A LITTLE BOY’S DREAM
The summer of 1944 brought two great excitements to a small boy of five in East Kent. The nightly droning of German bombers overhead, heading from the French coast for the target of London, had ceased as the Royal Air Force won back control of the skies. The rhythmic throb-throb of the V-1 rockets, or “doodlebugs,” Hitler’s pilotless drones packed with explosives, had not yet started. But by May all the grown-ups were tense. They were expecting the long-awaited Allied invasion of occupied France. That was when the Texan came and parked his tank on my parents’ lawn.
At the breakfast hour, he was not there, but when I returned in the midafternoon from kindergarten, there he was. I thought the tank, which turned out to be a Sherman, was immense and hugely exciting. Its tracks were half on the parental lawn, the fence reduced to matchwood, and half on Elwick Road. It simply had to be explored.
It took a chair from the kitchen and a lot of climbing to reach the t
op of the tracks, and then there was the turret, with its formidable gun. Having reached the top of the turret, I found the hatch open and stared down. A face stared up and there was a muttered conversation down below and a head began to climb toward the light. When a tall, lanky figure detached himself from the metal and towered over me, I recognized that he had to be a cowboy. I had seen them in the Saturday-morning film shows and they all wore tall hats. I was looking at my first Texan in a Stetson.
He sat on the turret, coming eye to eye with me, and said, “Hiya, kid.” I replied, “Good afternoon.” He seemed to be speaking through his nose, like the cowboys in the movies. He nodded at our home.
“Your house?”
I nodded.
“Waal, tell your paw I’m real sorry about the fence.”
He reached into the top pocket of his combat fatigues, produced a wafer of something, unwrapped it, and offered it to me. I did not know what it was, but I took it, as it would have been rude to refuse. He produced another piece, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. I did the same. It tasted of peppermint, but unlike British toffee, it refused to dissolve for swallowing. I had just been introduced to chewing gum.
That tank and its entire crew were convinced that in a few days they would be part of the invasion force that would try to storm Hitler’s Atlantic Wall in the massively fortified Pas-de-Calais. Many must have thought they would never come back. In fact they were all wrong.
My Texan was part of a huge decoy army that the Allied commanders had stuffed into East Kent to dupe the German High Command. Secretly they were planning to invade via Normandy, way down south, with another army then crouching under camouflaged canvas miles away from Kent.
The soldiers of the decoy army might go over later, but not on D-Day. Thinking they would be the first shock wave, with terrible casualties, thousands of them were jamming every bar in Kent to the doors, drinking in the final saloon. A week later, a solemn voice on the radio, which was then called the wireless, announced that British, American, and Canadian troops had landed in strength on five beaches in Normandy and were fighting their way inland.
Two days after that, there was an earsplitting rumble from the front garden and the Sherman rolled away. My Texan was gone. No more chewing gum. Under the guidance of my mother, I knelt at the bedside and prayed to Jesus to look after him. It was a month later that I was taken to Hawkinge.
My father was a major in the army, but for the past ten years he had been a member of Ashford’s amateur fire brigade. Despite his protests, this put him in a “restricted occupation,” meaning he could not be posted abroad and go into combat. The country needed every fireman it had. He insisted on a job and was made a welfare officer, answerable to the War Office and charged with overseeing the living conditions of all the soldiers based in East Kent.
I do not know when he ever slept for those five years. My mother ran the family furrier’s shop while Dad spent his days in a khaki uniform and his nights on a fire truck, racing around putting out fires. My point is, he had a car and a cherished petrol allowance, without which he could not have done his day job. Hence the trip across the Weald of Kent to visit the grass-field fighter strip at Hawkinge. It was the base of two squadrons of Spitfires.
Back then the Spitfire was not just a fighter plane, it was a national icon. It still is. And for every small boy, the men who flew them were heroes to surpass any footballer or showbiz personality. While my father conducted his business with the base commander, I was handed over to the pilots.
They made a great fuss of me, thinking perhaps of their own children or kid brothers far away. One of them picked me up under the armpits, swung me high, and dropped me into the cockpit of a Mark 9 Spitfire. I sat on the parachute, overawed, dumbfounded. I sniffed in the odors of petrol, oil, webbing, leather, sweat, and fear—for fear also has an aroma. I studied the controls, the firing button, the instruments; I gripped the control stick. I stared ahead along the endless cowling masking the great Rolls-Royce Merlin engine to the four-bladed propeller, stark against a duck-egg-blue Kentish sky. And in the manner of little boys, I swore a little boy’s oath.
Most small boys swear to something they want to be when they grow up, but usually the promise fades and the dream dies. I swore that one day I was going to be one of them. I was going to wear the pale blue uniform with wings on the chest, and fly single-seaters for the RAF. When I was hoisted back out of the cockpit, I had made up my mind what I was going to do: I would be a fighter pilot, and I would fly a Spitfire.
I could not foresee the years of discouragement from schools and peer groups, the mockery and disbelief. When my father drove his little Wolseley saloon back to Ashford, I was lost in thought. A month later, I turned six and the dream did not die.
LEARNING FRENCH
Before the war, my father had been a pillar of the Rotary Club of Ashford. With the departure of so many men into the armed forces or to war work, that was all suspended for the duration. But in 1946 it was restarted, and the next year saw a program of “twinning” with our newly freed neighbors in France. Ashford, beginning with the letter A, was twinned with Amiens in Picardy.
My parents were matched with a French doctor, the Resistance war hero Dr. Colin and his wife. Throughout the occupation, he had remained the doctor assigned to the hundreds of railwaymen living and working in the great rail hub of the Amiens marshaling yards. Permitted his own car and free movement, he had observed many things useful to the Allies across the Channel, and at risk of discovery and execution, had passed them on to the Resistance.
The Colins came to visit in 1947, and the following year invited my parents back. But the shop came first, and they could not take the time off, so I went instead, a pattern that would be repeated for the next four years. Not just for a weekend, but for most of the eight-week summer school vacation.
Like many families of the French bourgeoisie, the Colins had a country house far from the city fumes, buried deep in the countryside of Corrèze in the Massif Central in the middle of France. Thus in July 1948, aged nine, in short trousers and school cap, I accompanied my father on the adventure of crossing the Channel on a ferry. Only at the other side, looking back, could I see for the first time the towering white cliffs of Dover, which the German army had been staring at so longingly eight years earlier. Dr. Colin met us at Calais, and my father, pink with embarrassment, was duly embraced and kissed on both cheeks. Then he patted me on the head and reboarded the ferry for home. Real men did not kiss in those days.
Dr. Colin and I boarded the train for Amiens, and I saw for the first time wooden seats in a railway carriage. The doctor had a complimentary ticket for first class, but he preferred to travel in third with the working-class people he served.
At Amiens, I met Madame Colin again, and their four children, all in their early twenties and late teens. François, then seventeen, was the wild one, arrested several times by the Gestapo during the occupation and reason for his mother’s snow-white hair. Not one of them spoke a word of English, and after three terms at a British prep school, I could just about manage bonjour and merci. Sign language was coming into its own, but I had been given a primer textbook for the grammar and began to work out what they were saying. Two days later, we all left for Paris and Corrèze.
“Abroad” seemed a very strange but fascinating place. Everything was different—the language, the food, the mannerisms, the customs, and those massive French railway engines. But children, in the manner of learning things, are like blotting paper. They can soak up information. Today, sixty-five years later, stumped by the new Internet-connected, digitalized world, I marvel at children little more than toddlers who can do twenty things with an iPhone that I have a problem switching on.
Dr. Colin was not with us. He had to stay in Amiens and tend to his patients. So Madame and the teenagers traveled south to fulfill the sacred French summer holiday in the country with a small and slightly overwh
elmed English boy. We changed trains at Ussel onto a branch line to Egletons and thence by wheezing country bus to the ancient village of Lamazière Basse. It was like going back to the Middle Ages.