Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  By breakfast time a sense of drama had possessed the house and its inmates. Our house was, in fact, no longer our own. Processions of soldiers drew water from the tap; others went to the lavatory or to telephone. [Later] While I was planting snapdragons along the drive a Scotch Army cook came up and said, ‘Missus, could you sell me a few spring onions to give a taste to a stew?’

  Much the same was happening in the far north. A farmer’s wife living near Scapa Flow described how tradesmen’s and fried fish vans had disappeared from the roads, along with commercial travellers and holiday-makers’ cars:

  In their place came army lorries, trucks, ambulances, lorry-loads of workmen from a’ the airts to work on the dromes and dumps which are springing up everywhere. Gradually all of us came to have our quota of soldier-visitors who so gladly spent their half days and holidays on the farm … and how welcome these boys were to me.

  Then came ‘schemes’ and ‘stunts’, and how exciting for everyone they were. It should have been alarming to see cook-house, duck-house, garden wall suddenly sprout bayonet and helmet, and then to have the granary ‘besieged’ and the house surrounded by creeping, silent, stalking figures, but I only kept the kettle on the boil, lest I had grimy, tired, thirsty warriors asking in vain for a cup of tea.

  By that stage of the war parachutists were descending on England, but, rather than German spies, they were more than likely to be air crew who had baled out of stricken bombers or fighters. Most of them, when they landed, were either injured or terrified or both, fearful that they would be shot on sight, and wanting only to give themselves up. Even so, they were liable to alarm civilians by their abrupt appearance.

  Early one morning five-year-old Susie Procter and a young schoolfriend went out of the house on the edge of Milverton, a village in Somerset, and ran down the long passage to the garden, which was bordered by fields. There they found a slight, dark-skinned man dressed in black, and wearing a belt with loops on it, gathering up what looked like a parachute. When the girls appeared he stood still, looking frightened. They weren’t frightened, because he seemed friendly; but then it occurred to them that he might be a German, and when he moved, they did, too. They ran back to the house and reported what they had seen. At first the grown-ups did not believe them, and when at last they went to investigate, there was no sign of any stranger. Had Susie imagined him? Her memory of him is absolutely sharp. She remains convinced that he was flesh and blood, a real airman who had just come to earth, and quickly absented himself.

  There was no doubt about the arrival of another parachutist, witnessed by young Jeff Woods, who was seven when the war broke out. His family was among the thousands of expatriate Britons who fled from France when the German armies invaded in the spring of 1940. Jeff had been born and brought up in France, where his father George, a professional jockey, rode racehorses for the owner-trainer Marcel Boussac; and the family had enjoyed a comfortable life at Chantilly, near Paris. Then, suddenly, Hitler’s forces were advancing towards them, and, like millions of other people in Europe, they were engulfed in chaos.

  To their aid came Frances Phipps, wife of Sir Eric Phipps, the British Ambassador in Paris, who had a large house on the Boussac estate. Through her benevolence, George Woods, his wife Beryl and their six children escaped to England in a fishing boat and found sanctuary at a pub in Wiltshire. The Raven, a half-timbered hostelry in the village of Poulshot, near Devizes, became their home, and they settled there for the rest of the war.

  Although Poulshot, seventy-odd miles west of London, was not affected by the Blitz on the capital, it lay beneath the flight path of Luftwaffe aircraft heading for Bristol, and bombs occasionally landed close to the village, especially when the attackers, fleeing for home, dumped the remains of their loads. Young Jeff and his brothers became expert at interpreting the sound of engines overhead: a thudding whumf, whumf, whumf meant planes on their outward journey, heavily laden, whereas a higher, thinner whine signified Heinkels or Dorniers returning. All members of the family slept in their clothes, ready to make a dash for the deep ditch behind the pub, where they had a shelter fashioned from railway sleepers and corrugated iron topped with earth. Whenever they heard the sirens start wailing in Devizes, three miles away, they would pile into it until the all-clear sounded.

  Jeff’s father George was very small – at about five foot two inches small even for a jockey – but he was tough and aggressive, and much given to chastising his sons, who called him ‘the Old Man’. When the Government sent him a dozen sets of uniform, along with a dozen Lee-Enfield .303 rifles, a dozen mouth organs and a bell for summoning his troops, he lost no time in forming a squad of Local Defence Volunteers, to secure his part of the realm against any German spies who might drop in. Relishing his new role, he held a drill parade every Sunday morning, marching his recruits up and down in front of the pub. The dignity of the proceedings was not enhanced by the antics of old Dick Perrett, who lived across the road, illiterate but always laughing, and owned only one lot of clothes – filthy great boots, gaiters up to his knees and baggy corduroy trousers. He was quite unable to march in time, and his gait was so erratic that the Old Man would not entrust him with a rifle, but got him armed with a pitchfork, with which he paraded back and forth.

  One summer evening brought this doughty band a chance of glory. Jeff and his mates were playing cricket on the common when they heard an aircraft approaching. Quickly they saw that it was a German plane that had been hit: it was trailing smoke and on its way down, about to crash. There came a clatter of machine-gun fire as, in a final gesture of defiance, the pilot emptied his last rounds into the ground ahead of him. The bullets kicked up spurts of turf all round the boys, but hit none of them. On went the doomed plane, down, down, until it smashed into a hay barn in the distance. But Jeff, looking up, saw that one of the crew had baled out high up and was floating away beneath a parachute.

  With a yell he ran to summon his father from behind the bar. Outside, the survivor was drifting off on the wind to the north-west. The Old Man rang the bell to summon his worthies, grabbed a rifle and set off in pursuit, racing up the lane that led to the village of Seend. Of course the boys went after him, about twenty of them. Every hundred yards or so he stopped, turned round and roared at them to go home, but they were far too lit up to obey and carried on, passing older volunteers who sat gasping for breath on the sides of the road.

  When at last the airman touched down in the outskirts of Seend, the hounds were on him in a flash, with the Old Man and Reg Collett, the blacksmith (an enormous hulk), first on the scene, levelling their rifles at him. He drew a pistol from his belt and threw it towards them, then raised his hands and cried ‘Kamerad!’ He looked terrified, especially when Old Dick hove up with his pitchfork. Obviously he had no intention of trying to escape, but the Old Man and Reg started arguing about how they should tie his hands: in front of him or behind? Although Reg prevailed, and knotted the man’s thumbs together in front, it was the Old Man who led the prisoner in triumph through the village before depositing him at the police station. When the posse returned to Poulshot, they found that a second crewman had been killed in the crash, but this did not dampen their celebrations. George became a bit of a hero, and for the next few days trade in the pub was brisk.

  Jeff was soon enjoying life in England, but he was puzzled by the official attitude to prisoners. He and his mates were told never to trust them – after all, they were Huns, who might easily do you a mischief – and to spit on them whenever they got a chance; but in his view they were decent enough people – and they were certainly hard workers. Every day in autumn a truck-load of them was brought out from the camp at Devizes to dig potatoes on land which the Old Man had rented. Jeff was dismayed to see that all that the men had for lunch was some porridge-like gruel, which they made by boiling coarsely ground oats in a big copper.

  Presently his mother took pity on them, and got him to collect a bucketful of pig spuds, the tiny potatoes normally left on t
he field as being too small to be worth picking up. These she boiled, sometimes putting a smear of butter on the top, and Jeff took them down to the prisoners, who received them ecstatically.

  Scrump apples and gather mushrooms though he might, young Jeff never had enough to eat. The Woods clan of two parents, six children and a grandmother had a weekly allowance of six sausages, which seemed to be stuffed mainly with sawdust. Yet they were better off than most, for the Old Man was licensed to rear six pigs at a time, and occasionally purloined one for his own use.

  He would wake Jeff and one of his brothers in the middle of the night, creep out into the stable and bolt the door on the inside. In the sty a helper would lasso the victim’s nose with rope to prevent it squealing, and the men would carry it into the stable, where one of them slit its throat so that the blood ran down the drain. The boys’ job was to light a small straw fire and singe the bristles off the skin before the animal was butchered and shared out among the villagers in the know. Another task assigned to Jeff was to clear out the main intestine by forcing water through it: his mother would then coil the gut into a dish and bake it in the oven until it came out like a meat loaf, which all ranks ate with relish.

  The pigs themselves were on wartime rations. Feed wheat was unobtainable, so they got no mash, but lived on potatoes and the lees from empty beer barrels: the boys would extract the bungs, drink any dregs that remained (disgusting though they were) and fish out the spent hops with sticks. The mixture was alcoholic enough to knock the pigs sideways: their legs and eyes would cross, and they would fall about the sty in such ridiculous fashion that Jeff could charge his mates from the village a penny a head to come and watch.

  So, with courage, ingenuity, a bit of harmless cheating and a sense of humour, the Woods family survived the war. But, as with millions of other Britons, the conflict had dragged them out of their former environment, and changed their lives for ever.

  Just as a bad air raid killed humans and wrecked their houses, so it left pets at large on the streets or lanes. The Manchester diarist Arnold Boyd wrote a charming account of how wanderers quickly attached themselves to persons wearing khaki:

  A devastating air raid brought the homeless in by platoons. An attractive mongrel (a fox bull terrier) walked in that night and was taken at once on the strength for rations and discipline. He answers to the name of Blitz and is friend to all the world. He and Buchanan, a black and white kitten, sleep side by side and eat from one dish, and he was sadly affronted when one cat rejected his advances with a masterly right hook to the nose. The sirens alone make him bark. We also have Nellie, a little yellow bitch with a smug expression, and Nellie Wallace, another mongrel … All these animals, and I have mentioned only a few, scorn civilians. For them khaki is the only wear, and their trust is never misplaced.

  Eight

  Food from Everywhere

  ‘Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,

  With England’s own coal up and down the salt seas?’

  ‘We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,

  Your beef, pork and mutton, eggs, apples and cheese …

  For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,

  The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,

  They are brought to you daily by All Us Big Steamers,

  And if anyone hinders our coming, you’ll starve.’

  Rudyard Kipling, Big Steamers

  Whale and snoek were the twin horrors of wartime food. Whale meat, tough and fishy tasting however it was cooked, came into the country frozen; snoek came in cans from South Africa, where the long, slim fish were caught off the south-west coast. Both were imported by the Government to ease food shortages, but even when times were at their leanest, neither found favour.

  Rationing was nothing new. It had been imposed towards the end of the First World War, in 1917, and it had been threatened (though not applied) before the General Strike of 1926. But in 1939 Hitler was determined to starve Britain into submission: U-boats began taking heavy toll of merchant ships in the Atlantic, cutting off essential food supplies, and early in 1940 the threat of invasion made some measure of control essential.

  The need had been anticipated: ration books, printed in advance, were issued to the public on 8 September 1939. Everybody had a book – even the King and Queen – and rationing was announced on 1 November. The news unleashed volleys of protest in the popular press, the Daily Mail claiming that Dr Goebbels himself could not have devised ‘a more harmful piece of propaganda for Great Britain’.

  Most ordinary citizens accepted that restrictions were inevitable. All the same, it was an unpleasant shock when rationing of bacon, butter and sugar came into effect in the depths of the freezing winter on 8 January 1940. Other staples were soon on the list, and adults were restricted to minuscule weekly amounts: bacon and ham (4oz), cheese (2oz), milk (three pints), butter (2oz), margarine (4oz), tea (2oz) eggs (one in a shell, if available), dried eggs (one pack per month, if available, and looking like custard powder), cooking fat (4oz), jam (1 lb every two months) – as well as tea, breakfast cereal, biscuits and canned and dried fruit. Meat was rationed by price rather than by weight. In May 1940 an adult was allowed 1s 10d worth a week, which would buy almost 3 lb of beef, pork or mutton – if they were available; but in June 1941 these amounts were almost halved. The financial constraint was designed to encourage people to go for cheaper cuts such as beef skirt or breast of lamb.

  Fresh fish, though not rationed, became progressively more expensive as the Admiralty requisitioned trawlers for mine-sweeping and closed some fishing grounds for security reasons. Trawlermen were reluctant to endanger their boats and themselves by going to sea, even in coastal waters, and as supplies fell to 30 per cent of pre-war levels, the price of a stone of haddock rose from 4s to 18s (£9.50 to £43 in today’s values), that of cod the same. In November 1939 the Ministry sought to improve life for fish-fryers by importing frozen cod fillets from Norway; and fish and chips – before the war regarded as a working-class meal – rose rapidly in public estimation to become universally popular.

  At the beginning of the war fish was going literally in all directions. Catches landed at Cardiff, for instance, were being sent cross-country to Grimsby, on the east coast, and Cardiff was getting regular supplies from Fleetwood in Lancashire. As one expert recorded, ‘The journeys of fresh fish about the country presented a fantastic and intricate network.’ Government attempts to rationalize distribution by means of the White Fish Zoning Scheme caused ‘the most violent uproar’ in the trade, and it took a personal intervention by the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, in December 1942 to calm things down.

  Even in wartime, there was room for private enterprise. People living on the coast could catch sea fish, and along rivers like the Tweed or the Wye there was always the chance of a salmon, caught legally or otherwise: explosives were stored everywhere, not always in secure depots, and a hand-grenade was much deadlier than a fly or a worm when dropped into a pool.

  Bread, the staff of life, was never rationed during the war, but it was made with flour described as ‘an eighty-five per cent extraction from the wheat’, and the ubiquitous National Loaf turned out grey rather than white. Fastidious housewives crumbled the bread and sieved it in old silk stockings, which left the flour white; and one woman wrote to Lord Woolton saying, ‘I got all your vitamins out and gave them to the pigs.’

  Measures were passed to control the consumption of bread, because, in spite of the huge expansion of arable farming, wheat was still short. Bakers were not allowed to sell loaves until they were a day old – in the hope that people would eat less if the bread had lost its delicious freshness, and that if it were slightly stale they would be able to slice it more thinly. But in any case it was so much disliked that it was soon known as Hitler’s Secret Weapon.

  Fresh fruit and vegetables were not rationed, but quickly became scarce in cities and towns. Apples, for instance, were few and far betwee
n out of season, and greengrocers often limited shoppers to one at a time. Exotic fruit like lemons and bananas disappeared for most of the war. Although some greengrocers had bunches of dummy bananas hanging outside their shops, the real thing could not be found, and one lad was downcast when he got his first banana – but that was because he ate it with the skin on. After the Allied victories in North Africa in 1943 oranges reappeared, reserved in the first instance for children. One boy, seeing a picture in a school book, conceived a yearning for a grapefruit – but when he eventually got one after the war, he was dreadfully disappointed to find how bitter it was.

  Onions also almost vanished when supplies from the Channel Islands and Brittany were cut off. In 1939 90 per cent of the onions eaten in Britain had been imported, many of them slung in chains over the handlebars of salesmen’s bicycles; but over the next four years the amount fell drastically. Imagine the chagrin of a merchant seaman on leave who brought home a sackful from North Africa. Having docked at Hull, he had to travel to Lancashire in a crowded train; because the onions smelled so strong, he left them in the corridor – only to find, whenever he changed trains, that more and more of them had been pilfered, and by the time he reached his destination hardly any were left.

  Before the war few people had grown onions for themselves, as importers provided plenty; but now gardeners realized that the vegetable was easy to grow and started to produce their own crops. Onions were also grown on farms with suitable soil, and Land Girls spent days crawling along the rows with sacking round their knees, hand-hoeing or turning over the stalks; but there were still not enough to go round, and a single good specimen was sometimes given as first prize in a village whist drive. In spring wild garlic made an acceptable substitute for onions, and in summer country cooks had an extra green vegetable in the form of stinging nettles – of which there was never any shortage. People compared their taste with that of rather sharp spinach, and nettle soup was often on the menu. Nettles were also used to dye camouflage material.