Nostalgie de guerre

26/07/2007

I was born a year before your correspondent, Bert Smith (MT, May 2007), and I wonder if he remembers the Woolton Pies? There was endless, ribald speculation as to what went into them. Of course, living in the Lincolnshire Wolds, I was probably bombed rather less frequently than Bert, but, since our village was in the Lea of Binbrook Aerodrome, we did not entirely escape the attentions of the Luftwaffe.

One bomb fell directly on our village, but didn't go off. When the bomb disposal men took it to pieces, it contained a perfectly innocuous substance and a greetings card from the Dutch resistance!

On the other hand, the dummy gunpost, on the brow of the hill just below the aerodrome, took a pasting every night. We would go there in the morning to find the big, wooden gun overturned and its crew of dummy soldiers all crumpled and leaking sawdust. But Jerry never got the aerodrome.

Our saddest occasion, though, was when a Lancaster, manned by an Australian crew, developed engine-trouble shortly after take-off. The pilot must have known that he and his men were doomed, but he still took the aircraft as far out of the village as he could. It crashed by Sawyers Farm on the South Road. The blast damaged the farmhouse pretty badly, but the rest of us escaped with the loss of a few roof-tiles and the odd window. Those poor young men were blown to pieces - their jackets were hanging up in the trees, all round Sawyer's farm, and bits of their bodies were scattered all over the surrounding fields.

As a retired schoolmaster, I would not wish such sights and experiences on the young of today - although I sometimes suspect that the evils to which they are exposed are more subtle and deadly than those which Bert and I had to endure.

The age he and I grew up in was an age of relative innocence, and I often catch myself indulging (as I am sure HE does!) in a certain “nostalgie de la guerre”.

John Wilkinson, London