales, five in Scotland. Designed by the distinguished Scottish architect T. S. Tait, each could accommodate 350 children in huts made of Canadian red cedar. One of the first was at Colomendy, near Mold in North Wales, where construction began on two sites, upper and lower, in April 1939, on the side of a lovely valley. Known to its inmates as ‘Collo’, the camp was created as a safe refuge for 170 boys and 125 girls from schools in Liverpool, some twenty miles to the north. Many of the inmates were scared by tales of Peg-Leg, the resident lame ghost said to haunt a particular bed in one of the huts; but agreeable recreations included exploration of the local caves and ascents of Moel Famau, the highest hill in the area, whose bare slopes were alleged to be alive with snakes, and from whose summit the fires raging in Liverpool after big air raids were clearly visible, lighting up clouds all over the sky. One girl remembered the peace and quiet of Colomendy as ‘absolute bliss’, but she was terrified for her family who had remained in the city, and she kept writing letters home without knowing if the house was still standing. Another successful camp, in a less dramatic setting, was Kennylands, near Reading in Berkshire, which took in the 300 boys of Beal Grammar School from Ilford. The camp’s setting, in twenty acres of land, gave scope for gardening, pig-rearing, potato-picking and bee-keeping, as well as for adventures in the surrounding woods, which the boys loved. At school many of them were inspired by the teaching of William Finch, a talented artist and writer who came from Lowestoft and created a unique pictorial record of the east coast fishing industry. On 30 September 1940 good reports of Kennylands attracted a visit from King George and Queen Elizabeth, during which the King startled his retinue by scratching a pig’s back. Many schools moved out en bloc, among them the girls of the Royal School in Bath, who were welcomed to the grandeur of Longleat by the owner, Lord Bath, and given the run of the Elizabethan house, including the library, with its priceless collection of books and manuscripts. The boys and staff of Malvern College, whose buildings were requisitioned in September 1940, also landed on their feet, for the Duke of Marlborough offered them the use of his vast home, Blenheim Palace, on the edge of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. Indoors, screens were built round the walls to protect precious tapestries, and the state rooms, together with the 180-foot-long library, became dormitories. In a splendidly sustained burst of energy, the masters dug a half-mile trench to accommodate a new gas main from Oxford. Did any prep school have worse luck than St Peter’s at Broadstairs? When Kent became too dangerous, the boys were evacuated to the relative safety of Shobrooke House, near Crediton in Devon; but during the night of 23 January 1945 the building caught fire, and pupils and staff alike, trapped on balconies, were forced to abseil down makeshift ropes made from torn-up sheets and blankets into six inches of snow. One of the boys, Peter de la Billi?re, then eight, never forgot that nightmare: The sheets were so old that the strips kept tearing through. As every third or fourth boy went over the edge, there would come a yell, followed by a dull thud – and another rope was needed … As we waited on the balcony, the sound of the blaze rose from a muted crackling to a roar, and suddenly the whole [central] dome, with its little bell cupola above it, collapsed downwards into the well of the stairs, sending a fantastic eruption of sparks into the sky. One matron and three boys were killed, and another, who lived, fell onto an iron spike which speared his throat. Peter survived physically unscathed, but was left with a horror of fires, and for the rest of his life has made it his first priority, on arriving at a hotel, to check the escape facilities. Altogether the evacuation from cities and towns displaced nearly four million people. In the first three days of the official exodus one and a half million left London – 827,000 schoolchildren, 524,000 mothers and children under five, 103,000 teachers and other helpers, 13,000 pregnant women and 7000 disabled persons. It is thought that another two million people made their own arrangements: some settled with relatives or in safely situated hotels, and thousands emigrated (or at least sent their children) to the United States, Canada, South Africa or Australia. Under ‘Plan Yellow’ more than 20,000 civil servants were moved to hotels in seaside resorts and spa towns. When the expected massed air attacks failed to materialize, foster-families complained vociferously that they were giving sanctuary to people whose houses or flats were standing intact and empty. Thousands of city-dwellers returned to their homes – and none were keener to go back than the mothers who had accompanied their children into the sticks but had been disgusted by the lack of facilities (mainly shops and picture houses) that the countryside offered. During the relatively calm period that became known as the Phoney War, which lasted into the spring of 1940, it seemed that the whole upheaval had been unnecessary – a huge waste of time and effort, and the cause of untold anxiety. Yet many evacuees took root where they had landed, and grew up to be country people. Martin Wainwright, later Northern Editor of the Guardian, reckoned that ‘for all the initial scares about vermin, disease and incomprehensible Cockney or Geordie, the close-knit world of Britain’s villages benefited from this fresh blood’. Others agreed that the great migration brought positive social benefits. A leader in Country Life entitled ‘Converting the Townsman’ declared: The old drift to the cities has not only been stemmed but reversed … It is a vital matter that we should make it impossible, when the immediate crisis of the war is past, either to relapse again into indifference or to resume the old antipathy between town and country. The least fortunate victims of the mass evacuation were domestic pets. Alarm about the possibility of immediate air attack gripped people so fiercely that during the four days after 3 September 1939 a colossal number of pets were put down. Some were killed by their owners, who brought them to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for burial; others were destroyed by vets or welfare organizations such as the Canine Defence League and the PDSA, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. The slaughter – by captive bolt, gas, electricity or lethal injection – was appallingly rapid; corpses of dogs and cats were soon piled high in and around the killing premises. Thousands of carcasses were incinerated, others dumped and buried on wasteland. The RSPCA gave the total as 200,000, but one later estimate was 750,000, and another 2.5 million – a vastly greater number than that of British civilians (60,000) killed in the whole of the war. The panic seems to have had multiple causes. A rumour had gone round that it was compulsory to get rid of all domestic animals; but this was officially denied – and the idea was refuted by many newspapers, including The Times. Another rumour suggested that Hitler would try to introduce rabies into England, in the hope that the disease would spread from domestic animals to farm stock – but even at the time this must have seemed far-fetched. The immediate trigger was a notice, Advice to Animal Owners, given out by the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee (a unit of the Home Office), which recommended that, ‘if at all possible’, animals should be taken out into the country ‘in advance of an emergency’, but if they could not be placed in the care of neighbours, ‘it really is kindest to have them destroyed’. Memorial notices, feline and canine, began to appear in newspapers. Bereaved cat-lovers immediately predicted a disastrous increase in the rat and mouse population. Determined efforts were made to save as many pets as possible – and pre-eminent among the rescuers was Nina, wife of the 13th Duke of Hamilton, who led a crusade to provide animals with alternative accommodation. First she opened her house north of Regent’s Park as a clearing station; then she created a sanctuary at her country home, Ferne House in Wiltshire, where 200 dogs settled in the coach house, and 200 cats pitched up in the hangar on the private aerodrome. Such was her energy and compassion that she became known as ‘that lady of the dogs’. Four Braced for Invasion (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) This fortress built by Nature for herself, Against infection and the hand of war. Shakespeare, Richard II Big, black capitals stand out starkly from the Ministry of Information’s poster: ‘If the INVADER Comes’. When the Phoney War ended, with the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk at the end of May 1940 and the capitulation of France in June, fear of a German invasion increased sharply. Within days of the fall of Paris on 14 June Hitler’s armies were on the Channel coast and starting to mass for Operation Seel?we (Sealion), the assault on Britain. In his Directive No. 16, issued on 16 July, the F?hrer stated his intentions with characteristic subtlety: As England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English mother country as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued, and, if it should be necessary, to occupy it completely. His Army Commander, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, who was to take charge of Britain if the invasion succeeded, had clear ideas about his treatment of the conquered people. In his Directive No. 5 he proclaimed: ‘The able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and forty-five will … be interned and dispatched to the Continent with a minimum of delay.’ There were also rumours that all young British men were to be sterilized. In his Proclamation to the People of England von Brauchitsch stated: ‘I warn all civilians that if they undertake active operations against the German forces, they will be condemned to death inexorably.’ After the first evacuation of the cities in September 1939, many people had trickled back to their homes; but as Hitler’s forces massed across the Channel, fear reasserted itself and another emigration took place. Driving about the south coast, the American reporter Vincent Sheean got the impression that it was the better off who went first, boarding up their houses and moving further inland. In St Margaret’s, near Dover, a woman whom he had known before the war stood in the door of her cottage and told him ‘how it was’: ‘The gentry’s all gone away,’ she said, her eyes twinkling with some enjoyable malice. ‘It was the same in the last war. I never did ’old with going away the minute there’s a bit of trouble.’ ‘For the second time the war is coming nearer, looming up large and threatening,’ wrote the author Frances Partridge (a pacifist and conscientious objector) in her diary on 3 April. Air raids, invasion, refugees. One’s whole body reacts with a taut restlessness, as though one had a lump of lead for stomach and sensitive wires from it reaching to toes and fingers. As a second exodus from cities took place, villages were flooded once more. Between 13 and 18 June about 100,000 children were evacuated from London and ‘invasion corner’ – the towns on the south coast. Some 17,000 went to the West Country and South Wales, in blazingly hot weather, and by the time one trainload reached Plymouth the young passengers were gasping for water. When drinks were administered by sailors waiting on the platform, some quick-witted young fellow called out, ‘Blimey, we must be near the sea!’ Frances Partridge was one of a reception committee in Hampshire, standing by in a village: The bus came lumbering in … As soon as they got out, it was clear they were neither children nor docksiders, but respectable-looking middle-aged women and a few children, who stood like sheep beside the bus looking infinitely pathetic. ‘Who’ll take these?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Oh well, I can have these two but no more,’ and the piteous cry, ‘But we’re together.’ It was terrible. I felt we were like sharp-nosed housewives haggling over fillets of fish. In the end we swept off two women of about my age and a girl of ten … Their faces began to relax. Far from being terrified Londoners, they had been evacuated against their will from Bexhill, for fear of invasion, leaving snug little houses and ‘hubbies’. By the end of June another 100,000 people had left the South East, and the population of some towns in Kent and East Anglia had shrunk by 40 per cent. The north country author and broadcaster J. B. Priestley recalled a visit to the ghost town of Margate: In search of a drink and a sandwich, we wandered round, and sometimes through, large empty hotels. The few signs of life only made the whole place seem more unreal and spectral. Once an ancient taxi came gliding along the promenade, and we agreed that if we hailed it, making a shout in that silence, it would have dissolved at once into thin air. With this second influx, the rural population again rose sharply. The village school at Thurgarton, in Nottinghamshire, which had taken in twenty-two children from Sheffield the previous autumn, now received another eighteen from Southend. The school became so crowded that some lessons took place in a barn next to the pub, the Coach and Horses. Among the evacuees was Gladys Totman, then seven, who remembered her foster-home, Hill Farm, as ‘sheer paradise’. There was always something going on – new calves and lambs, pink silky piglets in an old galvanised bath in front of the kitchen range, hunting free-range eggs and picking plate-sized field mushrooms or blue buttons on late autumn mornings. We were all included in the farm activities such as hay-making, harvest, potato-picking, gathering blackberries, sloes and hazelnuts. At harvest time there was a school holiday, and we all joined in; we rode on the huge carts … we carried big baskets of bread, cheese, apples and cold tea in quart beer bottles up to the men who worked in the fields well into the dusk. Acorns were collected by the sackful to supplement the pigs’ diet, and rose hips to make syrup for vitamin C. This time hundreds of people brought their domestic animals with them, so that the countryside was freshly inundated with cats and dogs which had survived the initial massacre; many dogs were destabilized by the sudden change of habitat, or by loud noises, and bolted when let out. Their arrival exacerbated the problems of farmers, who accused them of worrying sheep or killing chickens. Some were recovered after frantic hunts by their owners; others disappeared for good, and a few demonstrated uncanny powers of direction-finding, making their own way home over long distances. Later, there were reports of dogs sensing the distant approach of enemy aircraft and beginning to whine or bark long before humans picked up any audible warning of an air raid. Spy fever became ubiquitous. It was assumed that if enemy agents were dropped by parachute, they would surely aim for the countryside, where they might come to earth unseen, rather than urban areas, where they would be spotted and apprehended. For this reason the land became rife with suspicion. Official orders issued to country people, should a parachutist be discovered, included the instruction: ‘DO NOT GIVE ANY GERMAN ANYTHING. DO NOT TELL HIM ANYTHING. HIDE YOUR FOOD AND YOUR BICYCLES. HIDE YOUR MAPS.’ Challenges at road blocks caused travellers untold irritation, for nobody could move across country at night without being stopped and questioned; rumours spread like fire, and there were countless false alarms – none more ridiculous than one which started when a young man with a furtive manner and a strange accent was discovered wandering about in Oxfordshire. Because the Canadian soldiers who found him could not understand what he was saying, they arrested him. When questioned, he gave an address that quickly proved false; and when taxed with being a German agent who had descended by parachute, he said he was exactly that. Moreover, he gave the name of a well-known local farmer, claiming that this man was the chief German agent in the area, to whom he had been ordered to report. To the chagrin of the farmer, and the disappointment of the authorities, the entire story proved a fabrication: the stranger was Welsh, a parson’s son who had once worked for the farmer, but now had deserted from his anti-aircraft unit – a crime for which he was sentenced to two years in gaol. It was purely his accent that had foxed the Canadians. In that febrile atmosphere spy mania flourished. All strangers were suspect. A man walking along a lane with a pack on his back was obviously a spy – until he turned out to be a farm worker on his way to a distant field. Scratches which appeared on telegraph poles were waymarks incised by agents to guide the German infantry when they invaded. Arrow-shaped flower beds in cemeteries had been deliberately planted with white flowers so that they pointed towards ammunition dumps. A farmer who covered a field with heaps of white lime was suspected of deploying them in a pattern that would indicate the direction of a railway junction to a pilot overhead. The population was warned against impostors. ‘Most of you know your policemen and your ARP wardens by sight,’ ran an official pamphlet. ‘If you keep your heads, you can also tell whether a military officer is really British or is only pretending to be so.’ Particular suspicion attached to nuns – or to people dressed like them – who were almost certainly enemy spies in disguise, with weapons hidden under their habits. Amateur sleuths followed black-clad figures eagerly, only to be disappointed when the fugitives turned round and revealed themselves as elderly women. One day on a train the writer Virginia Woolf insisted to her husband Leonard in a stage whisper that a woman who had got into their carriage was a German spy. In fact she was an embarrassed and innocent nun. In fact a few spies were arriving, some by parachute, some by ship or submarine. In the autumn of 1940 twenty-odd German agents came to Britain, but all were so incompetent or amateurish that they were quickly rounded up, mainly because the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park had cracked the wireless code used by the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) and were reading messages between Berlin and its outstations. Forewarned and forearmed, the British arrested the new arrivals one after another – all except one man who escaped and shot himself. After interrogation, five of the prisoners were executed, fifteen were gaoled and four were taken on to become double agents. A leaflet issued by the Ministry of Information gave civilians detailed instructions on how to behave if the Germans arrived. Just as in 1803, when fear of invasion by Napoleon’s armies was widespread, the inhabitants of Hastings had been advised to stay at home ‘for the preservation of their lives and property which would be much endangered by any attempt to remove from the Town’, so now people were told: ‘You must remain where you are. The order is to “stay put” to avoid clogging up the roads and being exposed to aerial attack … Think always of your country before you think of yourself.’ Individual motorists were ordered to immobilize their cars by taking the rotor arm out of the distributor whenever they left them; the police were empowered to remove some essential part of the mechanism from any vehicle they found inadequately crippled, and to leave a label on the car saying that the part could be recovered from a police station. Another Government order prohibited the use of ‘wireless receiving apparatus’ in all road vehicles. A leaflet reminded farmers that their first duty was to ‘go on producing all the food possible … Unless military action makes it impossible, go on ploughing, cultivating, sowing, hoeing and harvesting as though no invasion were occurring.’ ‘Plough now! By day and night’ exhorted one of the Ministry’s posters. Farmers also received instructions for putting their tractors out of action if there was a danger that the enemy might capture them. Parish Invasion Committees were formed ‘to draw up precise inventories of things available likely to be of use – horses, carts, trailers, wheelbarrows … crowbars, spades, shovels … paraffin lamps etc’. The Ministry of Information issued a short film, Britain on Guard, only eight minutes long, with script and narration by J. B. Priestley, which included an excerpt from Churchill’s ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ speech, and the stirring declaration that Britain was responsible ‘for the future of the civilised world’. Along the south coast farmers made plans to move their cattle and sheep inland, their overriding aim being to ensure that neighbours did not manage to annex any of their animals during a sudden, unseasonable transhumance. With nerves on edge, people began to agitate for permission to take up arms to defend themselves. From their redoubts in the Home Counties superannuated colonels dropped hints in letters to the press: ‘Retired men over the age limit are of course a confounded nuisance in wartime, but’ … ‘Parachutists? The great army of retired-and-unwanted at present … can all use the scatter-gun on moving objects with some skill.’ The newspaper tycoon Lord Kemsley suggested to the War Office that rifle clubs should be formed as the basis of a home defence force, and the Sunday Pictorial asked if the Government had considered training golfers in rifle shooting, to pick off German parachutists as they descended. The Home Office, worried that private defence forces might start to operate outside military control, issued a press release laying down that it was the army’s task to engage enemy parachutists: civilians were not to fire at them. In the House of Commons an MP asked the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, whether, ‘in order to meet the imminent danger of enemy parachute landings’, he would sanction the immediate formation of a corps of older, armed men ‘trained for instant action in their own localities’. Together with senior military officers, the Government had been putting together a plan, and on the evening of 14 May, after the nine o’clock news, Eden came on the radio with a stirring announcement: We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain as are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the Local Defence Volunteers. The name describes its duties in three words. You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed. Anyone might join, said Eden, simply by handing in his name at the local police station. The result was phenomenal. Men were heading for their nearest station before he had finished speaking, and within seven days 250,000 too old or too decrepit to fight in the armed services, or already in reserved occupations, signed up for the LDV. On the day after Eden’s broadcast the War Office announced that volunteers would be issued with denim uniforms and field service caps – and these had to suffice until serge khaki battledress and armbands became available. Such was the enthusiasm that in July the number of volunteers rose to 1.5 million, but at first the organization of the new force was chaotic, as different factions had different ideas about its role. Almost at once it became known by its alleged motto: Lie Down and Vanish. Was its purpose merely to act as an armed constabulary, observing the movements of any German troops who landed, or was it to be more aggressive, and attack invaders whenever possible? Within days the embryonic organization had a new title. Churchill, disliking ‘Local Defence Volunteers’, which he found uninspiring, changed its name to the Home Guard. Enthusiasm was particularly strong on the south coast, where any invasion force was most likely to land. When a company was formed in Worthing, with platoons in the town and outlying villages, two local benefactors each offered ?1000 for the purchase of arms and equipment, and a theatre was taken over as a headquarters. One of its first units was established at Storrington, a village north of Worthing, where recruits set up their headquarters in an evacuated monastery and began to patrol the South Downs on the lookout for paratroopers, besides guarding a railway tunnel against sabotage. Little did they know how quickly they might have become engaged with German forces – for in the final version of Hitler’s invasion plan, after a landing between Brighton and Eastbourne some units would have swung westwards along the line of the Downs, and Storrington would have lain directly in their path. If anyone sought to ridicule the new organization, there were plenty of spokesmen to defend it. ‘It is no mere outlet of patriotic emotion that we are endeavouring to recruit,’ said Lord Croft, the Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for War, in the House of Lords, ‘but a fighting force which may be at death grips with the enemy next week, or even tomorrow.’ Another leading advocate of the need for a people’s army trained in guerrilla warfare was Tom Wintringham, the Communist writer and editor who had visited Moscow in the 1920s and commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, during which he was twice wounded. In the summer of 1940 he set up a private training school in Osterley Park, Lord Jersey’s stately home in Isleworth, teaching street fighting and the use of explosives; but because of his Communist background, the War Office did not trust him. Having first tried to close the school, they took it over in September 1940, setting up training establishments of their own. Wintringham himself was never allowed to join the Home Guard, since membership was banned to Communists and Fascists. Twenty-eight years later the Home Guard would be immortalized (and ridiculed) by the BBC television series Dad’s Army, which became one of the nation’s favourite programmes. At the outset in 1940 much about the organization was ridiculous, not least its weapons, which included wooden rifles, pitchforks, pick-handles, ancient revolvers, swords, daggers, stilettos, clasp knives and coshes made from garden hosepipe filled with lead. The force’s initial low rating derived partly from a remark by Churchill, who told the War Office that ‘every man must have a weapon of some kind, be it only a mace or a pike’. Taking him at his word, the War Office ordered 250,000 metal poles with surplus rifle bayonets welded to the ends – a move much resented by the volunteers, as it made them sound idiotic, and no more use than bystanders in the production of a Shakespeare comedy. Other objects of mockery were their ill-fitting denim overalls, which had a revolting smell when new. When squads started marching about on their evening parades, little boys would run after them, derisively calling out the sizes from the tickets on their backs and trousers, and comparing them unfavourably with the physique of the wearers. A good deal about the nature of the organization is revealed in The British Home Guard Pocket-Book, a small volume which first appeared in October 1940. Its author, Brigadier General Arthur Frank Umfreville Green, had fought in the Boer War and First World War. In 1940 he was sixty-one, and his rank and seniority made him an obvious choice for the commander of some Home Guard unit; but he preferred to let junior officers exercise control, while he went round teaching his own special subject, musketry. He was also something of a writer, with two published novels to his credit, and clearly had a robust sense of humour. His pocket-book, though primarily an instruction manual, was so engaging that it sold 22,000 copies in its first year and was reprinted five times before going into a second edition in 1942. The text – 150 pages of detailed advice on leadership, training, weapons, battle drill, reconnaissance, patrolling, digging trenches, creating obstacles, handling explosives and many other topics – was both outspoken and intensely practical, and his first chapter set the tone: As I see it, our only excuse for existence is to look out for Germans and to help the military to kill them, or – better still – kill themselves. Discipline does not consist merely in smartness on parade – it consists in all working as a team and obeying a permanent or temporary Leader promptly, vigorously and intelligently … Duds, Dead-Weight and Passengers – are they of any use to H.G.? What are we to do with malcontents and subversive individuals and inefficient men? The answer is easy. As Mr Middleton [the radio gardener] teaches us to prune roses, so can we prune our duds. ‘Ruthlessly’ is the operative word. We are at war, and there is no time to spare. If you see dead wood or anything unhealthy – cut it out. Rank. Are we to salute or not? Whom shall we salute? If, for example, a tradesman with no military prestige … has in his unit an Admiral and a couple of Generals, the question they ask is ‘Who salutes whom?’ My answer is clear. If I am a Volunteer in a section or a patrol commanded by a General or a Blacksmith or my own Gardener, I do what he orders to the best of my ability. And on parade I salute him. Stirred up by General Green and others, many countrymen handed in their shotguns for use by the Home Guard, and these were tested by experts for their ability to fire single-ball ammunition. Later the volunteers were properly armed with British .303 rifles and American P17 .300 Springfields, and they quickly became less of a joke then than now. Captain Mainwaring and his ramshackle crew provoked great hilarity in the television audiences of another generation, but it is easy to forget that 1600 members of the Home Guard were killed on duty during the war. Many absurd incidents did take place. One moonlit night there was a call-out in Shropshire, when somebody claimed to have seen a parachute descending. Norman Sharpe, gamekeeper on the Apley Hall estate, remembered how he and his fellow volunteers rapidly took up prearranged positions: The night wore slowly on, with everyone becoming increasingly bored and tired. Suddenly a shot rang out! Action at last! Everyone was electrified. Complete with escort, the Company Commander strode away in the direction of the shot. A sentry had been posted along a narrow lane, and he was asked, ‘Did you fire that shot?’ ‘Yes Sir.’ ‘What at?’ ‘A rabbit, Sir.’ ‘You absolute so-and-so.’ ‘Yes Sir. But I did as you instructed. I said halt but he came on. I said halt again and he took a few more hops forward. I challenged a third time and still he came on, so I shot him.’ Much of the recruits’ time was spent training. Nineteen-year-old Charles Bond, at forestry school in the Forest of Dean, beyond the Severn in Gloucestershire, was actively involved, and many an entry in his diary recorded Home Guard activities: ‘HG exercise in morning … HG parade … rifle range drill, distance judging … HG lecture on Sten gun, practice at moving in extended order through woods … Posting night sentries.’ But a questionnaire issued by headquarters in Inverness to all Zone Commanders, Group Commanders and Battalion Commanders, and kept under lock and key, suggests that in March 1941 instruction was still at an early stage: ‘How do you distinguish between enemy and friendly (a) parachutists (b) troop carriers? … Do you and your men understand map references? Have you a map? … Have you fired your rifle? If so, what result?’ The amateur soldiers studied maps, gave orders to the platoon in drill halls and went on exercises at weekends, often in pairs, guarding railway lines and bridges, and defending beaches against practice attacks by units of the regular army. Indoors, they stripped their rifles with the lights on and reassembled them in the dark. For live firing on the ranges, they were supervised by regular soldiers. At first ammunition was so scarce that men were allowed to fire only five rounds a day. All the same, target practice took place not just on designated ranges but also in old quarries and chalkpits, where any vertical wall or cliff-face served as a stop-butt and minimized the chance of casualties among the local population. For country boys on the loose, such places were a delight, for they yielded treasures such as empty cartridge cases, fragments of grenades and even the occasional live round. Spent .22 bullets were highly prized, even if crumpled up by impact on metal or stone, for they could be melted down, fashioned into arrow-heads and fitted to home-made shafts of hazel or willow. Better trophies still were intact heavy-calibre machine-gun bullets found dumped, presumably because they had failed to fire; and thunderflashes, which simulated grenade explosions. Sometimes these big, thick fireworks were accidentally dropped during night exercises and could be found lying about in the morning – but they needed careful handling, for a premature detonation could easily blow off fingers. Even bits of bomb casing were much valued. Ian Hacon and Peter Lucas, two boys who lived near Ipswich, were much given to riding around the countryside on their bikes. When they discovered an ammunition dump which was guarded during the day but not at night, they several times climbed over the barbed wire and helped themselves to cartridges, which they sold to school friends for 2d each. Schools, of course, made it illegal to collect such desirable souvenirs, and boys found secreting them were punished, usually with the cane; nevertheless, collectors keenly swapped and traded items, not least the silver paper dropped by enemy aircraft to confuse radar. In the words of the historian Geoffrey Cousins, ‘Although defence was the stated object of the exercise, every man who answered the appeal [to join the Home Guard] was captivated by the idea of being on the offensive.’ That opinion was seconded by Captain Clifford Shore, an expert on guerrilla warfare and sniping, who reckoned that the creation of the force had a marked effect on morale: quite apart from its practical use, it gave men a positive way of serving their country. To him it was ‘a marvellous organisation’, and did a tremendous amount of good. ‘I am sure it prolonged the life of many men, taking them away from a life of total sedentary [sic] and lack of healthy interest. Thousands of men discovered the delights of shooting for the first time.’ Among the part-time soldiers was Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984. Having failed an army medical, he joined the Home Guard and became a sergeant in the St John’s Wood platoon – only to be incensed by closer acquaintance with the army, and in particular by the futility of a lecture from some general: These wretched old blimps, so obviously silly and senile, and so obviously degenerate in everything except physical courage, are merely pathetic in themselves, and one would feel rather sorry for them if they were not hanging round our necks like millstones … The time has almost arrived when one will only have to jump up on the platform and tell them [the rank and file] how they are being wasted and how the war is being lost, and by whom, for them to rise up and shovel the blimps into the dustbin. Soon after the creation of the Home Guard – and as a protest against the exclusion of women – the Amazon Defence Corps was set up by ladies with hunting, shooting and deer-stalking experience. In Herefordshire the redoubtable Lady Helena Gleichen took the lead. British, but the daughter of Prince Viktor of Hohenlohe-Langeburg (and so a grand-niece of Queen Victoria), she had abandoned her German titles during the First World War and worked with distinction for the British Red Cross in Italy. Later she became a well-known painter, particularly good at depicting horses. Then in 1940, aged sixty-seven, she formed her estate workers and tenants into an unofficial observation corps, the Much Marcle Watchers, eighty-strong and armed with their own weapons. But when she applied to the Shropshire Light Infantry for rifles, ‘plus a couple of machine guns, if you have any’, she received a dusty answer. Her initiative reflected the tension gripping England by the middle of May 1940: it seemed possible that the invasion might start at any moment. Hitler’s forces had stormed through France to the coast only twenty miles from Dover at such a speed that it was easy to imagine their momentum propelling them on across the Channel. Particularly in the country, where paratroops were most likely to land, everyone was on edge. Margery Allingham described how many people in her village were overcome not by any particular grief, but by cumulative emotional strain. Government posters were plastered up everywhere: ‘Dig for Victory’, ‘Lend a hand on the land’, ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ ‘BEWARE’ shouted one of the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ series, with a crude caricature of half Hitler’s face in the top corner: Whether alone or in a crowd Never write or say aloud, What you’re loading, whence you hail, Where you’re bound for when you sail. ABOVE ALL NEVER GIVE AWAY THE MOVEMENTS OF H.M. SHIPS Although most members of the Home Guard lived in towns, their real role was on the land, where they felt they were defending their own territory. As J. B. Priestley put it in one of his immensely popular Sunday evening Postscript broadcasts in June 1940, describing a night vigil: Ours is a small and scattered village, but we’d had a fine response to the call for volunteers … I think the countryman knows, without being told, that we hold our lives here, as we hold our farms, upon certain terms. One of these terms is that while wars still continue, while one nation is ready to hurl its armed men at another, you must if necessary stand up and fight for your own … As we talked on our post on the hill-top, we watched the dusk deepen in the valleys below, where our women-folk listened to the news as they knitted by the hearth … I felt too up there a powerful and rewarding sense of community, and with it too a feeling of deep continuity. There we were, ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk, turning out at night, as our fathers had often done before us, to keep watch and ward over the sleeping English hills and fields and homesteads. Of course, rivalry sprang up between neighbouring units, each hell bent on defending its own patch, and reluctant to help anyone else. In Devon a man whom the poet Cecil Day-Lewis tried to recruit came back with the retort: ‘We don’t want to fight for they buggers at Axmouth, do us?’ Small detachments were posted to man lookouts, some of them on the tops of church towers; they struck aggressive poses when photographed, but, in spite of the all-round enthusiasm, recruits were often scared of their own weapons, and numerous accidental discharges took place. One man put an M 17 round through the flat roof of a golf clubhouse which had been identified as an ideal Home Guard observation point. The bullet tore a large exit hole in the roof, missing the watchman above by inches. Another stray round went through the driver’s door of an Austin Seven, deflated the cushions in both front seats and passed out through the passenger door, leaving a neat hole. People supposed that if German parachutists landed they would try to hide in woods, where, at close range, a shotgun would be a handier weapon than a rifle. Unofficial experiments were therefore conducted to make shotguns more lethal – for instance, by opening up cartridges and pouring molten wax into the pellets to form a heavier and more solid single missile, with greater killing power. There was a risk that the procedure would bulge or even split the barrel of the gun; but its efficacy was proved when someone fired a doctored 12-bore cartridge at an old barn, and the whole door collapsed in a cloud of dust and splinters. In their attempts to grow more corn, farmers were seriously impeded by military plans for protecting the countryside against the possibility of enemy airborne landings. All over the South East fields were disfigured by new defences. Anti-tank lines of reinforced concrete cubes, each weighing a ton or more and cast in situ, were strung out across fields, often two or three rows deep. Where firing lines were cleared through woodland, the trees were felled across each other and the stumps were left high. In June the Ministry of Agriculture encouraged farmers to build their hayricks in the middle of fields – especially flat fields suitable for glider landings. All open spaces should be obstructed (the directive said), and some fields should be trenched diagonally. In Wiltshire and Gloucestershire broken telegraph poles were dug into the ground upright and festooned with networks of wires. In other fields trees were felled and laid across a glider’s most likely line of approach. To protect standing corn from incendiaries, farmers were advised to cut ten-yard-wide strips across any large field, aligning the firebreaks with the prevailing wind, while the crop was still green. The immature cut corn could be used as fodder or made into silage, and when harvest approached and the remaining crop was dry the danger of a major blaze would be reduced. Along the coast entanglements of barbed wire, with one coil laid on top of two others, blocked the beaches, which were also protected by minefields and miles of anti-tank scaffolding. Some possible landing places were stocked with barrels of pitch, which could be set on fire to incinerate troops trying to come ashore, and in other bays oil was pumped out underwater so that it could be released to form pools on the surface, which could be ignited. Concrete pillboxes sprouted on the cliffs and vantage points, some sunk into the ground, some showing above it. Areas of Romney Marsh were flooded, in the expectation that they might be used for a landing, and thousands of sheep were driven inland to deny the enemy any chance of seizing them. Swarms of barrage balloons swung in the sky, not only above and on the outskirts of conurbations, but round individual factories. In the rush to collect scrap metal for munitions, iron railings round parks disappeared. Churchyard gates and railings – many of them beautifully designed – went the same way. Metal objects – even hairpins and combs – vanished from the shops. To confuse enemy trying to travel by road, signposts were removed from junctions, railway crossings and stations. Old milestones with names carved on them were dug up and taken into safe keeping. If the names of towns and villages appeared on shop fronts, they were painted over. All this was irksome for country people and anyone trying to move around on legitimate business: if a motorist pulled up at a crossroads to ask for directions, locals were forbidden to answer his questions. As the American Vincent Sheean remarked, ‘The barricading of roads was going on all through the country, and you did not have to travel far down any one of them to see the sudden feverish construction of tank traps and airplane obstacles … The threat of invasion had suddenly risen like a dark cloud over the whole island.’ The aim was not so much to stop an enemy advance as to delay it until strong British forces could muster further inland, and ships of the Royal Navy could steam down from Scapa Flow, where they had been sheltering, to knock out the German fleet in the Channel and cut off the invaders’ supplies of fuel, ammunition and food. On shore, the general plan was to move vital assets away to the west, as far as possible from likely landing points and lines of advance. The King and Queen – the jewels in the crown – were furnished with a personal bodyguard consisting of one company of the Coldstream Guards, known, after its commander, Lieutenant Colonel J. S. Coats, as the Coats Mission. With their four armoured cars and some civilian buses, the little force stood by to whisk the royal family out of danger, particularly in the event of an airborne landing by enemy forces. Their initial rendezvous would have been Madresfield Court, a huge, redbrick house, part-Jacobean, part-Victorian Gothic, with more than 130 rooms, standing out in the plain at the foot of the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. The home of the Lygon family for eight centuries, the house is now inextricably associated with Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, which was inspired by his fascination with the Lygon girls, Lettice, Maimie, Coote and Sibell, with their brother Hugh, whom he knew at Oxford, and their notorious father, the homosexual Lord Beauchamp, whose excesses eventually forced him to live abroad (his brother-in law, the Duke of Westminster, who loathed him, referred to him as ‘my bugger-in-law’). Brideshead and its landscape, as Waugh described them in 1945 – the house set in a valley above a lake, among rolling hills – bore no physical resemblance to ‘Mad’ and its pancake surroundings; but the author had been entranced by another immense house, Castle Howard, near York, and made that his model for the home of the Flyte family. On that and his love of the Lygons he built a dream world, and there is no doubt about the twin sources of his inspiration: Brideshead is a version of Castle Howard, but Sebastian Flyte, the central figure in the novel, is Hugh Lygon in all but name. In 1940 Madresfield, with its sixty acres of gardens, its carp-haunted moat and four glorious avenues, would never have been remotely defensible, furnished though it was with a token guard force. Nevertheless, large quantities of non-perishable food were imported and stored in the basement, and much of Worcestershire was fortified as a kind of redoubt. The Severn, Avon and Teme rivers were designated ‘stop lines’, with crossing points defended by camouflaged gun emplacements, tanks parked in copses, pillboxes, road blocks and lines of trenches. Worcester itself, Kidderminster and Redditch were marked out as anti-tank islands, to act as centres of resistance, and the aim was to retard any German advance until regular home forces could regroup. On the eastern side of Worcester another great house – Spetchley Park – was earmarked as a refuge for Churchill and his Cabinet if the invasion took place or London became too dangerous. The grand Palladian building belonged (and still belongs) to the Berkeley family, and before the war was a haunt of the composer Edward Elgar, who often stayed in the Garden Cottage and told his hosts that parts of The Dream of Gerontius were inspired by pine trees in the park. If the Germans had landed, the transfer to the west would have taken place in two phases: in Yellow Move, non-essential staff from Whitehall would have led the way, followed, in Black Move, by the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and the royal household. The city of Worcester would have been invaded by armies of civil servants, and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon would have housed Parliament. Luckily for the owners, in the event neither Madresfield nor Spetchley was needed for senior evacuees from London; but later in the war the US Eighth Air Force took Spetchley over as a recuperation centre for pilots, and added to its amenities by building a squash court. Two other grand houses, further north, were also considered as possible royal retreats. One was Pitchford Hall in the wilds of Shropshire, a wonderfully romantic, black and white Tudor mansion in which the King and Queen had stayed (while Duke and Duchess of York) in 1935. The other was Newby Hall, home of the Compton family, an eighteenth-century redbrick house set in splendid gardens at Skelton-on-Ure in North Yorkshire. While the King and his Government stood fast, Nazi propaganda took to the air by way of the New British Broadcasting Station, which sent out messages intended to intimidate the population of the United Kingdom. The broadcasts, purporting to emanate from dissident elements within the country, sought to portray a nation in disarray and ripe for takeover. ‘Disunity, demoralisation, hatred of its leaders and a passionate yearning for peace were the distinguishing characteristics of this cloud-cuckoo land,’ wrote one historian. Everybody knew that not only Churchill and his friends but even Socialist Cabinet Ministers were being bribed by Jews to continue the war. Sabotage was rife, and so were foot-and-mouth disease, faked Treasury notes and tins of meat poisoned by German agents in the Argentine. More concrete attempts were made to unnerve the population. On the night of 13/14 August 1940, German aircraft staged an Abwurfaktion (throwing-down or dropping action), in which ‘pack assemblies’ were released by parachute over various parts of the Midlands and lowland Scotland. The packs contained maps, wireless transmitters, explosives, addresses of prominent people and instructions to imaginary agents about their roles in the imminent invasion. The aim was to suggest that the attack would come from the east coast, and that a Fifth Column of Fascists and Nazi sympathizers eager to undermine the regime was established all over the country, ready to receive the invaders. Farmers, in particular, were sceptical: they pointed out that documents purporting to be those of parachutists who had landed in standing corn, but had left no trails when they moved out of the field, must have been carried by men with exceptional powers of levitation. There was much talk of Fifth Columnists, but most people thought that, if any existed, they were harmless. On the contrary: in the words of the historian Ben Macintyre, ‘There was an active and dangerous Fifth Column working from within to hasten a Nazi victory … motivated in large part by a ferocious hatred of Jews.’ Not for seventy years did the release of secret files reveal that during the war a large network of crypto-Fascist spies in Britain had been run – and neutralized – by one extraordinarily skilful and courageous agent working for MI5, who posed as a member of the Gestapo. He was known as Jack King, until, in 2014, his real name was revealed as John Bingham. His contacts thought he was working for the Nazis, and happily revealed their treachery to him, but none of them was ever prosecuted, partly because they were doing no real harm, and partly because any action taken against them might have broken Jack King’s cover. On 13 June 1940 the Government imposed a ban on the ringing of church bells, except to warn of imminent air raids or invasion – in which case they would play the role of the beacon fires which signalled the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Even in an emergency they might be rung only by the military or the police. Senior clerics protested, and the restriction caused displeasure among many villagers, who felt that an important part of their lives had been suppressed, and that, in the event of an attack, the invaders might single out churches for retribution, on the grounds that they were part of the defenders’ warning system. Prophesying doom, The Ringing World denounced the ban as ‘a stunning blow to ringing, from which, even when the war is over, it will take a long time to recover’. On the other hand, some people who lived near churches were delighted, and hailed the silence on Sunday mornings as one of the few blessings brought by the war. As the threat of invasion waned, the restrictions were gradually lifted, but not until VE Day in May 1945 were full peals allowed again. Country priests and members of congregations did what they could to protect their churches from bomb damage. At Fairford, in Gloucestershire, the vicar, the Revd Francis Gibbs, supervised the removal of the outstanding medieval stained glass from the windows of St Mary’s Church and had thousands of pieces buried in a vault beneath a large memorial cross in the grounds of Fairford Park, outside the village. In a similar but even bigger undertaking, the twelfth-century stained glass was removed from the great window in the south-west transept of Salisbury Cathedral. Three effigies from the Cathedral were wrapped up and taken to East Quantockshead in Somerset, where they were hidden in the cellar of St Audrey’s School; the transfer was supposed to be deadly secret, but pupils in the school saw the bundles arriving, thought they were bodies, and alarmed their parents with lurid stories about casualties or plague victims. As the bells fell silent, new airfields were being laid out all over the country, especially in East Anglia, some with grass strips good enough for fighters and light bombers, others with asphalt or concrete runways for heavier aircraft. Hangars and Nissen huts made from curved sheets of corrugated iron (for accommodation and storage) sprouted at their edges. To the irritation of people living close by, footpaths across these new bases and other military areas were closed for the duration. Besides the genuine airfields, numerous decoys were created in the hope of luring Luftwaffe pilots away from vulnerable targets. Daylight airfields, known as K sites, were furnished with inflatable or wooden aircraft, usually with wings but only a skeleton fuselage. To add verisimilitude, redundant training aircraft, old bomb tractors and other service vehicles were parked in the open and moved around to new positions during the night. On dummy night airfields, known as Q sites, there was often a runway flare path made from small burning lamps, and lights that went on and off at various points to give the impression of vehicles moving. Experiments were made with various kinds of fires, including drums of burning creosote, designed to simulate activity in railway yards or factories. The decoy fields began to attract attention immediately after the withdrawal from Dunkirk. One successful K site was at East Kirkby in Lincolnshire, where wooden Whitley bombers were trundled around from day to day by the local RAF contingent: their efforts evidently paid off, for German planes bombed the airfield several times. The Q sites in East Anglia and Lincolnshire were the most frequently targeted, and during June thirty-six Q raids were recorded in England as a whole. All farming became more difficult and dangerous, especially in the south and east of the country as, out of sheer spite, stray German aircraft began to attack obviously civilian targets before they headed for home. One Luftwaffe pilot provoked a volley of sarcastic comments on the ground in Kent when he bombed a hayrick and then came in on another low pass, riddling the stack with his machine guns. As the farm workers had already taken shelter, the only casualties were a few sheep. Some countrymen went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard their property. Colonel Charles Owen, who had been involved with the development of camouflage during the First World War, lived in a house called Tre Evan on a hill outside the Herefordshire village of Llangarron, near Ross-on-Wye. There he went up and down a ladder to paint the building’s white, stuccoed front with splodges of green and brown, both to make it a less conspicuous target, and to disguise a landmark that might be useful to the enemy pilots on their way to or from Coventry or Cardiff. Neighbours – mostly First World War veterans – considered the exercise mildly eccentric, and the Colonel’s family found it rather embarrassing; but he – head of the local ARP squad – was serious about it, and organized regular fire drills, during which his grandchildren stood to with stirrup pumps and pails of water. Five Going to Ground (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well … First she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Captain Peter Fleming was an unconventional figure, to say the least. An Old Etonian aged thirty-two at the start of the war, he was well known to the public as the author of two runaway bestsellers published in the 1930s, twenty years before his younger brother Ian thought up James Bond. Brazilian Adventure – funniest of travel books – sent up a quest for the explorer Percy Fawcett lost in the Mato Grosso, and News from Tartary described how the author had walked 3500 miles from Peking to Kashmir in the company of Ella Maillart, lesbian captain of the Swiss women’s hockey team, without telling his fianc?e, the actress Celia Johnson, that he was accompanied by a woman. Yet, in spite of his renown, Fleming was essentially a private person, and one main qualification for an unusual wartime commission was his first-hand knowledge of the English countryside. At home in the woods and fields of his 2000-acre estate in Oxfordshire, he could distinguish the sett of a badger from the earth of a fox; he could read the tracks left by animals and interpret the calls made by birds and animals both in daylight and in the dark. As a means of confusing the enemy, he would sometimes advocate the Victorian poacher’s trick of walking backwards through mud or snow, to make it look as if the passer-by had been moving in the opposite direction. As the threat of invasion intensified, General Andrew Thorne, Commander of XII Corps, was given the task of defending south-east England along a front that stretched from Greenwich, on the Thames, round the coast of Kent and Sussex to Hayling Island, in Hampshire. Remembering how, six years earlier, he had seen peasants in East Prussia digging last-ditch defence positions in the hills and stocking them with food, weapons and ammunition, in the hope that they would be able to disrupt the supply lines of an invading army, Thorne appointed Fleming to do much the same in England: to raise and train a body of men whose role would be to go to ground behind any German advance and harass the invaders from the rear, while the main line of defence was organized nearer London. Armed with a letter of authority, and operating in the strictest secrecy, Fleming set up his headquarters in a brick and timber farmhouse called The Garth on a hill at Bilting, between Ashford and Faversham. The true identity of his organization was buried under the meaningless title ‘The XII Corps Observation Unit’, and individual patrols were assigned an equally uninformative name, the ‘Auxiliary Units’. Together with Captain Mike Calvert, a Royal Engineer, Fleming first went about his area setting up booby traps by stuffing ammonal explosive into the churns in which dairy farmers set out their milk for collection – but even though these home-made bombs were never fitted with detonators, they made people nervous and were soon removed. He and Calvert also mined a whole belt of bridges, in the hope of slowing any German advance, and booby-trapped country houses which the enemy might use as headquarters by cramming the cellars full of explosives. As Calvert put it, their task was ‘to make Kent and Sussex as unsafe and unpleasant as possible for the Germans if ever they got that far’. They also blew out the centre sections of the piers at Brighton, Worthing and Eastbourne. Then, in absolute secrecy, they began recruiting gamekeepers, poachers, foresters, gardeners and farmers – men with intimate knowledge of the area in which they lived. All were hand-picked, after apparently casual approaches, and all were vetted for security by their local police – even though the police did not know what role the candidates were going to undertake. Meanwhile, Colonel Colin Gubbins (a specialist in guerrilla warfare, and later head of Special Operations Executive) established a training base in Berkshire at Coleshill House, a relatively small but elegant seventeenth-century mansion bristling with tall chimneys, home of the Pleydell-Bouverie family, well isolated by its own park, shrubberies, fields and woods. Recruits were told to report to Highworth village post office, where the elderly postmistress, Mabel Stranks, would check their identity papers, disappear for a few minutes, then return and say ‘Someone’s coming to fetch you’. A vehicle would appear to ferry the newcomer to the house. Training weekends took place in the house and grounds, and three manuals were produced, each succeeding the earlier one as guerrilla activity became more refined. Some predictions were blissfully optimistic: ‘In districts where the war is intense and enemy troops thick on the ground, it will not be necessary to go far to find a target.’ Men chosen to be auxiliaries were set to work building subterranean lairs which they stocked with ammunition, explosives, sabotage equipment, rations and cooking stoves. One of these dens in Kent was in the cellars of a ruined house that had been destroyed by fire years earlier, but most of them lay in dense woods, and at least one was excavated from on old badger sett in a derelict chalkpit: the long, winding tunnels – a foot or so in diameter – were enlarged into a reasonably comfortable hideout, which Fleming himself later described: They [the men] took a pride in their place. They schemed endlessly and worked hard to improve it. Ventilation shafts, alarm signals, dustbins, lights, clothes pegs, bookshelves hollowed out of the chalk, washing up arrangements – all these tactical problems they tackled with enthusiasm. In his book A Very Quiet War Ralph Arnold, ADC to General Thorne, gave an idea of how cleverly the den was concealed. In the middle of a thick belt of woodland on the hillside above Charing, the General was led into a clearing and challenged to find the entrance to the local unit’s hideaway: We poked about unsuccessfully for a few minutes, and then our guide casually kicked a tree stump. It fell back on a hinge to reveal a hole with a rope ladder dangling into a cavern that had been enlarged from a badger’s sett. In this cave, sitting on kegs of explosive, and surrounded by weapons, booby-traps, a wireless set and tins of emergency rations, were some Lovat Scouts and half-a-dozen hand-picked Home Guards … It was pure Boys’ Own Paper stuff, and the Corps Commander, whose brainchild the Auxiliary Units had been, simply loved it. Another distinguished visitor was General Bernard Montgomery, who took over from Thorne as Commander of XII Corps, and early in 1941 was escorted out onto a Kent hillside by Captain Norman Field, Fleming’s successor as the Auxiliary Units’ Intelligence Officer. When the walkers reached a battered old wooden trough, Field suggested they should sit on it to enjoy the view. They did just that, but a few moments later Montgomery was startled to find that, without a sound or any apparent movement, his companion had vanished. Only when he saw Field’s head appear beside him, sticking up through a rectangular opening in the bottom of the trough, did he realize that he had been perching on top of a perfectly concealed hideout. When the young officer told him that this was one of XII Corps’ two-man observation posts, he was furious, because no one had let him know that such lookouts existed; but when he wormed his way down into a small chamber hacked out of the earth, he could not help admiring the way in which two authentic looking rabbit holes leading out through the steep bank beneath the trough had been adapted to give a view of the A20. In the construction of such dens, the disposal of excavated soil was a problem, not least because it usually had to be done in the dark. The diggers would carry away earth and rocks in buckets, and either dump them elsewhere in the wood (having first scraped back the leaves and earth on the forest floor), or tip them into streams strong enough to wash new deposits away. If the site was on sandy ground, the spoil could be loaded into hessian bags, thousands of which were being piled up all over the country to protect buildings or gun sites from blast. Many of the larger bases were built by the Royal Engineers or by civilian contractors, who told inquisitive locals that the holes being dug in the woods were to house emergency food stores. These professionally made dens were lined with sheets of corrugated iron, and had access and escape tunnels made of wide-diameter concrete pipes. Later in the war one, near the Northumberland village of Longhorsley, caused huge excitement among a gang of boys, vividly remembered by Bill Ricalton: We climbed up the wooded hill from the burn side for perhaps fifty or sixty yards. Beside the base of a large tree our leader stopped and cleaned away decayed grass and leaves with his hands, which exposed a wooden door with a handle on it. When the door was opened it revealed a concrete shaft, about two to three feet square. A metal rung ladder was attached to the side, and disappeared into the darkness below … We all descended the steps and into the tunnel below. The bottom of the iron ladder must have been eight feet or more below the trap door. Leading from the bottom was a concrete tunnel, large enough for a grown man to stand up. We were to visit this place many times over the next few years, sometimes just to sit and talk and wonder why it was there and what it was for. Years later shivers went down his spine when he discovered that it had been one of the Auxiliary Units’ lairs, and that the locked rooms (which he and his friends never penetrated) had been stocked with food, water, the new plastic explosive (known as ‘PE’) and weapons, among them Piat anti-tank grenade launchers and the first Thompson sub-machine guns imported from the United States. During the war Boy Scouts were taught to carry verbal messages from one place to another, using roundabout routes to dodge other Scouts sent to intercept them: back gardens, passageways, ditches, orchards, fields – all became familiar undercover approaches. Few, if any, of the boys realized that what seemed an amusing game might, in the event of invasion, suddenly become an important messenger service. Because the role of the Auxiliary Units would be mainly nocturnal, most of their training was done at night, or wearing dark goggles during the day. ‘Make a patrol march past and listen for avoidable creaks,’ Fleming noted in his diary. ‘Even at his stealthiest the British soldier emits a sound as of discreet munching.’ In his own headquarters officers sat on packing cases of explosives and ate off a table formed from boxes of gelignite; but because of his social standing, the diners might sometimes include a brace of generals or even a Cabinet Minister. Fleming himself was almost comically cack-handed, but he took delight in devising esoteric methods of attacking the enemy, such as training his men to shoot with bows and arrows. Archery, he thought, might come in useful, either for silently picking off individual German sentries, or for causing confusion in their camps if arrows carrying small incendiary devices could be shot over perimeter defences, to cause inexplicable fires or explosions within. Posterity credited him with the ability to bring down a running deer at 100 yards, but in reality he could not be sure of hitting a barn door at twenty-five paces. If the invasion had taken place, the auxiliaries would have immediately left their homes and gone to ground, emerging at night. No one will ever know how much the troglodytes could have achieved if the Germans had come. Fleming himself doubted if his force could have been ‘more than a minor and probably short-lived nuisance to the invaders’: he feared that his men would have been hunted down as soon as autumn stripped leaves from trees and hedges, and that reprisals against the civilian population would soon have put the teams out of business. Besides, he noticed that among his own recruits ‘it was not long … before claustrophobia and a general malaise set in, because they were civilised men who had suddenly executed a double somersault back into a cave existence’. His colleague Mike Calvert was more optimistic: If it had been called to action, the Resistance Army of Kent and Sussex would have had at its core some of the toughest and most determined men I have ever met. Their farms and their shops and their homes would have been highly dangerous places for any enemy soldier to enter. No doubt the defenders would have killed quite a few Germans, had the invasion taken place; but, judging by the brutality shown by the Nazis to French resistance fighters, of the two estimates Fleming’s seems the more likely. (As an illustration of this, in July 1944 the Germans massacred hundreds of Maquis in an all-out attack on their stronghold in the Vercors massif, in the south-east of France.) Fleming’s counterpart in Essex, Captain Andrew Croft, a former head boy of Stowe, felt the same as Calvert, and believed that his units could have held out indefinitely by stealing food, weapons and ammunition from the invading forces. In any case, under Colonel Gubbins’s direction resistance cells came into being all over the country, not only in Kent, but in the South West, in East Anglia and up the coasts of Yorkshire, Northumberland and Scotland, as far as Cape Wrath in the far North West. Scotland certainly needed them, for regular troops were thin on the ground, and there was always a chance that the Germans might invade up there. The man chosen to create Auxiliary Units north of the border was Captain Eustace Maxwell, nephew of the Duke of Northumberland and brother of the writer Gavin. His aristocratic connections made it easy for him to recruit, as did the fact that he was an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander; and the terrain in which he went to work – miles upon miles of scarcely populated moors, mountains and coastline – was ideal for guerrilla warfare. So were the inhabitants: farmers, foresters, deerstalkers, ghillies – all used to living and working in the open air. Melville House, a huge, square, four-storey building, the Palladian home of the Leslie-Melville family at Monimail in East Fife, became the Coleshill of the north – a training centre, surrounded by woods and farmland, approached by a beech avenue and equipped with all the facilities needed for firing weapons, setting demolition charges and learning hand-to-hand combat. Behind the house a gentle slope made an ideal background for a small-arms range, and rail tracks were laid in the woods so that budding demolition experts could practise blowing them up. When a German prisoner-of-war camp was established at Annsmuir, near the railway station at Ladybank, Wehrmacht uniforms found their way into Melville House to add verisimilitude to the training. As recruits went through the mill there, hideouts were being dug or built all over Scotland. Ruined castles made ideal sites: caverns were dug out beneath heaps of stone at the foot of collapsed walls, with access via a single, spring-loaded slab. Once a few rainstorms had swept over the rubble, there was no sign that anyone had been there for centuries. Other dens were made beneath houses in villages and entered through cellars – but always with an escape tunnel leading to a disguised exit some distance away. By the end of 1940 about a hundred units were fully established, and Maxwell himself had driven 70,000 miles overseeing their creation. In Britain as a whole some 3000 men were trained to go to ground, and they were issued with liberal amounts of ammunition and explosives. They remained ready for action throughout the war; but so deeply secret was the organization that its existence was not officially admitted until the middle of the 1950s. Later in the war a parallel clandestine organization was formed, under the cover name of the Special Duties Section of the Auxiliary Units. This was a secret radio network staffed mainly by women, who went to ground with transmitters in hideouts of their own, charged with the task of keeping communications open in the event of an invasion. Like the operational bunkers, every den was elaborately concealed: if there was no building at hand tall enough to carry a forty-foot aerial, men from the Royal Corps of Signals would climb a tree, cutting grooves in the trunk, laying the wire in them and filling them with plaster of Paris painted to resemble the bark. During the Phoney War Fleming at times thought uneasily of Rogue Male, a thriller by Geoffrey Household set in the 1930s. In the novel an anonymous British sportsman, ‘who couldn’t resist the temptation to stalk the impossible’, is at large in central Europe, bent on personally assassinating a loathsome dictator. The target’s name is never mentioned, but clearly it is Hitler whom the rifleman has in his sights. Before he can fire a shot, he is seized by security men and beaten up, but escapes and flees back to England. Even there, however, he is not safe. Enemy agents pursue him so tenaciously that he is forced to go to ground in an old badger sett, with the entrance tunnel disguised as an ‘apparent rabbit hole’ in the side of a sunken lane. His only ally is a feral cat which he calls Asmodeus – the legendary king of the demons – and in the end it is this animal, or, rather, its skin, that saves him. The chase is immensely exciting, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the dank hideaway is powerfully evoked. The timing of the novel’s publication, in 1939, was extraordinarily apt, and the book foreshadowed many of the elements – the claustrophobic subterranean redoubts, the nocturnal forays – with which the Auxiliary Units became familiar. Above ground there was at first no place for female talent in the Home Guard; but in 1942 the Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries were formed, and girls were allowed to join the men, both in the office and in the field. At St Ives in Huntingdonshire a small team dealt with telephone and radio equipment in the local headquarters, and also took part in night exercises. One of them remembered how disconcerting it was to find ‘well-respected businessmen from the town crawling along ditches in camouflage, with blackened faces’, and another gave herself a nasty fright when she blundered on all fours into a big, solid, warm lump, which turned out to be a recumbent cow. In the office they whiled away spare time by sending each other frivolous radio messages – until some of them were intercepted by staff at Wyton Airfield, three miles away, who thought the traffic was coded signals transmitted by enemy agents, and the girls were severely reprimanded. Yet another agency at work in town and country was the Royal Observer Corps, whose members spotted, identified and tracked any aircraft that appeared in the sky and reported its details to group headquarters, whence the message was swiftly passed to the RAF. The organization’s motto was ‘Forewarned, Forearmed’ – and success depended on continuous vigilance backed by speedy reaction. During the Battle of Britain the volunteer observers, stationed in posts about ten miles apart, furnished the only means of tracking enemy aircraft once they had crossed the coast; and so valuable was their work that in April 1941 the King awarded the Corps the prefix ‘Royal’. The two-man crews devised any number of comfortable lairs from which to keep watch: wooden huts, little brick buildings, concrete boxes on prominent mounds, penthouses on the roofs of factories. One outpost was beautifully captured by the war artist Eric Ravilious, whose delicate watercolour portrayed two watchers standing in a kind of grouse butt, protected by sandbags and a canvas screen, with a single telephone wire disappearing through the air above a wintry landscape. Still more elaborate was a contraption in Ayrshire which consisted of a heavy metal post sunk into the ground, topped by a revolving cross-piece, on either end of which was a padded seat made from a car’s steering wheel. Each seat revolved individually, and one of the team was always aloft, binoculars at the ready. Although able to operate only in daylight, and often blinded by fog, the Observer Corps provided a vital service throughout the war. But in the autumn of 1940 the enormous, all-round effort of the Auxiliary Units in going to ground proved unnecessary – for the time being, at any rate. It has never become clear why, on 17 September 1940, Hitler ordered the postponement of Operation Sealion until the spring, or why in the end he abandoned his invasion plan altogether. Instead, he unleashed the full fury of the Luftwaffe in the Blitz on London. Six Adapting to War (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) Necessity is the mother of invention Traditional proverb When petrol rationing came into force on 19 September 1939, only 10 per cent of the population had cars; and now each owner was limited to seven gallons – or about 200 miles – a month. The result was that many people put their vehicles into storage, mounting them on blocks in shed or garage to take the weight off the tyres. After November 1940 no new cars were built for civilian use, and those that were available (about 400 in the whole country) were allocated for use by doctors, police and so on. Buses ceased to run, leaving many country people marooned, and most rural roads were almost free of traffic. Restrictions brought out a rash of new bicyclists, who often discovered that travel on velocipedes is hard going: as someone pointed out, ‘A bicycle finds out the uphill gradients in a remarkable manner.’ Because they lacked both practice and confidence, and rode machines bedevilled by lack of maintenance, these novices were a menace to other road-users; but boys soon mastered the trick of catching hold of the back of a slow-moving lorry and getting a tow uphill. Children lucky enough to own bicycles rode to and from school as a matter of course. Old pony traps and governess carts were dragged out of sheds in surprising numbers: dusted down and polished up, they commanded two or three times the price that any owner would have dared ask before the war: ?30 or ?40 instead of ?10 or ?12. The writer Penelope Chetwode (wife of the poet John Betjeman) described how she taught Mrs John Piper, wife of the artist, to ride. Myfanwy had never been near a horse before, but now she sold her car, bought a 14.1 hands black gelding, and after minimal instruction was riding twenty or thirty miles a day around her home near Henley-on-Thames. Farmers were allowed an extra ration of fuel. Even so, lack of petrol often meant that they had to move their sheep and cattle to market on foot, sometimes walking ten or twenty miles a day. Because the police began to stop private cars and ask drivers to justify their journey, many farmers took to carrying a decoy sack of wheat, or the punctured front tyre of a tractor, which remained on board indefinitely as a decoy to allay suspicion. Fuel shortages put new life into another transport medium: the canals. The Grand Union Canal from London to Birmingham was a key route for shifting heavy loads: boats carried fifty tons of steel, aluminium and cement northwards to the industrial Midlands and brought back coal. When some of the barges were laid up for lack of crew, a scheme was launched to recruit women, and more than sixty took up the offer. One, Emma Smith, found that the experience changed her life. Having grown up in a privileged background, the daughter of a banker, she felt that in joining the dockers, the boatmen and the regular boaters who travelled with their families, she had ‘crossed over a boundary line, and never went back. I became a working-class girl.’ On the land, every effort was being made to increase food production. In a message to The Farmers’ Weekly the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dornan-Smith – a popular figure, who had served with a Sikh regiment in India, and was a former President of the National Farmers’ Union – offered the magazine’s readers some stirring thoughts: The fresh-turned furrows are our trenches: the added blades of grass are our bullets, and every extra sheaf of corn is a shell in this war of resources … The war is here in earnest, and two opposing ideas, freedom versus a ruthless tyranny, are locked in a grip in which one or other must die … The farmer is a key man in the events which now shake Western civilisation. In response to the Government’s urgent appeal, agricultural machinery began pouring into the country: from America, under the Lend-Lease agreements made in the spring of 1941, came big Allis-Chalmers and Minneapolis-Molines tractors, but also small Ford Fergusons, built in Detroit under a contract signed in 1938 between the Irish engineer-inventor Harry Ferguson and Henry Ford Senior. Ferguson’s key innovation was the revolutionary three-point linkage, which attached the tractor to an implement (for instance a plough) with hydraulically operated arms, and in effect made the pair a single unit, instead of one pulling the other. During the war thousands of Ford Fergusons were made in America and shipped to Britain, and the three-point linkage has been taken up all over the world. Besides tractors, Massey-Harris combine harvesters came in from America, Sunshine combines from Australia, and various types of drill for sowing seed. Crawler tractors went high up hillsides in the north of England and in Wales, ripping out bracken, which had invaded over two million acres and was useless as fodder, being poisonous to ruminants. A study by the Oxford Agricultural Research Institute worked out that ploughing with a horse and a single-furrow plough cost 12s per acre, whereas a two- or three-furrow tractor cost just over 9s per acre – and the tractor could cover at least four times as much ground in a day. With American imports pouring in, the number of tractors available to farmers increased so fast that in 1941 190 Oxford undergraduates (a third of them girls) were given instruction in the basics of driving and maintenance and sent to a hundred public and secondary schools to pass on their skills to older boys. Each instructor was detailed to take on twenty-four boys of sixteen or over, who would learn to drive ‘dead straight’, and to back a two-wheel trailer between stakes (no easy task). They were also to learn about servicing, ‘the meaning and use of the grease gun and nipples’. The idea of fitting tractors with cabs was still so new that a photograph of a man ploughing steep ground at Almondbank in Perthshire was captioned: ‘The cab on this caterpillar tractor makes the driver independent of good weather.’ Some farmers invented methods of their own for speeding production. One was Jack Hatt, who hitched four implements in line behind a powerful tractor and proclaimed the virtues of PPDH – Plough, for turning the furrows over, Press, for levelling, Drill, for sowing the seed, and Harrow, for working it in. By this means he was able to cover enormous acreages, saving time and fuel. On waterlogged land, especially in the clay of East Anglia, ploughing had to be preceded by the restoration or creation of drains – and here again astonishing results were achieved. By February 1943 the Government had sanctioned 10,380 mole-drainage schemes, 19,725 tile-drainage schemes, 66,011 farm-ditch schemes and 5338 schemes for small areas. The land improved extended to more than four and a half million acres. One outstanding success was the reclamation of 400 acres on Ferrymoor Common in Yorkshire, which until then had been used as a camping ground by gypsies, but after treatment yielded huge crops of potatoes, wheat, oats, rye, clover and turnips. The frenzy of ploughing led to some unforeseen results. One was that on upland farms the pastures on which dairy cattle had been grazing disappeared under corn, and the cows had to move to higher ground. Up there, however, there was often no water, so that the Government had to offer farmers 50 per cent grants to install piped systems. So urgent was the need to increase food production that the Government declared war on all species which it reckoned were inhibiting farmers’ efforts. The first and foremost enemies were rabbits; thousands of acres round the edges of fields close to woods and spinneys were being eaten to the ground, yielding only a quarter of their potential output. Norman Sharpe, gamekeeper on the Apley Hall estate in Shropshire, attributed their proliferation to the fact that control measures had been abandoned during the Great War, and remembered how some of the fields bordering the Spring Copse at Apley Hall ‘simply appeared to be moving of an evening’. On a farm at Linkenholt in Hampshire four guns killed 940 rabbits in a morning, but that made little difference, and the owner became so desperate that he decided to wire in his whole estate. This drastic solution took fourteen miles of rabbit netting, four feet tall, with a mesh of 1? inches, and with the bottom turned outwards horizontally so that rabbits outside the pale could not burrow underneath. Those that remained inside were exterminated by gun, dog, trap, snare and gas; and although fiendishly expensive, the experiment was reckoned to have paid off in the amount of crops saved. If live rabbits were a menace, dead ones were very popular. On one farm near Newton-by-the-Sea, on the Northumbrian coast, the assembled villagers killed 250 out of a single field of corn, whereupon the chief vermin-catcher gave one to everybody present and loaded the rest into his Austin Seven. He and the farmer then drove to the Ship Inn to celebrate their record bag, but got so drunk that when they reached home they failed to empty the car – only to find, in the morning, that most of their cargo had disappeared. As for rats – the annual damage done by them was estimated at ?12 million (over ?600 million in today’s terms), and Mr E. C. Read, later technical adviser to the Ministry, quoted the cost of every rat as 30s a year. The Ministry commissioned a study to determine the cost of rat-proofing corn stacks with circular walls of corrugated-iron sheets, sunk two feet into the ground and protruding four feet above it. Estimating that 411,000 stacks would have been needed to store the 1939 harvest, researchers concluded that the cost of corrugated iron for 1940 would be ?2,719,000. Since this was clearly prohibitive, the Ministry urged farmers to use every means to destroy the vermin: ‘Spring traps, wire traps, snares, sunk pit traps, barrel traps, break-back traps and varnish traps, known as sticky boards.’ In October 1940 the Minister, invoking the Rats and Mice (Destruction) Act of 1919, announced that the annual Rat Week should be held, ‘notwithstanding the war’. Everyone in the country was asked to ‘take concerted action against these vermin’. The success or failure of the initiative was not recorded – but the Pied Piper himself could hardly have matched the performance of Louth Rural District Council, in Lincolnshire, which in the previous November had begun paying 2d for each rat’s tail handed in. By 31 March 1940 almost 42,500 rats had been destroyed. This astonishing cull must have reduced the local population substantially; but as Country Life declared, ‘A combined effort is necessary for their extermination. Every method must be brought to bear simultaneously – rat-hunts, gassing, poisoning, trapping, and particularly the surrounding of ricks before thrashing.’ The Government was doing its best. ‘Kill that rat!’ cried one of its posters. ‘Rats rob us of food. Rats spread disease. Rats delay our victory.’ The Ministry also turned its fire on the poor house sparrow. A pamphlet emphasized the bird’s destructive habits – pecking blossoms of currants and gooseberries, eating whatever seedlings it could reach, and, at harvest time, flocking to the fields to devour huge quantities of corn. A ‘wanton pest’, the sparrow was said to destroy fledglings of other species. The campaign was welcomed by many War Ags, including that of Lancashire, which encouraged people to destroy nests and eggs; and Country Life suggested that the best way to deal with the menace might be to recruit village boys in spring and pay them a small sum for every dozen eggs collected. Vermin bounties paid by the War Ags varied from place to place, but were generally 2d for a rat’s tail, 3d for a grey squirrel’s tail and a halfpenny for a sparrow’s head. Another detested species was the wood pigeon, described as the ‘food growers’ enemy No. 1’, which was notorious for plundering newly planted crops of peas, beans and corn. One experiment seemed to justify the farmers’ hostility. A sweepstake was held on the number of grains of barley a single bird had swallowed: the highest guess was 722, and investigation of its crop showed that the answer was 711. In November, when flocks had begun their seasonal migration from north to south, Country Life was again in an aggressive mood: ‘It is more than ever necessary this winter that an attack should be made on the flocks of migrant wood pigeons which have already begun to come in.’ The best method, the article recommended, was for the National Farmers’ Union to organize country-wide shoots in the afternoons, when the birds were flighting into the woods to roost. Even the starling (‘a most unpleasant bird’) attracted the magazine’s wrath: by January 1940 flocks were said to be making an unprecedented assault on holly berries, and were almost as great a threat to agriculture as other ‘feathered pests’. As always, from time to time curious incidents were reported in farming journals. On one grass airfield a swarm of bees settled on a wheel chock underneath a fighter. The mechanics working on the plane panicked and started the engine, trying to scare them off; but when they found that the bees remained unmoved by the noise, they calmed down, switched off and continued their maintenance. In the middle of March a calf was ‘born underground’ in Cornwall. A terminally pregnant cow had been standing in the farmyard when the ground beneath her gave way, and she fell fifty feet into an old mine working. Next day she was found partially buried, with a newborn calf by her side, and neither of them any the worse. Life on a wartime farm was brilliantly evoked by Xandra Bingley in her memoir Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, a headlong narrative of the author’s early days, almost all in the present tense, set in a decrepit smallholding high on the Cotswolds above Cheltenham. Bertie is her father – explosive, loving, mostly away in the army; May is her mother – wonderfully capable and compassionate, as ready to release gas from a bloated cow by driving a needle into its stomach as she is to shoot pigeons or comfort Xandra when she breaks an arm; Mrs Fish, with her orange ringlets and an ungovernable thirst for gin, is a neighbour who comes in to help. Crisis follows crisis. Horses escape; the farmhand cuts off two fingers with the circular saw; the police arrive hunting a murderer. One extract must suffice to give an idea of May’s character: She has an accident when her car hits a black bull on a narrow road near Guiting Power … She drives into the bull head-on and breaks his front legs. She gets out of the car and kneels by him, and her hands feel his broken bones as he tries to stand up and falls. She sits on the tarmac and rests his heavy head in her lap and she strokes and strokes his face and says … I’m sorry … I’m so sorry … In the dark I didn’t see you … Why were you in the road? Where were you coming from at nearly midnight? Try to lie still my darling. Before long someone will find us. Sooner or later the pain will go. She sings … There is a green hill far away … without a city wall … Where our dear Lord was crucified … he died to save us all. Just before sunrise a lorry stops and the driver stands over her and says … Those Yanks do him … all over the shop they are, going like the clappers. My mother says … No … I did. I saw him too late … Will you go to a telephone box and dial the Hunt Kennels … Andoversford 248 … they’ll be up and about … tell them where I am and tell them to send a winch lorry and a kennelman with a gun. The milkman says … You’ll be half dead of cold … and my mother says … He keeps me warm … be as quick as you can. The kennel lorry arrives and the kennelman in black rubber boots and a brown overall says … You can slip out from under him … then I’ll get to work. My mother says … I’ll stay put where I am … he’s been through a lot tonight … he’s very brave. The hunt kennelman says … He’s carrying a mountain of flesh … and kneels and puts the gun to the bull’s black curly-haired forehead. My mother says … May his spirit for ever rest in peace … for the sake of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. The gun fires and the kennelman says … I’ll lift his head … Out you come … You going far? She says … Only another seven miles … I thought at first he must be Zeus … He was a god and a black bull. The kennelman says … Master will be pleased … hounds can live off his flesh for a week. For May, and for all the other country housewives working day in, day out to sustain their households with primitive equipment, there was little entertainment to be had. But one great morale-booster was the radio. In the mornings and afternoons the half-hour programmes of continuous Music While You Work had the same soothing effect on rural housewives as on women toiling in factories, where productivity increased sharply for a while after each broadcast. Another infallible solace was the voice of Vera Lynn, the nation’s best-loved singer, who received a thousand letters a week begging her to sing ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘You’ll Never Know’ and other favourites. (When rationing began to bite, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was sometimes parodied as ‘Whale meat again’.) Children’s Hour, broadcast from 5 to 6 p.m., was also immensely popular. Under the direction of Derek McCullough – ‘Uncle Mac’ – the programme achieved an audience of four million in 1939, and young listeners eagerly awaited his invariable valediction, ‘Goodnight children, everywhere’. In the evenings people out in the sticks crowded round their Bakelite sets to hear BBC news bulletins. The readers always identified themselves, to prove that Lord Haw-Haw or some other obnoxious interloper had not taken over the microphone: ‘Here is the news, and this is Bruce Belfrage reading it.’ A farmer’s wife living at Thornton-le-Moor in Lincolnshire, eight miles from one town and nine from another, gave a dispassionate account of how she adapted to wartime exigencies and was, as she put it, ‘plodding away very happily’. She sent postcards to order her groceries, which were delivered once a fortnight by van, along with her allowance of paraffin. A baker left bread at a neighbour’s house. Newspapers arrived by post, at least one day old. Movies were ‘out of the question’, but she got books from the local library, and belonged to a club with twelve members, each of whom bought one book a year and passed it on after a month, so that at the end of a year all volumes came back to their original owners. Village halls became hives of activity, used for numerous purposes. At Trumpington, near Cambridge, the hall was let to the local Education Committee as a canteen for school dinners. Evacuee children from St James’s School in Muswell Hill, north London, had a classroom there and held a Christmas party in the building. The British Legion and Women’s Institute opened a canteen for soldiers from nearby camps. Outside the hall was a National Savings indicator, with a moveable seagull showing how much the village had raised. In 1941 the ARP unit set up a feeding centre in the hall, in case of enemy attack, and the Brigade Headquarters at Anstey Hall, near Trumpington, used the building for dances, causing (as a local report put it) ‘inevitable problems’. Dances were held on Saturday nights (tickets 1s), and on 18 November 1944 (the day street lights were turned on again) a reception was held after the wedding of Percy and Mabel Seeby – she having come to the village as an evacuee. The passion for dancing spread all over the country. Frank Mee, who grew up during the war in Norton-on-Tees in Co. Durham, and ‘lived for dancing’, was told by his father that, given some music, he’d ‘dance on the roof of the pigsty’. He remembered how ‘every town and village had a hall where dancing could take place’, and reckoned that later generations had ‘no idea what part the dance halls played in keeping up morale’. The bigger halls had orchestras, the smaller ones three-piece bands, a gramophone, or sometimes only a piano. In the small halls it was plank floors with nails sticking up or concrete with linoleum squares glued down … Any kind of footwear would do, but some people had dancing pumps and others wore what they had, down to hob-nail boots. The lights, the music and the company let you forget the misery, austerity and danger of the war … You could live your dreams for a few sweet hours. Escapism? Yes, but we came out of those places light of heart and uplifted to another planet for a short while. We would come back down with a crash when someone asked whose turn it was to buy the fish and chips. Music and singing played an important part in village life, as at Spondon, near Derby, where a choral group formed in 1941 grew rapidly until it became a well-balanced choir of eighty. In the words of one member, Gwendolyn Hughes, ‘It gave people something different to think and talk about, instead of surmising and worrying about the war.’ But the war was constantly on every villager’s mind, and event after event – dog show, pony show, garden show, baby show, whist drive, f?te – was organized to raise money for some sector of the armed forces. In the summer and autumn of 1941 the village of Foxholes, near Driffield, raised ?212 for the Red Cross Agricultural Fund – part of a total of ?48,000 collected in Yorkshire. Seven Rain of Death (#u41914432-c3b2-5fa1-bc8e-36718b407362) Through many a day of darkness, Through many a scene of strife, The faithful few fought bravely To guard the nation’s life. Hymns Ancient & Modern, No. 256 Forecasts of German airpower made in the early 1930s soon proved to have been wildly inaccurate. The Government had assumed that even if war opened with a blitz on London, the limited range of Luftwaffe aircraft would mean that destruction would be confined to the south and east of the country. The rest of England, north of a notional line from the Wash north of East Anglia to the Solent on the south coast, was reckoned to be relatively safe from bombardment. Perhaps that was true in 1939; but with the fall of France in the summer of 1940, the picture suddenly changed. Taking off from captured airfields closer to England, German bombers could reach targets much farther inland, and to the north and west. One of the first daytime raids on the United Kingdom was an attack on Wick, at the extremity of Caithness – about as far from the Channel coast as any point in Britain. The object of the attack may have been to disable the RAF fighter squadron based on the airfield just north of the town, which was there to defend ships in the anchorage in Scapa Flow. The Luftwaffe raiders came in at teatime on 1 July, a fine summer’s day, and whether they meant to hit the airfield or the harbour, a stick of bombs fell in the middle of Bank Row, a narrow road alongside the port, killing fifteen people, including eight children (the youngest not quite five) who were playing on the bank. After its first run one aircraft turned and came back, machine-gunning along the river. In all Wick was raided six times, the last on 26 October, when three Heinkels dropped twenty high-explosive bombs on and around the airfield. All summer the Luftwaffe carried out sporadic raids on convoys in the Channel and on south coast ports, from Dover in the east to Swansea in the west in what Hitler called the Kanalkampf – the Battle of the Channel. Key targets were Weymouth (which suffered forty-eight raids in all during the war) and Portland, home of the Whiteways Royal Naval torpedo works. On 9 July twenty-seven people were killed in Norwich. Southampton and Coventry were also heavily bombed. People soon learned to identify the marauders, especially when they attacked at low level. The Heinkel 111 – a twin-engined medium bomber – was easily recognized by its bulbous cockpit with curved, clear panels through which the crew were visible. Also all too familiar was the Junkers JU 88, a fast and versatile twin-engined fighter-bomber with low-mounted wings, and the JU 87, also called a Stuka, or dive-bomber, distinguished by its upwardly bent wings and fixed undercarriage (with wheels permanently down). The Dornier D-17, known to the Germans as der fliegende Bleistift (the Flying Pencil), was recognizable by its slim body and twin tail, especially in its low-level role. Even schoolboys could soon identify fighters like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the twin-tailed Bf 110 by the noise of their engines alone. On 16 July Hitler issued Directive No. 16, which authorized detailed preparations for Operation Sealion, the invasion of England. Three days later he proclaimed his ‘Last Appeal to Reason’, still pretending that he did not want war with Britain, and demanding that the nation surrender. When this rant failed to produce the required result – even after leaflets of the text had been dropped over England – he changed tactics and in Directive No. 17 ordered the destruction of the entire RAF – aircraft, airfields, supply organizations, factories – a task which the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, the sybaritic, elephantine Hermann Goering, assured him could be accomplished in four days. On 24 August bombs fell on central London for the first time, killing nine people. In fact the docks had been the target, and the German navigators had lost their bearings. But Churchill was so outraged by the strike on the heart of the capital that the War Cabinet countermanded Bomber Command’s plan to hit Leipzig in retaliation, and on the night of 25 August a force of seventy aircraft went out to bomb Berlin. Hitler, infuriated in turn, set in motion Adlerangriff (Eagle Attack), his attempt to destroy the RAF and its bases. Preliminary raids were launched on 12 August, and heavier ones on the 13th (Adlertag – Eagle Day); but all else paled before the mass assault on 15 August, when 2000 aircraft attacked. Seventy-six of them were shot down, but the raids continued and many key fighter airfields – Biggin Hill, West Malling, Croydon, Kenley – were badly damaged. As battle raged in the sky, of all the counties Kent was at the greatest risk. Any Luftwaffe raid made life in the countryside hazardous, for the danger area extended far beyond the perimeter of whatever airfield the Germans were attacking, with stray bombs falling, aircraft crashing and shrapnel cascading down. One farm lost forty sheep to bombs and bullets, and its pastures were pitted with ninety-three craters, the biggest forty feet across and more than twenty deep. With such dangers prevailing, it was hardly surprising that many Londoners decided not to take their annual holiday hop-picking. To fill their places 2000 soldiers were drafted in, and local schools waived normal rules so that children could help with the harvest. Elaborate precautions had been made to protect those taking part: shelter trenches had been dug, casualty stations built and camouflaged. One of the most evocative images of the whole war is a photograph of a dozen small children crouching in the bottom of a freshly dug slit trench, gazing upwards at a dogfight in progress high overhead. Farmers naturally wanted compensation for damage to their crops, and to their land. If the army could provide labour to carry out repairs, there was no problem; but if no military help was available, farmers often called on rural solicitors to make their case to the War Department. A 250kg bomb created a sizeable crater and scattered earth for hundreds of yards, which made filling in the hole a laborious and expensive business. Damaged trees also gave rise to disputes. Branches blown off of an oak (for instance) could be burnt in situ, but if bomb splinters were embedded in the trunk, no timber merchant would look at it, for fear of wrecking his saws. Market gardeners – especially those with big greenhouses – were particularly vulnerable, and often had an entire crop destroyed by a single explosion. Northern farmers were hit as well. ‘Eh! Just fancy! Bang in the middle of Ford’s clover root,’ wrote the Mancunian diarist Arnold Boyd. ‘These Jerries will stick at nothing.’ Another diarist, identified only by the initials M.A., reported the effect of a bomb which fell in a woodland copse in the winter of 1940: The small symmetrical crater was ringed round by the now-familiar mound of earth, and the surrounding bracken and grass was mown close to the soil. About thirty yards away from the crater a large number of beech saplings had had their heads cut cleanly off with a cut that ran parallel to the earth and not, as one would have supposed, at an angle to it. The larger trees that had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the shell splinters received deep, clean cuts often six inches deep and the width of the bole. In spite of the obvious danger, country people going about their work soon became phlegmatic, tending to call a siren a ‘cyrene’, or just to refer to it as ‘that thing’. ‘There goes that thing again’, they would say, before getting on with the job in hand; and distant dogfights were regarded as a form of free entertainment. ‘They were just like butterflies flying round each other,’ said a woman of two tussling aircraft. ‘Lovely to watch.’ Children felt the same. Twelve-year-old Eileen Ryan, who had been evacuated from London to Weymouth, was walking with friends on the promenade one day and stopped to enjoy the spectacle of Spitfires wheeling in pursuit of ME 109s – until a warden roared at them, ‘You bloody kids – GET IN THE SHELTER!’ There was huge excitement one day in Essex when a lone parachutist was seen swinging down out of the sky over Dagenham. Nine-year-old Richard Hunt was messing about with a gang of friends when somebody shouted that the invasion had begun, and a great crowd of people poured into the boys’ lane, armed with every kind of makeshift weapon, from garden forks to butchers’ knives, making for the fields. Richard had his airgun, and his friend Reggie some other weapon. Joining the rush, they ran through allotments, scattering the crops and breaking down fences in their way. At one stage they heard shots, and later learned that some member of the Home Guard, ignoring all the rules, had opened up on the parachutist and wounded him. The boys reached the scene in time to see an army van drive off with the man inside, and found out that, far from being German, he was one of the Polish or Czech pilots flying Spitfires with the RAF. Between 19 and 24 August bad weather enforced a lull and gave the RAF fighter squadrons some respite, but then Goering decided to concentrate attacks on 11 Group, which was defending London and the South East, and by the end of August Fighter Command had been drastically weakened: in the last week of August and the first of September 112 pilots and 256 aircraft were lost. Damage to ground stations was so severe that the fighters had to use small civilian airfields. Fortunately Goering never realized how close the RAF was to collapse. Instead of keeping up the pressure on fighter stations, he switched to the bombing of London – and so the Blitz proper began late in the afternoon of Saturday, 7 September 1940. Just after eight o’clock that evening the Chiefs of Staff issued the code word CROMWELL to military units, signifying that invasion was imminent. The warning put the whole country on alert: church bells rang out, the Home Guard stood to, and remained on post all night. Many people believed that German troops had already landed. What Hitler had launched, in fact, was Operation Loge, a mass attack on London, in which more than 1000 aircraft took part. Between then and the end of May 1941 the capital was attacked seventy-one times; a million houses were destroyed, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed. H. E. Bates was fishing on a lake in Kent when he witnessed one of the big raids coming in: Up to that day we had seen as many as eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty planes flying over at one time. Now we saw a phenomenon. It was like the inland migration of hundreds of black and silver geese. They came in steadily and unceasingly, not very high, the black geese the bombers, the silver the fighters. The fighters made pretty circling movements of protection above the bombers. They went forward relentlessly. The air was heavy with moving thunder and the culminating earthquakes of bombs dropped at a great distance. All that had happened before that day now seemed by comparison very playful. On 15 September – which became known as Battle of Britain Day – Fighter Command achieved its most spectacular success, breaking up raid after raid over London and the south coast. Such was Hitler’s frustration that two days later he shelved Operation Sealion indefinitely and turned his attention eastwards to Russia. It is estimated that during the Battle of Britain the RAF had lost just over 1000 aircraft, and the Luftwaffe nearly twice as many. When Hitler realized that his attempt to demoralize England had failed, attacks on London dwindled. But all Britain had been battered by bombs. After the capital, the city most heavily raided was Liverpool, where nearly 4000 people were killed. Bristol also came under persistent attack: on the night of 3–4 January 1941 a single raid lasted for twelve hours. Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Plymouth, Swansea and Southampton were also prime targets. Of all the outrages perpetrated by Hitler, none caused greater anger and grief than the attack on Coventry, on the night of 14 September 1940. The city was, in a sense, a legitimate target, for its factories were making cars, aircraft engines and munitions; but nothing could have prepared it for the devastating raid, which began at 8 p.m. and lasted until midnight, killing 560 people, destroying most of the city centre and leaving the fourteenth-century cathedral a ruined shell. Almost as emotive was the series of attacks that became known as the Baedeker raids. In April and May 1942, in revenge for Bomber Command’s laying waste the Baltic port of L?beck, Hitler ordered reprisals against Exeter, Bath, York and Norwich – historic towns of no strategic importance. The raids killed 1600 civilians and wrecked many notable buildings, including the Assembly Rooms in Bath and the Guildhall in York. Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, a Nazi propagandist, announced that the Luftwaffe would hit every town in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker tourist guide. His threat was never carried out; but in another burst of retaliation Hitler responded to Bomber Command’s mass attack on Cologne (in May 1942) with three raids on Canterbury. In all the air raids throughout the war, human casualties were inevitably by far the most numerous in cities and towns, but the countryside suffered as well, mainly from bombs jettisoned by crews who had accomplished their principal mission and were on the way home, or were being hard pressed by fighters and sought extra speed to escape. In the early days of the battle a rumour went round that the Germans were dropping magnetic mines, and people wearing steel helmets were warned not to approach them in case they set off an explosion. But in fact almost everyone did wear steel helmets when out of doors, including ladies playing tennis, because during dogfights shrapnel and spent bullet cases were constantly raining down out of the sky. Vera Lynn wore a helmet in the car while driving to her shows. There were some astonishing survivals, such as that of Mr Withers and his neighbours in their Essex village, described by Margery Allingham: Their stick of bombs fell neatly between their bungalows, one bungalow, one crater, and so on … In the actual spot where Mr Withers’s own bomb fell he had a shed containing a pony and trap, a cat, some budgerigars, a jackdaw and a ton of coal. They got the pony out from under the trap in the crater and held it up for a minute or two until, to everyone’s amazement, it wandered off and began to eat. The cat ran away for nearly a fortnight. The budgerigars were none the worse. Most of the coal was retrieved, and the jackdaw died three days later, more from rage than anything else, Mr Withers said. No one in the houses was hurt. Between raids, life carried on. At Cranbrook School anti-aircraft guns were installed on the cricket field, and, whenever they opened up during a game, the boys had to sprint for cover. For minor crimes committed, an alternative to detention was a spell hoeing the sugar beet planted on one of the rugger pitches. Later in the war the Kent Messenger published a map showing where high-explosive bombs of 50kg or more had fallen on Sevenoaks Rural District between the end of July 1940 and the end of February 1944. Even though some 50,000 incendiary bombs were not included, the chart looked as though it had been blasted with a charge of No. 5 pellets from a shotgun, so thickly was it spattered with dots. One particularly dense cluster, running north-west to south-east, lay close below Chartwell, as if the Luftwaffe had been aiming for the Prime Minister’s country home. Efforts were made to lure German pilots to false targets. One decoy town was laid out by Shepperton Studios on Black Down, north of Bristol. Bales of straw soaked in creosote were set alight to simulate the effects of the incendiary bombs dropped at the start of a raid, and drums of oil were ignited to represent buildings on fire. Dim red lights, powered by petrol generators, were switched on in a pattern based on the streets and railways of the city. But these initiatives seem to have been fruitless, for no bombs landed on or around the site. The Germans went so far as to attack the Republic of Ireland – even though the country was officially neutral, and the Government had embellished the south coast with signs made from white-painted concrete blocks proclaiming EIRE in huge letters. People were nervous of German intentions, fearing that Hitler might use the Republic as a springboard for invading England from the west – and the saying went that if the F?hrer wanted to take Ireland at 13.00 hours, it would be his by 16.00. Even so, nobody was prepared for the attack at lunchtime on 26 August 1940, when four bombs fell on the Shelburne Cooperative Dairy factory at Campile, in Wexford. The first landed in the canteen, killing three young women; the second came through the roof and started a fire; the third hit the railway line and the fourth landed in a field. The Germans claimed that the pilots had become separated from the rest of their formation, and had jettisoned their bombs over open country. To the people on the ground it seemed that they had made a precision raid. No convincing reason for the attack was ever established, but great was the fury of witnesses who saw the German Ambassador come from Dublin to the women’s funeral sporting a top hat and a scarlet sash emblazoned with a swastika. In England animal losses on farms mounted rapidly: in the nine months to December 1940 the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee – a voluntary body – reported 3000 air-raid casualties, mostly cattle and sheep. Of these, 843 were killed outright, 706 had to be put down and 440 were given first aid treatment. Many of the deaths and injuries resulted from the Nazi fighter pilots’ deplorable habit of machine-gunning herds in low-level attacks – more for target practice and their own amusement than from any hope of reducing English food supplies. From the dead stock, 30 per cent of the meat was bought by the Ministry of Food and sent for human consumption – but the salvage of a carcass depended on prompt action immediately after the animal had been killed. Unless some competent person – farmer, butcher or vet – tackled the victim within a few minutes, it would be useless; and the easiest method of disposal would be to bury it at the bottom of a bomb crater. The Ministry had its own arrangements for salvaging useable livestock, but told farmers that they themselves should be prepared ‘to slaughter, bleed and disembowel any animal injured beyond hope of recovery’. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/duff-hart-davis/our-land-at-war-a-portrait-of-rural-britain-1939-45/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.