TONY HOLMES REMEMBERS THE EXCITMENT AND DANGER OF A WARTIME CHILDHOOD

THE BOMBING

In Miss Shearing’s class we were saying afternoon prayers when a boy listening to an overhead aeroplane said ”That’s a Jerry plane Miss!”.  We were told to carry on with· saying our prayers but when machine guns were heard, Miss Shearing told us to get under our desks and we could hear the explosions. My mother, returning from the village, crouched down by a hedge in front of the hospital. She later told us that she had seen the bomb doors open and bombs being released. My father, who was on the Grammar School tennis courts with the Army cadets, was shot at from the plane,  but they missed.   One bullet went through a window in the church and was lodged in an oak pew. The bombs missed the house where the two sisters of Mr Neville Chamberlain lived by twenty yards and fell in Church Street, across the High Street, killing four people and landing in Boyce’s builders’ yard.

Defenses of Odiham

There were pillboxes in the garden next to the Waterwitch in Colt Hill; behind the War Memorial; half way up Love Lane; in a barn in Warnborough Street; in a field near The Firs; and at the end of West Street. Barbed wire went from Love Lane pillbox to the Chalk Pit. There were holes for mines at the village end of King Street and barbed wire barricades, which could be put across King Street. Slit trenches were dug on the Buryfields side of Monk’s Meadow. There was a Home Guard observation post in a tree in The Firs.

Before the war, the road to Long Sutton went alongside the aerodrome. From there we watched the review of aircraft by King Peter of Yugoslavia in 1938. Soon afterwards the road was closed and it still is. A machine gun post was put at the top of the road by the crossroads. The old National School site in Buryfields became a first aid post and many local people helped to put sandbags round it. In the allotments opposite our house, “St Ives” in Buryfields (now called Apple Tree Cottage}, there was a post with a fluorescent green square on top. If it changed colour we knew it signified a gas attack!

Air raid shelters were constructed. One was underground opposite the Assembly Rooms in King Street. There were above ground shelters at the top of Cemetery Hill by the Alms Houses and also in the passageway between Terry’s shop and the Post Office. There were others, but I am not sure of the location.

We were issued with gas masks at Dunleys Hut at the top of Dunleys Hill. We had to carry these in a cardboard box every time we went out. On the way to London Road Boys’ School we were often asked the way to the aerodrome, which was being extended, by contractors’ lorry drivers.

One Sunday morning bombs were dropped in the field between the cemetery and Fisher’s stream. In the  afternoon  many people were out collecting shrapnel for souvenirs, little knowing that there was an unexploded  bomb in the hedge. A few days later, after the area had been cordoned off, a bomb disposal team came to set off the bomb. There is still a dip in the hedge where it was.

I also remember a French Bren gun carrier that crashed into a house on the corner of Western Cross. The crew spoke no English. None of the attending police spoke French . It took a long time to sort out the problem!

BEFORE D DAY

Many convoys went through Odiham, often coming up Dunleys Hill, across the crossroads and past the Chalk Pit on their way to the south coast. We used to call out to the Americans to ask if they had any “sweet caps”. (These were cigarettes which had on the packet silhouettes of aircraft which we boys collected).

Maori soldiers had an encampment in a field off the Dogmersfield Road. Their chaplain became friendly with my parents and often came to our house for afternoon tea. He wrote to my parents after D Day that the Maoris had suffered heavy casualties.

Near Snatchangers Farm a field was used by the American forces in tented accommodation . They departed after D Day and left much equipment behind which local boys made use off.

On one of the many military exercises in the area “windows” (metal strips dropped to confuse enemy radar) were used. The area had many varieties of these, some thick, some thin, lying on the ground.

From our house I saw three aircraft crash –

• A Hudson coming in to land at the aerodrome stalled and burst into flames on the airfield.
• A Mosquito cartwheeled down the road to the airfield and burst into flames near the guardhouse.
• A Tomahawk crashed into the hedge near The Firs after colliding with a Tiger Moth and for months afterwards the area smelled of aviation fuel.

Coming back from school one day I saw a Mustang which had bounced across the Buryfields Oust missing the School and come to rest in the barbed wire across the field. As it bounced along, the ammunition from the plane was spread out across the field. Matron and Nurse from the hospital rushed out to help, but the pilot was only shaken. The plane had run out of fuel.

Towards the end of the war it was common to see several hundred Lancasters and Halifaxes setting out on raids at dusk. My brother Peter and I counted 720 one evening.