How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (20 page)

‘Safety catches on!’

‘Guv, where’s the safety catch?’

‘Fire your rifle!’

‘Hell’s bells,’ I said to the bloke on my right, ‘where’s the safety catch?’

He gave me a startled look, but offered no help.

‘Fire your rifles!’

In a cold sweat I squeezed the trigger . . . whee-ee-ee! The bullet flew out, high into the heavens. Every eye was on me.

‘Step out that man!’

I stepped one pace forward.

‘Why wasn’t the safety catch on? Sergeant, this man must have rifle drill. He’s shot an old woman in Urmston.’

Fred Cawte, Heywood, Lancashire

During the very early days of the war, we lived in a row of houses that faced the local electricity supply company and power station. We had long back gardens with side
entrances that led out onto the road just opposite. One Sunday morning we were startled to see a whole row of camouflaged men creeping up through the back gardens. My seventy-year-old aunt, whose
word was law in the house, threw open the bedroom window and called down to ask who they were and what, precisely, they were doing. The sergeant quickly stood up and said that they were the local
Home Guard on a practice manoeuvre. They were, it seemed, pretending to ‘storm’ the electric company. But Auntie said: ‘Never mind that, you must all clear off at once.’

‘Sorry, ma’am, but there is a war on and we must practise. What would you say if we were Germans?’ the sergeant asked.

‘The same as I am telling you lot! I never allow anyone to trample all over my garden.’

Mrs M. Wilkinson, Uxbridge

My young brother was in the Home Guard, prior to joining the RAF. He was sent out one night to help search for a German airman, alleged to have parachuted into the area.

My brother found himself in the pitch dark, beside a high fence, from the other side of which he could hear an agitated shuffling. He scrambled up to look over but slid down the other side and
into the middle of a flock of hens!

Getting to his feet, he stumbled about as he tried to get out of the garden, stepping on a rake, the handle of which sprang up and hit the rim of his helmet with a loud clang. He remarked that,
after all that racket, any German would have made for Land’s End.

Miss P. Manser, Maidstone

My father, ‘Jack the Barber’ (a hairdresser), and his friend ‘Fishy’ (who kept the local chip shop) were First World War veterans. One night, during the
Second World War, they came out of the local pub in Jarrow. They staggered home, both a little the worse for wear. Just as they passed the nearby barrage balloon site, manned by the Home Guard, a
voice boomed out: ‘Halt, who goes there? Stop, or I’ll shoot!’

The reply from the two merry men?

‘Bugger off, Jim, or we’ll stop your fish and chips!’

And, with added disdain: ‘Anyway, you’ve not got a bloody gun! It’s only a bloody stick!’

Mr G. W. Telford, Northampton

As an RAF pilot, I was flying a Miles Magister over Allestree Park in Derby. Our brief was to give the Home Guard a chance to guess at what height we were flying and let them
have a bit of aiming practice as well. Only when we got back to base did we realize they were using live ammunition. One bullet had gone straight between my knees. The young officer in charge told
an inquiry: ‘We thought they were armour-plated. In any case, we never thought we’d hit them!’

George Watson, Derby

I was in one of the Home Guard platoons attached to the Rolls-Royce aero-engine factory in Derby where I worked. We always expected to be a target for the Luftwaffe because the
Merlin engines were manufactured there. But there was only ever one successful raid and that was in 1942 when a lone Dornier got through and bombed and machine-gunned the factory. Several people
were killed, sadly, but production wasn’t really affected. Anyway, we were always on the alert but one weekend we were taken to a camp near Skegness to practise on the anti-aircraft guns.

To be honest, we looked upon it as a bit of a break beside the seaside and, by and large, that is how it turned out. Our accommodation block was very basic, though, and the lavatories were quite
a long walk away, so in the middle of the night, one by one, when nature called we relieved ourselves in a farmer’s field across the road.

On the following lunchtime, we were called in for our midday meal and served some meat and veg. One of the lads remarked how nice the cabbage was, whereupon one of the cooks said: ‘Yes,
freshly picked a couple of hours ago.’ We asked from where and he waved his hand and said: ‘Out of that field opposite.’ It was the one we’d been using as a lavatory all
night. Suddenly the cabbage didn’t seem as tasty and he couldn’t understand why, after complimenting him on it, everyone instead started leaving it on their plates.

Bernard Buckler, Derby

I was in the Home Guard in Lincolnshire and it was one of those brilliant, moonlit nights when it seemed as though everywhere was bathed in a bright light. We heard a lone
aircraft overhead but, despite the clear night, couldn’t actually see it. Eventually, the noise of its engines receded and once more there was silence. Then someone pointed to a tree in the
distance. There was a white parachute in it. We debated whether to tackle the German invader ourselves, but in the end decided to call out the regular army lads from the nearby camp. Were our faces
red! The parachute turned out to be nothing more than a thick covering of white spring blossom. We all had a good laugh, though.

Geoff Hemmings, London

In 1940, I joined what was still the Local Defence Volunteers in Cheltenham. My occupation as a plumber and slater, plus my age group – I was then thirty-one – put
me in the deferred call-up class for military service. I owned a motorcycle so I became the despatch rider. I was also very keen to improve on anything that I considered to be out-of-date
thinking.

One sunny Sunday morning, seventy-two of us went to the local shooting butts to fire six rounds each at targets 2,500 yards away. We arrived about 9.30 a.m. and left about 7 p.m. But about sixty
per cent of that time was taken up using flags to signal back target hits. Now I’d been building radios since I was eleven, so when we returned to the range three weeks later, I produced a
simple device with a ‘speak/listen’ switch together with loudspeakers. It was a great success and reduced by more than half the time we spent on the range. We were getting the
‘target hit’ signal straight away rather than waiting for the flags. The only thing was that it cost £4 10s [£4.50], which I had to pay.

We also had to guard a length of railway line from nightfall to daybreak, with instructions that if a German paratrooper dropped in, we had to disarm him, tie his hands behind his back and walk
him to HQ, leaving some of our men to stay on guard. It seemed to me that we needed to inform HQ immediately, but that drum beating was a little ‘old hat’ while smoke signals would work
only in daytime. So I constructed another radio transmitter, one that could have us reporting any incident to HQ within seconds.