Harry Holder’s War Year Memories.

 

 

To be a teenager at the start of World War Two could be quite exciting at times.  In 1939/40 the blackout made a great change in our lives.   All houses were in total darkness, no light was allowed to show.  We were told that even lighting a cigarette could be seen from an airplane.  The street lighting was not allowed so people were in danger of having minor accidents such as slipping off the edge of pavements.  There were people who even followed the white line in the middle of the road on the way home.

Boy and girl out for a walk in a country lane, it still happened, could expect to be stopped by the Home Guard with the command ‘Who goes there’.  It was sometimes rather embarrassing because we generally know the people who were the local ‘Home Guard’.

It could be exciting to walk in the dark with only the light from the stars or moon and watch the searchlight beams criss-crossing the sky, and if a plane was caught in the searchlight they gleamed like silver.  We also learned how to tell the difference between “theirs and our planes” by the sound of the throbbing engines of the German bombers

We were always confident that they would never drop bombs on us, but they did one day when a group of German planes jettisoned their bombs in the fields around my village.

I remember that we took shelter under our solid wood kitchen table.  We learned later that one man was killed while cycling back from work.

Once you heard the wailing noise of the Air Raid Siren you’d never forget it for the rest of your life.

Some of our friends had left school and had joined one of the armed forces, usually the RAF because it got the most publicity. 

A very strange experience to us as teenagers was when one of our close friends was reported missing or killed in action.  This was something very difficult to appreciate that we would never see them again.

Some of us had a strange kind of bravado as we wanted to enlist and take part in the excitement of war.

Little did we realise what was to come in the next five years.