Our Land at War

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Our Land at War Page 10

by Duff Hart-Davis


  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 s
he 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, fête – 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

  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:

 

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