Wednesday, January 30, 2019

WAGBAI: THE WAR

The war came visiting, even in our small village. Some sixty miles north of London, we could see from where we were the orange glow of the city following the massive air attacks during the Blitz. From our front windows, looking toward the east and the Bedfordshire brick works at night, we could see the long, criss-cross legs of the searchlights stalking the night sky and sometimes the fleeting glint of the bellies of the squadrons of German bombers making their way home after dumping their deadly loads on the residents of our nation’s capital. We could see the silvery, bulbous shapes of dozens of uplit barrage balloons, like herds of aerial elephants, straining at their tethers on the ground below.

We knew the sound of every airplane, Spitfires and Hurricanes, Junkers, Messerschmidts and Heinkels, Wellingtons and Lancasters. Just by the sound, we could tell them from each other.

The war came visiting in busloads of refugees, streaming out from London into the relative safety of the countryside. The buses would pull up by the horse trough in the village square, disgorging their loads of Cockney families, terror-struck by the ordeal of the falling bombs and the chaos they caused, their homes blown apart and engulfed in flames, their neighbors killed or buried in the ruins. Assigned to different houses in the village on their way to more permanent housing, a good number of them would stream up to the Rectory where my parents guided them in the darkness to the safety of our coal cellar for an overnight stay. They slept in rows on the cellar floor, mothers and children, mostly—the men were at war—and a few old couples. Their fear was palpable. For me, as a boy, the war was for the most part more the thrill of distant danger than any immediate sense of fear, but on such occasions, I clearly remember having felt the chill of fear in my bones.


There was blackout, of course. Every one of the windows of the Rectory was draped heavily in black cloth. When we heard the deep, distinctive whine of the air raid sirens we would clamber down the back stairs to join the refugees and await the all-clear once the enemy squadrons had flown by and the danger was past. Even from down below the house we could hear the thud of explosions as the bombers jettisoned any weapons remaining in their bomb bays after the attack on London, to lighten the load for a speedier return across the North Sea to Germany. Bravely—and far too foolishly, in my mother’s eyes—my father would creep up the cellar stairs and out through the back door to inspect the perimeter of our house for any damage. There was none. The closest the bombs came to our house was a half mile away, on the commons, where we went the following day in great excitement to marvel at the fresh craters left in the green expanse of meadow. How fortunate we were, by comparison with those families in our coal cellar, who had lost their homes along with everything they had ever owned!

The war came visiting in the form of a Messerschmidt 109, which crash-landed in the mud of a neighboring farmer’s field. I never knew what happened to the pilot, but I do remember the black cross insignias on its side and wings, and I remember clambering up over one of the wings to gaze down in wonder into the damaged cockpit. I remember the glint of unspent magazines of machine gun ammunition scattered on the ground!

The war came visiting at Cranfield aerodrome, just a mile down the hill from Aspley Guise, where my sister and I would ride our bikes past the bluebell woods and watch from the fence at the end of the runway as the Spitfires passed over our heads to come to a screaming landing from the Battle of Britain, some of them breathing smoke and flames.

The war, towards the end of it, came visiting in the form of “buzz bombs” and “doodlebugs”—the noisy V1 rockets with their fiery tails, like comets, and the V2s, to be feared only when you heard the engine cut out, signally the beginning of its fall to earth and the subsequent explosion. Accuracy, with those early Werner von Braun missiles, built in Germany, we discovered later, by slave labor, counted for less than the fear they generated on the ground.

 It all seemed a source of excitement, little more, to a young boy. I was too young to understand what it all meant, that thousands of lives were being lost each day, that whole cities were being brutally destroyed, that great armies were in mortal and unending conflict. I knew that German Nazis were the enemy, and that we English were supposed to fear and hate them, though the German prisoners who worked on the farms around our village seemed for the most part smiling, friendly folk who took pleasure in carving toys for us children out of scraps of wood. I knew that Hitler was an evil man, with his little black mustache, as were his henchmen, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels. I knew these names so well—we all knew them, every child—without knowing what they stood for, without knowing exactly what the grown-ups were so terrified about. We just knew it was “the war,” and wished that it would soon be over. My father’s congregation even prayed, in church, that it would soon be over, but it seemed that God was always too busy to be listening to our prayers. The war went on.

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