Chapter 2a House moves and War make for a busy later childhood

The excitement and adventures as a child near wartime airbases and unexploded bombs! This is the second podcast of Bill Clark's Route & Branch.

American WWII Flying Fortress on Bombing Raid. credit https://www.goodfreephotos.com

Planes, Bombs and Souvenirs

At Thurleigh I was much nearer the action! Our farm was close to the small Twin-woods airfield, flying mainly Bostons and Blenheims, with some of the approach lights on our fields: Thurleigh airfield was just over two miles north of us, flying mostly B17 ‘Flying Fortresses’, and Staughton, some six miles north-easterly, flew Lancasters. Engine noise, either overhead or warming up on the runways, was with us day and night. The Fortresses often arrived back in the late afternoon and it was not unusual to see one trailing smoke as it limped home – to add to the drama we often got the news directly from those men billeted among us, or their village girlfriends.

Every playtime there would be a group of boys haggling over a spent 303 Home Guard cartridge, or the lead bullets dug out of their practice bank. I was never into ‘swopsys’ to build up a collection, with me it had to be, ‘my find’, but I didn’t mind exchanging duplicates to the highest bidder, for how else could I build up a marble collection or get a good whipping top? This meant my keeping a good look out in the countryside around – a spent cannon shell or a Very light cartridge from the American planes could occasionally be found. One special prize was a hatch that fell off when a gunner baled out, but I am afraid I cannot remember how on earth I managed to get the piece of new tank track home – it had fallen off the rack on the side of a tank, and must have weighed some 30 kilos. It was used as a barn door stop for years.

The best finds came from keeping my ears open, and it was surprising how much – a now ten year old – could pick up by listening in to his Home Guard father’s description of the happenings of the previous night. A Fortress had crashed on takeoff, at Mr Hope’s farm, so naturally I managed to cross that field on my way to school, even though it was a couple of miles out of my way. The friendly American guards let me wander over the site to pick up bits of the smashed ‘Plexiglas’ windows, a much prized plastic that older boys used to make into brooches and rings; little did the guards know, my pockets were also laden with live cannon shells and Very light cartridges – worth quite a bit to a syndicate of older boys who made fireworks out of them.

A Boston from Twin-woods crash-landed on one of our fields and provided me with hundreds of live cannon shells, some still in sections of belt. Alas the firework syndicate – and my best source of wealth – broke up soon after, when a boy was injured in an explosion. My first piece of a reputed thousand pound bomb, was gleaned from the soldiers about to bulldoze the crater – a very uninteresting torn piece of metal, that I thought could have come from anything. Another piece, decidedly larger, came from a ‘Doodle Bug’ which dislodged part of the roof of the next farmhouse to ours; what I really aspired to was a piece of bomb that really looked like a bomb, and better still, have a few German hieroglyphics on it.....

Full story of this chapter from Bill Clark, former Warden at Wandlebury is available here
https://archive.org/download/route-and-branch-ch-2a-podcast/Route-and-branch-Ch2a-podcast.mp3