High Explosive Bomb at Finchley Road

Over the Seas Two-Five-Four!
We’re marching right off,
We’re marching right off to War!
No-body knows where or when
But we’re marching right off
We’re marching right off - again!
It may be BER-LIN
To fight Hitler’s KIN
Two-fifty-four will win through
We may be gone for days and days — and then!
We’ll be marching right off for home
Marching right off for ho-me
Marching right off for home — again!

___________________________

Merry-merry-merry are we
For we are the boys of the AR-TIL-LER-Y!
Sing high — sing low where ever we go
TWO-FIVE-FOUR Battery never say NO

INTRODUCTION

The 64th Field Regiment Royal Artillery, Territorial Army has roots going back to the 1860’s. It first saw action in France during the Great War 1914 to 1918 when it took part in the well known battles of Loos, Vimy Ridge, River Somme, Ypres, Passchendale, Cambrai and Lille.
Its casualties numbered 158 killed.

Again in the Second World War it was called upon to play its part and fought with the 8th Army in Tunisia and then with the 5th and 8th armies in Italy. It was part of the first sea borne invasion fleet to land on the actual continent of Europe thus beginning its liberation from Nazi German domination. Battle honours include Salerno, Volturno, Garigliano, Mt Camino, Anzio, Gemmano, Monefiore, Coriano Ridge, Forli, Faenza, R. Senio Argenta.

Its peacetime recruits came mainly from the Putney, Shepherds Bush and Paddington areas of London up to the beginning of World War II. However on the commencement of hostilities and for the next two years many men left the regiment as reinforcements and for other reasons. As a result roughly one third of the original Territorials went abroad with the regiment, the remainder being time expired regular soldiers and conscripted men.

Casualties amounted to 84 killed and 160 wounded.

In 1937 I was nineteen years old and there was every indication that the dictators ruling Germany in particular and to a lesser degree Italy, were rearming and war seemed a not too distant prospect. Britain, in my opinion had gone too far along the path of disarmament since World War I and with a vast empire to defend was becoming alarmingly weak by comparison, particularly in the air and on land. It was in this atmosphere that my employers gathered together all the young men in their London office, and presumably, elsewhere, and indicated that they believed we really ought to join a branch of the armed forces in view of the war clouds gathering over Europe and the hostile actions of Messrs Hitler and Mussolini. There was a fair amount of enthusiasm in the air at the time and it must not be forgotten that we British in those days were intensely proud of our country. The Empire encompassed the world and it was only nineteen years since we had defeated Imperial Germany.

The fact that we may not do so well in a future war against Germany and Italy did not enter the heads of us teenagers. And we certainly had no idea that the army had not advanced very far since 1918 in some areas of military strategy.

In the circumstances I looked round for a branch of the forces that was local to where I lived and decided to join an artillery battery at Shepherds Bush in West London. The uniform, if you could call the rather misshapen khaki outfit by such a name, with its’ spurs was just that bit less unattractive than the various infantry or engineer units that were available. So in February 1937 I was sworn-in, with my friend Ernie and received the Kings shilling as was the custom. It so happened that soon afterwards conscription was introduced and I would have been called up with the first or second batch of “Belisha Boys”.

I had enlisted with 254 Battery Royal Artillery and I discovered, it was quite good so far as Territorial Army units were concerned, for that summer it came fourth in Gt Britain in the “Kings Prize” competition for artillery at Larkhill, Salisbury. In fact I happened to be on holiday in the Isle of Wight at the time and made special arrangements to travel to Larkhill and join my unit for the final and if my memory serves me correctly the winner was a medium battery from Liverpool.

My job as a “specialist” was very interesting indeed because even though a humble gunner — the equivalent of a private in the infantry — I had to learn all about the theory of gunnery. However after a year or so, indeed after the first years camp I realised that I was not really cut out to be a military type. In fact I am in no doubt that the British in general are not military minded and are somewhat reluctant to dress up in uniform. However I found that many of those who were military minded and lovers of “spit and polish” were marked out for promotion but were not necessarily the best choices for other reasons. There was also I suppose a quite natural tendency to select tall or well built men for initial promotion but my later experience tended to show that courage and leadership find strange homes and sometimes it was a quiet or an inoffensive man who turned out to be the hero.

Well the pressure from Hitler’s Germany intensified. There was a partial mobilisation in 1938 and in the summer of that year we went to camp inland from Seaford, Sussex. There were no firing ranges there so the gunners could only go through the motions of being in action but the rest of us, signallers, drivers, specialists etc. put in plenty of practice and the weather was warm and sunny.

During 1939 our camp was held at Trawsfynydd and the weather was dreadful. It rained on and off over the whole fortnight. Our tents and marquees were blown away and we had to abandon our canvas homes and be reduced to living in doorless open stables. Despite the conditions we did a great deal of training which included an all night exercise. The odd thing that I never understood is that both in Territorial days and when training in England from the beginning of the war until we went abroad there was always a leaning towards rushing into action and taking up three or four positions in a morning’s outing yet when it came to the real thing we had all the time in the world and occupying a gun site was a slow and deliberate job undertaken with as much care as possible. I believe it was the same in the first World War and also at Waterloo so I can only assume that the authorities were intent on keeping us on the go rather than simulating actual wartime conditions. Apart from going out daily on to the firing ranges we had our moments of recreation and I took part in at least one football match against another battery but I cannot remember the result. I always played left back although I really was not heavy enough for that position but I was able to get by as a result of being able to run faster than most of the attacking forwards that I came up against.

The really odd coincidence was that our summer camp in Wales was an exact repetition of what happened in 1914. Another incident that is still quite clear in my memory was that at our Regimental Dinner held, I believe in late July or early August of 1939, Major General Liardet, our guest of honour, stated that we were likely to be at war with Germany within the following month. He was not far out in his timing!

Well the situation steadily worsened and the armed forces were again alerted. This time on the 25th August 1939 to be precise. I was “called up” or “embodied” along with about half a dozen others. I was at work that day at the office when I received a telephone call from my mother with the news that a telegram had been sent to me with orders to report to the Drill Hall at Shepherds Bush at once. This I had expected for some days as already more than half the young men in the office had already departed because they were in various anti-aircraft or searchlight units that had been put on a full war footing. So that morning I cleared my desk, said farewell to the older and more senior members who remained, went home, changed into uniform, picked up my kitbag that was already packed, caught the necessary bus and duly reported as ordered.

I was one of several “key personnel” detailed to man the reception tables in the drill hall, fill in the necessary documents for each individual soldier when the bulk of the battery arrived and be the general clerical dogsbodies, for which we received no thanks whatsoever. The remainder of the battery personnel trickled in during the following seven days up to September 2nd and after being vetted was sent on to billets at Hampstead whilst we remained at the “Bush”.

The other three batteries in the regiment, namely 253, 255 and 256 were mustered in exactly the same manner. For instance 256 Battery went from their drill hall to Edgware in motor coaches and were billeted in private houses. The duty signallers post was in the Police Station and when off duty they slept in the cells! Slit trenches were dug in the local playing fields and four hour passes were issued occasionally. There were two ATS attached to 256 Battery at that time a corporal cook, and her daughter who was the Battery Office typist.

I well remember the day Great Britain formally declared war on Germany, a Sunday, because one of the newspapers bore headlines something like “There will be no war”. Thereafter I always took with a pinch of salt anything I read in other newssheets.

At this time our regiment was armed with elderly 18 pounders and possibly even older (1916 I believe) 4.5 howitzers. My battery had howitzers. They were quite serviceable but totally out of date particularly when compared with the latest German guns. They had a low muzzle velocity and a maximum range of only 5600 yards. Our small arms were Short Lee Enfield rifles, also out of date and we had no automatics. There were not enough greatcoats to go round and the new recruits were issued with navy blue civilian coats. Our transport, when eventually some was provided, was a mixture of civilian and military vehicles.

Those of us who remained at the Drill Hall were under a loose kind of military discipline and I do not think it ever entered our heads that the war would last so long. I can remember considering the vastness of the British and French empires and thinking that Hitler was crazy to arouse the hostility of such mighty forces. Each day we mounted a guard on the empty building we occupied and each day a small squad marched round the back streets, which I am certain did nothing to raise the morale of the civilian population.

There were false air raid alarms and we spent quite a lot of time filling sandbags which were stacked up outside all the windows and doors to provide a protection against blast from exploding bombs. In the streets cars rushed around with their windscreens decorated with such notices as “DOCTOR”, “FIRST AID”, “PRIORITY” etc, and it was all so unnecessary. Sometimes I felt more like a member of a senior Boy Scout troop than a soldier in the British Army.

After a few weeks the rearguard as we were now called left the drill hall and moved to Hampstead, not far from the Underground station and where the remainder of the battery was billeted in civilian apartments. They were very reasonable except that somebody at regiment had the unreasonable idea of sounding reveille at 0530 and we all had to mill about in the dark because the whole country was blacked out and shaving in such conditions with cold water was not easy. Being a Lance Bombardier my job when on guard duty was to post the sentries at two hourly intervals but the problem was that as we had no guardhouse the sentries slept in their own beds and there was a fair number of new recruits. Therefore you can imagine that as there were still civilians present, occasionally the wrong man was called. I remember finding my way into a third or fourth floor room and shaking a man in bed whom I thought was the next sentry to go on duty only to be somewhat startled when he shot up in bed and shouted “go away this is the third time I have been woken up tonight and I have to go to work in a few hours time!”

Whilst we were at Hampstead leave was frequent in the evenings and at weekends. Training such as it was, was of a theoretical rather than a practical form. However we very soon moved to “Bifrons House” in Kent, an empty stately home in very large grounds near Bridge and about four miles south of Canterbury. Here we resided until the middle of 1940.

In this position we had a bugler who blew reveille every morning while the Union Jack was raised, and lights out at night. The food was quite appalling in my opinion. It was prepared in large vats by a large and grimy cook and by the time it was distributed was almost cold due to the unheated condition of the dining area. Breakfast usually consisted of eggs eaten in the cold semi darkness and the yolks had what appeared to be a kind of plastic skin on them that was almost unbreakable. Indeed all meals were of the same poor standard and there was no noticeable improvement during our stay here.

The winter of 1939/40 was very long, very cold and brought a heavy fall of snow which stayed with us for several weeks. Christmas day was unforgettable. I had a touch of ‘flu and the first aid post where another soldier and myself were sent to was an empty room in a lodge house. There was not a stick of furniture, no heating, the floors were bare and we slept on straw palliasses on the floor. I recovered very quickly and was out in two or three days! On one day of our stay at Bifrons, on a Saturday morning there was a Colonels inspection and as a large number of sergeants and bombardiers were absent from among the gun crews I was detailed to take charge of one gun and stand in the frozen snow for the best part of an hour on what was I believe the coldest day of the winter. And so far as I remember our Commanding Officer decided not to include us and eventually we were dismissed and thawed out around the nearest fire.

In general however I think most of us quite enjoyed our stay here. It certainly was not like home but we made ourselves comfortable and parades finished about 1630 hours which gave us a fair span of time until “lights out”. At weekends we spent the Saturday evening in the pub in nearby Bridge and occasionally walked or begged a lift to Canterbury which was four miles away. In our spare time we played chess and various games of cards. From time to time we were entertained by groups of visiting artists or had sing-songs in typical army fashion. Looking back it was in some ways I suppose like an of beat low class boarding school with the battery numbering some two hundred and fifty men billeted in the bedrooms and stables of the house. Nevertheless we did a lot of training. We even went out in the cold snow covered countryside at night in our vehicles as if we were advancing or retreating, for two or three hours at a time. We had to take a certain preselected route which was very difficult to follow because with everything hidden beneath the snow, with no signposts and with trying to read an inch to the mile map at night with a hand torch giving only a very restricted light because of the blackout the odds against making a mistake were fairly high. We would come back cold and hungry to a mug of hot tea or cocoa and a bite to eat. By day we practised other aspects of artillery warfare either as part of the battery as a whole, sometimes with our signallers but more often as not as a group of specialists going through the many things we had to learn, time after time. When the weather improved this was a most enjoyable way of spending the morning or afternoon session for we could take our instruments out to an attractive bit of the countryside within walking distance of our billets and do some survey, map reading or a command post exercise.

Working and travelling to London in the wars years was no picnic; more often that not air raids shut down the underground, so getting to and from work could mean hours of delay.

My father and sister worked for the LNER (London North Eastern Railway) in the King’s Cross Station offices on Cheney Road, which have since been demolished and replaced with a car park. To help with the problem of clearing the station in the event of an air raid a volunteer fire guard duty was organised by railway staff. The duty required that the guard spend hours on the station roof listening for sirens or watching for approaching aircraft: if an attack was imminent the fire guard sounded a siren to clear the building. (My father held the record for clearing the station the highest number of times.)

My sister Connie was a typist in the typing pool. She recalls that on one occasion word went round that the greengrocer at the bottom of the escalator at King’s Cross underground station had received a delivery of cherries, so she rushed off to join the queue, quite forgetting to take a bag to put them in. She decided to use her ‘tin hat’ as a carrier. On returning to ground level she realised that there was an air raid, so she hurried through the station to get to the office shelter.

Suddenly there was the sound of a V1 and just as suddenly the engine cut out. The next thing she knew a soldier knocked her to the ground and threw himself over her as protection from the blast. As luck would have it the buzz bomb landed just outside the station, causing a great deal of damage and loss of life. She said she would never forget the screams and panic of people trying to get out of the trains. When she finally got back to the office, father was waiting for her, asking where the hell she had been, and why she wasn’t wearing her tin hat. She showed him the tin hat with the cherries in it and he went mad!

I was born on the ninth of April 1939,in the Dick Whittington Wing of St. Mary's Hospital North London, to Florence Margaret and Albert Edward Worboys.

Of course I had no idea at that time of what lay ahead of me.

Years after it was all over, in my teens and in a moment of some weird flashback, I asked my mother, "Did she ever try to stuff me into a basket, when I was a baby ?" She looked at me strangely and said: "Why do you ask ?"

I was lying on my back looking up, as this thing came down upon me it covered the whole length of my body (little did I know then, that I measured about 18 inches in full at the time)

It was shaped kind of oval and I could see a pattern similar to an Easter egg.
As it came down on me I screamed my head off and fought against it in sheer terror..... then blackness.

My mother said: "I tried to fit you into a baby gas mask chamber, you were too big for it, you were about nine months old, you didn't like it one little bit "
My first memory of the war.

I cannot remember, times, dates or even the year in which my memories of the war occured. Strangely, they are simple, vivid flashes, with nothing either side to identify what was happening before or after. Albeit, they have been with me all my life.

My father led my mother, then me, followed by my younger brother John, down the passageway of our home in Landseer Road, (off Holloway Road, Islington) Outside the closed front door I could hear explosions. My father was about to open the door. He stopped suddenly and said: "Wait". There was a high pitched pinging sound outside the door.
After it stopped, we went out to the shelter.
I often wonder, now what would have happened if my dad had not recognised what must have been shrapnel coming at and hitting our front door. I think I was about 18 months old at the time.

We had moved into my Grandmother's house at number 1 KIngsdown Road, in the next street, off Holloway Road. Air raid shelters had been built on the road directly outside the houses all along the street. Brick and concrete,shaped like giant shoeboxes.
Whenever I smell green concrete, I remember those shelters.
One miserable morning after spending the night in our street shelter,my mother and I had emerged to see a sky absolutely filled with flack. I looked up at it, there was a fireman standing near a fire engine.
I said to my mum and pointing up at the flack," Who gets that stuff out of the sky, mummy?".
Mum looked at me and at the fireman, who was smiling, then she said"The firemen do,my love" I replied "How"? My mum seemed momentarily lost for words and then confidently answered,"They go up on their ladders and clean the sky with their hoses".
I was very young then but the vision that came to me of a fireman climbing high up into that sky on a ladder with a firehose to wash out all of those little black clouds, didn't somehow ring quite true.One look at the firemans grinning face convinced me that"Mum" wasn't being quite accurate with me.

Sometime, about when it all began, I was huddled against my grandmother in the corner of the street air raid shelter, it was dark and the noise of the explosions,close by, was terrible. I said to my grandmother: "Nan, who is doing this ?"
She said:"The Germans."

I conjured up an infant's image of fire breathing dragons, I could not comprehend that other human beings were creating such terror for me and my loved ones.

As the war went on and during nights spent in the air raid shelters, my nan and I became very close.
One of our favourite times was when the "All Clear' sounded after a raid (or as it was later, an uneventful night in the shelters) I would go to her and she would take my hands in hers and I would say "All Clear Nan," and she would smile at me and say "Yes,my lovely all clear."

Now and again amid the noise, flashes, bangs and occasional screams of it's occupants the door of the shelter would open and a white helmet with ARP painted on it's front, would appear, atop the tiny head of Mrs. White, the wife of the cornershop grocer, "Everybody allright"? she would enquire, The reply was always "Yes,Mrs.White we're allright " Warm, comforting thoughts and feelings for each other were a way of life by then.

After the war we would continue to get our groceries from Mr. and Mrs. White's shop and comiserate with and help her when her husband became ill and began taking terrible fits. She was only a tiny woman but she had a great heart and magnificent patience.

I had started school with my younger brother John, at Grafton Road infants, (near Seven Sisters Road, Islington) and there we were in the assembly hall with all the other kids listening to Miss Somper the P.T. mistress telling us that "We were not allowed to take cherries on the train, which was going to transport us to the evacuation centres." "The stones and wrapping paper will make too much of a mess."
Dutifully, my brother and I did not take cherries on the train. We were the only little tots that didn't. There were purple wrapping papers, stones and stalks from one end of the train to the other. My brother and I had none.

Was it Banstead, Burk Hampstead or some other place I don't remember exactly. I do know it was an evacuation home and that ache that had been in my throat since leaving my family in London, was there as usual.

One of the nurses at the home collected a large group of us littlies and shepherded us down across the playing field to a "monkey climb" . She then proceeded to place the other kids on the "climb" and then placed me in front of it facing her. There were some other people there with cameras and one of them put a blindfold on her and then she,(the nurse)made as if to try and catch me.

I had returned to my family in Kingsdown Road(I don't think the war was quite over at the time). There was may grandmother and my mother, at the kitchen table and there was this newspaper "The Sunday Pictorial" They were pointing at it, for me to look at the front page. There I was, playing "blindmans buff" with the nurse. A full front page.

Was it that same afternoon that, as we all stood there in that room,suddenly there was a massive whoosh of air and the windows seemed to buckle in and out like balloons. My grandmother screamed and then it was all over and quiet again. I didn't know what doodlebugs were at that particular time, I do now.

After the war, the bombed areas(we as kids called them debris)became our playgrounds. On them we attended concerts organised by the local "talents", built barricades and engaged in territorial gang wars, climbed into the attics and out onto the roofs of derelict rows of condemned houses, took the lead out of the windows of the burned out church and melted it down, etc.etc.

The burnt out church in question was Saint Pauls and once stood at the corner of Kingsdown Rd. and Stanley Terrace. It must have been a beautiful structure before the blitz but had been reduced by incendiaries, to a shell whose walls and internal pillars only remained. It's pulpit was filled with a small mountain of rubble which extended from wall to wall at each side.
The door of the church had gone and the brickwork so patiently and continuously erected by workmen to seal it off was constantly being removed, just as patiently, by us kids, so we could get in and play. The floor was usually covered by about eight inches of water from end to end and made an excellent obstacle course for traversing across on old milk bottle crates and other junk.
One day whilst playing there, I and my mates, for some inexplicable reason decided to dig away at the rubble near the pulpit. We started at the left side and before long to our wonder and awe, we realised we had uncovered an arched opening over a large concrete shelf, beyond which we could see what appeared to be a small room. We clambered over the shelf,into the room one by one and as I stood there, my eyes becoming accustomed to the dark, feeling like an explorer,as I imagine pyramid explorers might have felt, entering a mummies tomb, another, strange,familiar feeling came over me.
I was looking at the walls;
They were patterned in gold diamond lattice over a purple background that I had seen somewhere before. I forgot about it and I and my mates continued on with our usual activities of getting thoroughly dirty and wet.
Weeks, maybe months later, I was talking with my Nan and out of the blue I said to her: "Nan, have I ever been in the old church, before it was burned?" My Nan looked at me incredulously and said: "How did you remember that?" I said to her: "It was the pattern on the wall in a room we discovered next to the pulpit". My Nan was amazed, she said: "You were only a baby then, we went into that room in the church to get a food parcel".

This story was added by Tricia Humphrey, Librarian, Wells Public Library, Somerset as told by Shelagh Levy Addis.
Every day during the war someone from Hampstead went up to the Whitestone Pond, the highest point in London, and if they could see the cross on the top of St Paul's cathedral, London was safe and free.

Extraordinary Schooling in WW2 - Part One
by Ernie-the-Author

Introduction

This account is chiefly about my wartime school experiences.
Despite its name, St. Mary's School was an independent (private) non-denominational co-educational school. To many of us former pupils, however, it was more than this - it was a remarkable and unique learning experience —albeit not particularly academic.

St. Mary's school had Froebel leanings with group and experiential learning practices. To what extent the school was "progressive" is debatable - as, for instance, we still addressed our teachers formally (viz: Mrs E., Miss Gardener, Mrs Paul). The school seemed heavily biased to the learning of languages and the arts from an early age, sacrificing time devoted to the sciences and technology.

The school was owned and run by Elizabeth Paul, assisted for most of this time by her husband Heinz Paul. They were of German Jewish origin and had previously run a school in Berlin. They bought the school as a going concern in 1937 when it was still at 1, Belsize Avenue, Hampstead (where I believe the original school was founded a few years earlier - in what form I know not). The Pauls relocated and restarted the school in a pair of adjoining "semi-detached" houses at 16 Wedderburn Road (between Fitzjohn's Avenue and Belsize Park) in Hampstead, London N.W.3. during the summer of 1937, initially as a day school.

With the outbreak of world war two in September 1939 St Mary’s became a boarding school on evacuating London. (Shortly after the war ended in 1945, the school split and was renamed St. Mary’s Town & Country School. The main part returned to within half a mile of its pre-war location - to 38-40 Eton Avenue (into another pair of leased semi-detached houses) just off Swiss Cottage - where it remained until its demise in 1982. The "country" boarding section moved to Stanford Park in Leicestershire - but this only lasted for a few years.)

Preamble

Formal education started for me at St. Mary's School in 1937, about a couple of months before my fifth birthday. As Mrs Paul’s purchase and rebirth of the school was that year, I must have been among its first pupils. I remained there for my entire primary education, or what Mrs Paul later termed the "Junior School." At the end of world war two in 1945 I transferred to The Beltane School - now also defunct.

On my first morning, I recall being told on arrival to play in the sand pit, which was located in a large ground floor bay window. Unfortunately, the school cat(s) had been there before me! Nothing else of note comes to mind from my first couple of happy years at school, except that I was much more enthusiastic about graphic art and finding out how things and nature work, than about the three "R’s".

Another memory was my appendicectomy, at The London Clinic, when I was almost six. A huge get-well card arrived at my bedside from all 15-18 of my school class mates. Five days after surgery I was allowed up from my hospital bed for the first time. This was to see, from my hospital room window, the 1938 Guy Fawkes fire works across London - the last before the war put an end to these more festive rocket missiles and explosions.

We had a rather late summer holiday in 1939, in Llanmadoc on the Gower peninsula in South Wales. This was a farmhouse holiday, with the five of us, plus my baby brother Peter's nanny - Evelyn, alias "nurseydear" - and our closest friends, the Flemings (originally Fleischmann): Oscar, Nina and their then teenage son Cecil. I remember that there seemed to be endless expanses of sand and dunes, which were about ten minutes walk through bracken and sheep cropped grass from the working farm. It was there, on the third of September, that we learnt that, because of Hitler's invasion of Poland, Britain declared war on Germany.

My father had to hurry back to London. St. Mary's School was about to evacuate to the south west coast - so it was arranged that Oscar would drive my sister Marian and me direct from Wales to the school's new Devonshire location. I recall that we had to bed and breakfast en route and the first time that I had a cooked English breakfast: egg and bacon. Oscar was far more Jewish than we were, yet he enjoyed his bacon too! Marian, aged five and I, not yet seven, were suddenly about to become boarders. Along with about twenty other children of various ages, we were expected to be relatively safe in rural England.

Marian and I had no idea then, of course, how heart-wrenched and devastated mother must have felt, not knowing when she would ever see us again. She returned to our London home to care for her ageing and ailing parents, toddler Peter and with Robin already well on the way.

Devonshire

St. Mary's School left London to escape from the imminently expected blitzkrieg. So, it changed from being a day school to a boarding school. Beesands is a tiny village on the Start Bay shore between Torcross and Start Point in the southern most part of Devonshire known as the South Hams. This beautiful fertile region of English countryside lies between the English Channel and perhaps the most rugged barren "last wilderness" in the southern half of Britain: Dartmoor.

The school house was a fairly large farmhouse, situated about a quarter of a mile along the shore just north of Beesands, towards Torcross It housed a total of about two dozen staff and pupils. The garden bordered the beach and was enclosed by a very high thick hedge - a very effective wind-break.

We had one of England's finest beaches on our doorstep - a vast expanse extending to about six miles north of Torcross, Slapton Sands and about three miles south to Hallsands. But these are misnomers, as the beaches are almost entirely shingle.

Tragically, the sea had almost totally eroded away the village of Hallsands and I believe that only two cottages were still inhabited when we left there in 1940.
There were no caravans on the foreshore then and for the first few months we had the beaches entirely to ourselves. Bathing was treacherous, with steeply shelved shorelines and severe undertow, other than at low tide and even then, never without a teacher being present was the strict rule, I recall.

We had a wonderful time. During that first "Indian summer" we, the younger groups, often ran around naked within the enclosed garden. Even during the first winter, we played mostly on the beach and foreshore.

I recall little of class sessions. I think that we were split three ways: a few under six years of age, about six of us between six and eight, about the same number between eight to 11 and a very few older children. I remember only three staff during that first year: the heads, Mr and Mrs Paul and Mrs E. (with her two children, Priscilla and her younger brother John, who was two or three years my senior).

Elizabeth Paul was a large, vibrant woman, who was enterprising, imposing and assertive. Beneath her larger-than-life macho image, I felt that there was some warmth and empathy, which she kept hidden most of the time. She was a linguist, being fluent in English, French and German. Heinz Paul (we nicknamed him "Higgy" - quite why escapes me) supported his wife, mainly behind the scenes and quite possibly was a tour de force there. I do not recall him actually teaching, possibly not being qualified. He appointed himself largely as the general factotum. Mrs E. was a gem of a primary teacher, with infinite patience, warmth and kindness.

Strangely enough I was not homesick, although Marian (still only five) was at times. Marian and I remained at the school over that first Christmas holiday, our parents deciding to visit us for the festive weekend instead, with a few very basic presents and extra clothes. The main reason for this, I believe, was that our London home was still filled with Jewish refugees (from father's escape line) awaiting clearance and passage to the States. Our parents had to come by train to Kingsbridge (this branch line later became a casualty of the "Beeching cuts") and then by taxi, as cars and petrol were allowed only to "essential" (and privileged) users during the war. I recall startling mother with my total rejection when she suddenly switched to speaking German to us (which I explain later).

I remember the arrival of Paul and his cousin Natasha, Jewish refugees from Vienna, who actually witnessed the Nazis marching into the Austrian capital - a situation which I found astonishing, in that they still managed to escape. Paul and I became firm friends for much of our childhood. (Paul went on, via Aldenham School and the Architectural Association, to earn quite a reputation as an architect. It is a small world - many years later, Marian met him and his own young family at the Caversham Centre in Kentish Town, London - the pioneering group practice/health centre, when it was still in Caversham Road - where Marian was the practice nurse!)

We had some beautiful walks: the Devon South Coast footpath to Start Point lighthouse, about seven miles round trip from the school. To Torcross too, via the mini fresh water newt pond in a glade (with many dragon-flies, newts and water-boat-men) and climbing Jacob's Ladder up a small rock-face to the top of the little headland to descend to the village. Behind Torcross lay the large fresh water lagoon of Slapton Ley alongside and just behind the beach, created by the natural silting-up process. (I found this path again over 40 years later and the vertical iron ladder, very overgrown but still there, exactly in proportion as I had remembered this at the age of seven.)

Naturally, we also explored the deeply hedged Devon lanes inland, into the farming areas, with the rich red clay soil and hedgerows dividing cattle from crops. Red squirrels were then still quite common, before being ousted by the grey.

The farm adjoining the school was mainly a pig farm. We were all upset with the slaughter sessions, as we could hear the pigs squealing for their lives. In those days they cut their throats and let them bleed to death, harvesting the blood. A nature walk for the entire school was organized on these afternoons, to allay our distress.

Most mornings, we had a before breakfast run: the older kids ran about 500 yards to the village store, called The Crab Pot (I believe it still is) and back, the younger ones ran about half way. Breakfast was certainly welcome after that. Despite food rationing, we always seemed to have had plenty.

Half a day each week was dedicated to maintaining the "sea wall" just below the high tide line as best we could, due to the immense tides causing erosion. This meant piling up stones and filling gaps with as many flat stones we could find, but setting them in a vertical plane with edge to seaward, to combat the lateral power of the waves along the beach. Frequently, we saw massive schools of porpoises or dolphins playing and "show-jumping" in the inshore waves.

By the time of our first holiday at home in 1940, I had deliberately forgotten all my German, despite the boast that the school specialized in being multi-lingual! There were three reasons for this. Firstly, anything German I was determined to scorn and reject, as Germany had rejected us and then became the dreaded enemy. Secondly, maintaining two languages may have exacerbated my speech impediment - a severe stammer (which I have long since learnt to manage). Lastly, in contrast to most refugee kids, my living-in (at home) grandparents knew sufficient English to not have to converse with them in German. So Marian and I lost our German, though for quite a while we could understand when we were not meant to!

One morning we discovered that a U-boat (German submarine) was trapped in Start Bay by a sandbank at low tide. We were rushed inland and out of sight, lest they opened fire on us. Apparently, they surrendered and a coast guard boat went out to officially take them prisoner and a trawler towed them in, probably to Plymouth.

On another occasion, we were all ushered to the back of the house when one of us noticed what looked like a mine floating in the waves. Very bravely, Mr Paul crawled Indian fashion down to the waters edge to investigate, eventually to return somewhat sheepishly (and wet) with a large medicine ball bladder (like a double sized football)!

Our world was beginning to feel a little less safe than that desired. Then, in late June 1940, about a month after the Nazi occupation of Belgium and Holland, France capitulated to the Germans. This meant that the Hun were amassing just across the water, with the invasion of England due next. Thus, the school had to evacuate again, from a potential combat area to a safer more central inland location. This move was indeed timely and fortuitous, as a stray torpedo (I know not whose) blew-up much of what had been our schoolhouse a few weeks after we vacated it.

This was my initial year at boarding school during the first year of the Second World War. I remained at the same school for the rest of the war at its new location in the heart of rural England, which is described in my follow-on article: Extraordinary Schooling in WW2 - Part two.