Oh what a lovely war!

I was asked to write my memories of WW2 for a book on the subject; it was to be a compilation of different people's memoirs. I can remember vividly many incidents from that period, here's what I wrote.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR.

The “we” referred to throughout the following is myself and my friend John Webster, we were inseparable. I lived with my grandparents at 49 Barber road, Walkley, Sheffield and he lived around the corner at 337 Crookesmoor Rd with his parents and his sister Christine. We went to the same school and he was ten days younger than me.

Well, from my point of view, that is that of an 8, 9, 10 year old lad growing up in Sheffield and living with his Granny, it was a wonderful time. It was so interesting and there was always so much happening: I feel sorry for the kids of today having to grow up in this paranoid fear ridden and controlled environment, what we had was freedom and excitement.

We had regular air raids with sirens and bombs and air raid shelters and rationing and gas masks etc. but we weren’t old enough to know anything other that, so it seemed quiet normal. We listened to the radio a lot, to ITMA with Mrs. Mopp and Mona Lott and to the 9 o’clock news read by Alvar Liddell or Chester Wilmott with news about what was happening where our fathers and uncles were and which German cities we’d bombed last night. There was also ‘In Town Tonight’ and ‘The Brains Trust’ and “The Radio Doctor” and they all drew huge audiences, they were what held us together. And then there were regular visits to the cinema, in my case the Scala or the Western where we would sneak in through the back door because we didn’t have any money. There we saw the forerunners of TV news, the weekly ‘Newsreel’ features that showed the war on the home front and abroad in addition to the regular films of the day, many of which I can still remember.

We had double daylight savings time, the clocks went ahead 2 hours, so that in the summer it was light until well after 10 o’clock, so we stayed out and played ‘til it was almost dark and I remember many times telling my granny who was worried sick since I’d probably been gone since early that morning, that “I didn’t know what time it was!” Chances are we’d been out on the moors, walking for miles: we’d take the bus or tram to the terminus at the edge of the city for half a penny and then hike for miles. Once we hiked to Castleton which is 16 miles from Sheffield and then had to beg for pennies to get the bus fare home before it got dark.

There were many events interesting to a kid, like one night I awoke at about 2 am and came downstairs, probably to go to the outside toilet, I heard a weird noise, like an aircraft with a 2 stroke motorbike engine, and then suddenly this thing with a flame shooting out behind it went overhead very low: the next day the paper said that the farthest north sighted V1 had passed over Sheffield and had crashed into farmland,normally they didn’t have the range to target cities as far north as Sheffield, I just happened to see the only one they fired at us! And then 30 odd years later I made a TV documentary about 'em.

One summer afternoon about 5 o’clock I was out playing with my mates when a B17 with only two of it’s four engines working flew over very low, it was badly shot up, trailing smoke and in obvious trouble. We knew immediately where it was heading: Endcliff Park! This was a park about 2-3 miles away that lay along the bottom of a valley in a heavily residential area: a river ran through the length of park, on one side of the river were soccer and cricket areas and on the other a heavily wooded steep bank. We jumped on a bus that was heading directly towards the park and within a few minutes we were there. The plane had crashed into the trees on the hillside and broken up over a very large area, there were trees on fire and already a police cordon along the river bank to prevent public access. In a glance we knew how to get to the wreckage: there was a row of houses along the top of the ridge whose back gardens looked down on the burning trees. We quickly ran out of the park and up the main road to the street where those houses were and then through their gardens and onto the wooded hillside. As we neared the wreckage we saw that we not alone, we recognised several kids from Mushroom lane, a street very close to where we lived and they were already flitting from behind the trees and gathering souvenirs: down at the bottom of the hillside we could see a crowd with the police holding them back. Gathering bomb and anti-aircraft shrapnel after air-raids was a normal procedure for all kids back then, so we picked up pieces of debris from the wreckage and knew it was time to leave when we saw fire engines pulling up below and firemen heading up towards the burning trees. As we scrambled back up the hill with our booty we passed the Mushroom lane gang, two of them were struggling to carry a pair of 50 cal. machine guns that must have weighed a ton! Next day we saw them again and they invited us to their house to see the guns, we were extremely envious, we’d never found anything like that!

And then there was the blitz. Thursday December the 12th. 1941. Being winter it was dark when the sirens went at about 7pm but that wasn’t uncommon, we often heard sirens: that night however we were in for something special. The Jerries had a policy of saturation bombing the large industrial cities and it was now our turn. I was at home with my Granny and Grandad and we’d just had dinner. Normally we didn’t bother about air raid sirens ‘cos they’d go even if it was just a single enemy plane but it was soon apparent that this was different. Bombs started falling everywhere, there were constant explosions and fires burning and the sound of our anti-aircraft guns firing with dozens of searchlights criss-crossing the sky looking for the bombers: as the night progressed it got worse. Finally we went down into the coal cellar, we went down and sat on the cellar steps. Cold, dark and dirty with only a flashlight or candles for light: I don’t remember the details but I’m sure we must have had cushions to sit on and blankets to keep warm. It went on all night with some bombs falling very close and shaking the house and at one point there was a huge crash of breaking glass as the windows in the living room right overhead shattered from a bomb blast across the street. I remember it being 3am but soon after that I must have dosed off and I awoke to the all-clear sirens going off at about 7am.

My dad, who still hadn’t been called up yet, came by that morning, it was very difficult to travel anywhere since there was no public transportation, many houses and buildings were on fire, gas mains in the streets were on fire and water was gushing out of ruptured mains, electric power lines were down and there were lots of shattered and burning buildings and people out in the streets looking at it all. About 200 yards up the road from us was a huge landmine that had come down on a parachute, but had not exploded. It was black, about 8 -10ft long and 2ft diameter and covered with very interesting, but totally unintelligable German writing: it was lying in the gutter outside someone’s house. The bomb disposal people took care of it and removed one end and all the explosives leaving the empty carcass there for weeks after, it became a plaything for us, we used to go inside it.

Just down the street from it was a huge vacant stone house behind a large wall, it was perhaps three stories and we often went to play in the large grounds that surrounded it. One day we were there and one of us threw a stone at something and missed, the stone hit one of the ground floor windows and it shattered. What a lovely sound! Someone picked up another stone and threw it and another window shattered: there were about 4-5 of us and we each started throwing stones trying to outdo each other in hitting window panes. Within a few minutes there wasn’t an intact window in the house, every pane was broken, now it looked just like all those other houses in the neighborhood with bomb damaged windows! We didn’t give it another thought and went off to find something else to do, that is until the next day when there was a loud knocking on my Grannies front door, it was a copper who’d come to ask about what I knew regarding some broken windows in a house on Crookesmoor Rd. He was let in and and he started asking me questions and saying that someone had seen me there and what did I have to say about it. I told him that I knew nothing about it but I’d heard the same stories and I’d been told that it was the Mushroom lane gang!

It used to be called ‘mischief’, today it would be called juvenile delinquency and you’d probably wind up in the nick for some of the things that we did. Another time we were right at the Walkley terminus where the city ends and the moorland begins: it was a quite abrupt transition and where we were playing it was a large flat open area but about 100 yards away there was a vertical cliff dropping down into a valley. Some workmen had been laying cable there, heavy stuff about 1” thick: They’d left a huge drum of it, it was about 6ft in diameter and sitting upright. Of course two mischievous lads would want to give it a push to see if it would roll and of course it did, right over the cliff laying cable out behind it as it crashed down the hillside. We left in a hurry!

There was another time when the same ‘we’ had to leave again in a hurry. Sheffield is a very hilly city, consequently there are lots of valleys running through it. Close to our house at the top of Crookesmoor rd. there was one that had a small dam across it, it was a favorite place to play and swim. One day after swimming there we were cold and wanted to dry off and get warm so we decided to light a fire. The hillsides around the dam were covered with what we called ‘gorse bushes’ sometimes called ‘furze’ in other parts of the country. It’s a scrubby bushlike plant with hard woody stems that gets up to about 4-5ft and it spreads laterally. When it dies it becomes sharp and brittle and dry as tinder. We lit our fire under a clump and it roared into flame instantly, totally out of control, and on top of that the whole hillside was covered with it and it was contigious, every plant touched another! Within minutes the hillside was engulfed in flames and we knew it was time for another hasty retreat. We fled and ran until we were on the road that looked down on the dam from the opposite side of the valley and found a spot with a view of the entire scene. There were several people watching the fire so we asked one of them what was happening “Bloody mischievous kids, that’s what’s happening” he said, another adult piped in and said she’d seen kids running away from the fire just minutes before. Bloody mischievous kids! Adults would probably have said “No parental supervision, no coppers, no men around to control all these kids, everybody’s off at war, that’s why all these kids are running wild: and that’s probably true, but it was wonderful from our point of view.

It wasn’t all mischief, I used to sit in class and whatever the subject I’d probably be drawing pictures of aircraft, mostly German in my exercise books and I became quite good at it. Every teacher’s report card said basically the same thing “Tony lacks the ability to concentrate, he doesn’t apply himself to the lessons in class”, and that might have been true from their narrow perspectives. But there were a couple of teachers, both women, who made a difference. Our classroom had a 36” blackboard around three sides, one teacher asked me if I would like to draw a panorama along the back wall, I probably said OK, but I had no idea what a panorama looked like. So I asked my Granny, she had no idea either so she told me to go to the local library and ask there. They were not much help except the librarian pointed me to an alcove where the dictionaries and encyclopedias were kept and that was a turning point, from then on I always had a library card and spent hours there poring through those interesting books. That led to my going to the main library in the city where there was a much larger selection: one day after class another teacher asked me about something and I told her that I was going to the main library to return some books. “Oh” she said, “I’m a member there also and I have some books to go back, could you take them for me?” Well that became our instant bond, we belonged to the same library and she trusted me to take her books back for her, I was walking on air. I found out what panoramas looked like and then created something that was based on that famous photograph of St. Pauls Cathedral in London during their blitz, I drew a panorama of a night-time skyline during a blitz with German bombers, Spitfires, searchlights and fire and smoke: it stayed on the back wall as long as I was at that school, which was 'til the end of the war.

Neither incident really means much but they’ve both stayed with me all these years and in later life “lacks the ability to concentrate” became meaningless as I took advanced degrees at universities and also taught at them. I’ve mentioned the importance of the radio to us during the war, we also had an old gramaphone and about a dozen 78’s, mostly American dance music, I don’t think that it’s insignificant that I now host a weekly radio music program where I play records. Plus, one of the few presents that I remember getting from that period was a toy film projector, it was battery operated and came with some short black & white Disney cartoons that I used to project over and over. In my 30’s I produced a documentary that was related to the war that was well received plus I had several one man photo exhibitions of my work around the world. All these things tie together and as I look back I realise that I got very little from “school” , about all that I can really remember is learning to read and my 12 times tables, not much else. My real education began when I chose to pursue subjects that interested me and were in part related to the experiences of my wartime childhood.

A couple more items come to mind: there were frequent events and programs designed to create public support for the war, posters everywhere urging us to ‘Dig for Victory’ or beware that ‘Careless talk costs lives’ but in addition there were displays set up on bomb sites around the city. One such was a real Lancaster bomber and a real tank! I don’t know what the adults thought but we thought it was wonderful, we’d only ever seen them in either books or films, we’d never seen the real thing up-close before. So we went, but unfortunately there was a catch, an admission cost that we couldn’t afford, one and sixpence. The way it was set up was that you had to buy a one and sixpence saving stamp, put it in your savings book, and then they’d let you in to go inside the Lancaster.
We looked mournful, we stood at the fence and drooled and finally the sergeant said “OK, I’ll let you in, I’ll even give you the saving stamp and the book, but you have to start buying saving stamps "OK” we willingly agreed. So he made out two books, one in each of our names and glued a one and six stamp in each, we were in! We spent the rest of the day ‘til they kicked us out going through the Lanc and talking to the ‘crew’. When we left we read the fine print in our savings books and discovered that we could cash them in at any time, suddenly we were rich, we’d never had one and six in cash ever before, so we went to the post office and closed our accounts! One and six was more money than I’d ever seen but I don’t remember what I did with it, probably gave it to my Granny.

Another time we were in the center of town and we found ourselves in the cathedral gardens, before you knew it we were in the cathedral and spying a door in a dark corner we tried it and it was open. There was a staircase leading down into the vaults, we went down. Lo and behold this was where they stored all the sacramental wines, bottles stacked everywhere. We had no idea what we’d found so we decided to find out, we opened a couple of bottles and it was quite nice. Not what we’d expected, it was sweet and fruity so we sat down and passed the bottle back and forth. We also would steal occasional cigarettes from our parents so we usually had one or at least a butte in our pockets, so we lit one up and shared it. No one disturbed/discovered us, we finished our drunken orgy in peace, but I’ve wondered since if the Lord/Lady looking down from above has some special punishment awaiting us on judgement day? You know, sacrilage and all that.

I lived with my Granny: my Father and Stepmother had a house about 3-4 miles away, I would often visit and spend weekends there, it was always interesting. Their house was the weekly meeting place for the local communist party, it seemed like every weekend there was a meeting that quickly degenerated into a party: a party being a good sized group of people sitting around drinking, smoking and discussing everything under the sun. I quickly understood who uncle Joe was, even though we didn’t have any family members by that name. Marx and Lenin were names as familiar to me as many of those on the BBC but I didn’t know much about them though I heard their names often enough. When the weather was nice on a Sunday, and sometimes even when it wasn’t, we’d all go for long hikes across the moors in Derbyshire which probably has something to do with why John Webster and I spent so much time out there also. These hikes comprised about a dozen adults and me, me in short pants and on one occasion with my boots on the wrong feet, this wasn’t discovered until we’d walked many miles! They always ended at a country pub where everyone except me went in to continue setting the world in order and strategically planning how we should fight the war to aid our Red Army allies. Kids not being allowed in pubs I got to sit outside on the steps with a bag of crisps and a lemonade and as I sit here writing this 60 odd years later there’s a photo of us all on one of our hikes pinned on the wall in front of me, I remember every one of them and all their names.

On other occasions when the air-raid sirens went off at night we’d go out walking in the city: it seems like all the raids were at night. We’d leave the house and walk towards the outskirts of the city where there were hills with clear views of parts of Sheffield and often as we sat there during the air raids we’d see the results of bombs with fires and explosions off in the distance and my father always knew which area it was, I remember him once saying “Attercliff’s getting a pasting tonight!” There would always be barrage balloons, search lights and ack-ack fire but I never saw an enemy bomber get hit, though any that did get shot down wound up on bomb sites for the public to see and that was always a treat for those of us fascinated by German planes. Other times when we’d walk during the raids we’d go from one air-raid shelter to the next, they were scattered all over the city and usually fairly close to each other. Some houses had their own Anderson shelters buried in the back garden, the public shelters that we visited were very strongly built, ie 18” brick walls with baffles at the entrance and no windows and very thick concrete slab roofs. There was no lighting or heating just a platform bench that ran around the walls. People would leave their houses and go into the shelters usually bringing blankets and candles and guitars and accordians: it seems like every shelter we visited had a sing-song going on, there was a long list of songs that everybody knew by heart: “We’ll meet again” “W
hite Cliffs of Dover” “Seigfreid Line” “Bless ‘em All” etc.

One clear summer day I was out playing by myself when I looked up and saw a sight like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were hundreds of allied planes circling around and around and forming up into formations. They were all bombers or transports, lots of DC3 Dakotas and Lancasters, no fighters and each one had something I’d never seen before: they all had black and white stripes on the wings and the fuselages. I had no idea what that meant but I was very intrigued. That night on BBC 9 o’clock news the announcer said “Today the allied invasion of occupied Europe has begun....” D Day had started and everyday thereafter we listened to reports from correspondents with the troops as they advanced towards Berlin. I have no memory of VE day and I’m at a loss to understand why since I can remember in vivid detail the street party that we had for VJ day.

For almost everyone in Europe the war was a terrible time, a time of separation and losses, of terrible fear, of shortages and rationing and of emotional turmoil, but for kids, particularly boys of my age in my environment, it was the most exciting time to grow up.