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| Later, my
brother developed a friendship with a boy who often went to his
grandfather's house. The grandfather kept pigs and had a few
acres of land. One day my brother saw granddad picking stones
out of a pile of fresh, wet, sloppy pig manure with his bare hands
and without washing his hands, made a pot of tea, sat my brother and
his friend on his knee, poured the tea out into a saucer and, after
blowing on it to cool it, gave it to his grandson to drink. My
brother, whose turn was next, decided that he had no thirst that day
or any other day when he visited that house. My mother told me that I went to a certain house in Melton Ross on only one day of the week and no other. She was puzzled by it until she discovered that the lady who lived there baked jam tarts on that day and she liked me. She had children of her own and for many years, I remember seeing, written in a child's spidery handwriting, in crayon, on the back door, "The green is grass." Until 1946, I never experienced a
life without war. RAF Kirmington was just over a mile on one
side of Melton Ross and RAF Elsham Wolds less than 2 miles on the
other, with Hibaldstow at 8 miles and Binbrook at 13 miles. The
skies were filled with aircraft and every schoolboy recognised and
knew the names of all of them. Lysander, Lockheed Lightning,
Hampden, Halifax, Wellington, Lancaster and others. There were
many crashes. One was at the top of Nab's Hill at the end of Benny
Goose's lane, another, between Green Lane and Barnetby Wold farm.
When we heard of a crash, we would rush to the scene and look for
the Perspex glass (a kind of soft plastic) which we could file and
carve and make models and rings for our fingers. A red-hot
poker would burn straight through it for making holes. I can
still remember the strong, sickly smell this caused. We also looked
for sweets issued to the aircrew. Carbide was the power source for bicycle lamps. It was a substance a bit like chalk, which when mixed with water gave off a gas. We would put it in a tin with a hole in the top and add water. When we put a lighted match to the hole, it would go off like a bomb. It was more exciting if you could get a friend to hold the match. I once stood with my father, in the afternoon, and saw an aircraft that I did not recognise flying over Chalk Hill (the local quarry one mile outside Melton Ross.) Suddenly, what looked like a string of sausages fell out of it. It was a German aircraft and they were bombs. They landed and exploded harmlessly on the grass verge near the railway bridge. Many people built air-raid shelters in their gardens at just below ground level so that if a bomb landed nearby, the blast from it would pass over them and the occupants would be safe. My father and others dug a large hole in our garden and lowered the garden shed, which had once been a chicken hut, into it. The roof was just below ground level so we were safe from all but a direct hit. All was well until one night we had torrential rain and the next morning the floor of the shed was at ground level, as it bobbed up and down on the flood. It was soon returned to its old position and we just let Hitler and Churchill get on with the war. Our parents said that if there was
bombing nearby, we should hide under the ladder going up to the
bedroom. We never did that in earnest, and I do not think we
ever took the danger or the war seriously. It was something
that happened a mile down the road at RAF Kirmington, so it was
nothing to do with us. One night my father took a newspaper
outside in the dark and read it in the light from the blazing city
of Hull caused by German bombing (Hull is approximately eleven miles
as the crow flies from Melton Ross.) Although, being
intelligent birds, I cannot imagine why any crow would want to fly
from Melton Ross to Hull. [Continued] |
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