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By Root 97 0

and just two figures on the landscape, it all seemed very very strange. We swam in silence. Occasionally, a squadron of Spit fires or Hurricanes headed out towards France. I remember so clearly, Bombardier Andrews standing up in the water, putting his hands on his hips, and gazing towards where the B.E.F. was fighting for its life. It was the first time I’d seen genuine concern on a British soldier’s face; “I can’t see how they’re going to get ‘em out,” he said. We sat in the warm water for while. We felt so helpless. Next day the news of the ‘small armada’ came through on the afternoon news. As the immensity of the defeat became apparent, somehow the evacuation turned it into a strange victory. I don’t think the nation ever reached such a feeling of solidarity as in that week at an, other time during the war. Three weeks afterwards, a Bombardier Kean, who had survived the evacuation, was posted to us. “What was it like,” I asked him.

“Like son? It was a fuck up, a highly successful fuck up.”

The O.P., galley Hill, with the coast-guard and fishermen’s cottages at the back

SUMMER 1940

Apples be ripe,

Nut’s be brown

Petticoats up

Trousers down

(Old Sussex Folk Song)

Apart from light military training in Bexhill there didn’t seen to be a war on at all, it was a wonderful ‘shirts off’ summer Around us swept the countryside of Sussex. There were the August cornfields that gave off a golden halitus, each trembling ear straining up for the sun. The Land Girls looked brown am inviting and promised an even better harvest. On moonlight nights haystacks bore lovers through their primitive course by day there was shade a-plenty, oaks, horse chestnuts, willow: all hung out hot wooden arms decked with the green flags of summer.

The W.V.S. Forces Corner on the corner of Sea and Cantalupe Road was open for tea, buns, billiards, ping-pong and deserters. The Women’s Voluntary Service girls were ‘jell nice’, that is, they were undatable We tried to bait them with Woodbines disguised in a Players packet and trying to wall like John Wayne. The other excitement was watching German planes trying to knock off the radar installations at Pevensey Bombardier Rossi used to run a book on it. It was ten to one of against the towers being toppled. Weekends saw most officers off home in mufti. Apparently the same went (Or the Germans The phoney war was on. I was now a trainee Signaller, highly inefficient in worse, flags and helio lamps. My duties were simple, a week in every month at an Observation Post overlooking the Channel. We had three: Galley Hill, Bexhill; a Martello Tower, Pevernsey and Constables Farm on the Bexhill-Eastbourne Road. Most of us tried for the Martello on Pevensey Beach as the local birds were easier to lay, but you had to be quick because of the tides. My first confrontation with the enemy was an early autumn evening at Galley Hill O.P. The light was going and a mist was conjuring itself up from the Channel. I’d just finished duty and was strolling along the cliff, enjoying a cigarette; in the absence of a piano I was whistling that bloody awful Warsaw Concerto when suddenly! Nothing happened! But it had happened suddenly, mark you. A moment later I heard the unmistakable sound of a Dormer Bomber, 103 feet long, wing span 80 feet, speed 108 m.p.h., piloted by Fritz Gruber aged twenty-three with a gold filling in his right lower molar. Suddenly, below me, coming out of the mist was the Dormer, flying low to avoid radar and customs duty. I could actually see the pilot and co-pilot’s faces lit by a blue light on the instrument panel. What should I do? A pile of bricks! I grabbed one and as the plane roared over me, I threw it. Blast! Missed! But in that moment I envisaged glorious headlines:

LONE GUNNER BRINGS DOWN NAZI PLANE WITH LONE BRICK…INVESTITURE AT PALACE. MILLIGAN M.M.

And the Germans! “Mein Gott, if dis iss vot dey can do vid bricks, vot vill dey get vid guns?” They didn’t all get away. That week a Hurricane downed a Dornier on Pevensey marsh. We ran to the crash. It was going to be a bad year for the