Richard Storer

A Boy’s Wartime Memories of Suffolk
Richard Storer, WW2 People’s War

WW2 People’s War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar’
Article published as general public interest (non profit) as per BBC guidelines.

In 1942 I moved to Suffolk to join my mother and stepfather. I was getting older and slowly the war became of greater significance in my life. East Anglia was much closer to the action than was the small Dorset village where I had been since 1939. Rationing, transport, the blackout, air raids, aeroplanes, the war news on the radio, all were now significant factors in daily life. We were constantly warned or exhorted by a constant flow of government posters and other propaganda; “Dig for Victory”, “Careless talk cost lives”, “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases trap the germs in your handkerchief.”

In the autumn of 42 I started going to school in Ipswich and I travelled there and back by bus. These bus journeys were affected quite substantially by the war. The only male drivers and conductors were elderly as all the younger, able bodied men had been called up. All the single deck buses had their forward facing seats relocated so that there was a long row of seats down each side, all facing inwards. This allowed many more passengers to be carried with the majority standing in the central space. At night, because of the blackout, not only were the bus headlights covered in metal shields which prevented any light from shining upwards, and only allowed forward illumination through a very narrow horizontal slit, but the only bright light inside the bus was a single downward pointing lamp which was slid along a track by the conductress as she moved down the bus collecting fares. She thus moved around in her own personal spotlight which dimly revealed her in her dark blue serge uniform and peaked cap. The rest of the bus was virtually in darkness.

All the buses were eventually modified to run on gas and they used to tow behind them a two wheeled contraption, like an over sized dustbin with a coke stove underneath, which produced the gas to run the bus. This was also a period when pea soup fogs were common and these were greatly assisted by all the heavy industry billowing smoke in the Ipswich region in the 40’s and I remember bus journeys which only progressed with the help of the conductor walking along the edge of the pavement or roadway, holding a dim torch to give the driver some sort of reference to drive by.

Going home from school in the afternoons could sometimes be a problem if some after school activity had kept you back after normal hours. After a certain time – I think it was 5 o’clock – ‘workers’ had priority and school children, and any housewives who had been doing some late shopping, had to stand aside until all the ‘workers’ were on board. If the bus completely filled up with workers then you had to wait for the next bus. Mention of ‘workers’ brings back a vivid memory of the Norwich Road in Ipswich just after knocking off time in the factories. The road was packed with a mass of bicycles ridden by factory workers going home through the smoky atmosphere, usually elderly, usually rather grubby from a day working in heavy industry, mostly wearing cloth caps and invariably with some kind of knapsack slung across their shoulder and which had contained their lunch.

Most village cottages and houses had gardens large enough to provide ample space to grow all the vegetables needed by the household during the year. There was usually also enough space to keep chickens for both meat and eggs and many households also kept a pig which was fed on the food scraps from the house and was slaughtered when it was big enough. Tame rabbits were also kept to provide meat rather than as pets for the children and wild rabbits were also caught and were available either in the village butcher’s shop or from the local poacher. I remember ration books for both food and clothing in which the butcher or grocer either cut out or crossed off the various squares which denoted the ration of whatever it was for a particular week. Not only were most items rationed, they were also in short supply and my mother and other housewives would spend lots of time doing the rounds of shops looking for things they wanted. Sometimes a shop would acquire something that was ‘off ration’ and word quickly spread and a queue would form stretching outside onto the pavement. It is said that housewives used to join such queues without knowing what they were going to find when they got to the shop counter and any queue thus became an indication that there was something worthwhile to be found at the end of it and that joining it would probably pay dividends.

As a change from school lunches some of us used to go into town and patronise the Ipswich British Restaurant in Arcade Street. These British Restaurants were set up all over the country and were very, very basic and provided cheap but nutritious food. I don’t remember if there was any restriction on who could use them but, if there was, schoolboys were on the allowed list. When you entered you paid for what you wanted to eat and you were given a different coloured disc for each course. These discs were swapped for the food when you collected it from the serving table.

Most of the military activity that we saw in Suffolk was in the sky. All the American airfields, and there were masses of them, used to launch enormous numbers of bombers in the early mornings – B17’s and Liberators – and they spent lots of time wheeling round the sky joining up into larger formations before departing for their targets in occupied Europe. As they maneuvered for position they would fire off coloured vary pistol flares, presumably communicating various instructions without using the radio which would have alerted the Germans to the fact that big formations of bombers were on their way. All the remnants of these coloured flares would come floating down to the ground an I formed a collection of the cartridge end caps which had the various flare contents written on them: Yellow, Red/Red, Green/Blue, Green/Green etc. I sometimes accompanied my stepfather on business journeys which passed the airfields at Mendlesham and Eye, both of which were used by the Americans. Eye was particularly interesting as there was an aircraft dispersal pan at the side of the road and the aircraft had to cross over the road to get to it. I have a vivid memory of an armourer walking along the road, towards the B17 which was sitting on the pan, carrying an aircraft machine gun on his shoulder and long belts of ammunition draped around his neck. This particular concrete pan is still at the side of the A140 and is now used in the autumn as a hard standing for sugar beet.

Night time was when the war came closer to Suffolk during the early years of the conflict. The drone of bombers was a familiar sound in the dark. Some people said they could tell the difference between the sound of RAF and German aircraft with the “Gerries” supposedly making a pulsating rather than a steady sound. The impending arrival of the enemy was heralded by air raid sirens which gave out a rising and falling sound as a warning and a steady note for the all-clear. The nearest siren to where I lived was some distance away and could not always be heard but we had a dog who always heard it and would rush to be first into a cupboard under the stairs which doubled as a family air raid shelter.

When the Luftwaffe was around, the night sky would be crisscrossed with searchlights seeking to illuminate the enemy bombers so that antiaircraft guns could try and shoot them down. There were antiaircraft guns on the school playing field, just off the Henley Road in north Ipswich, and I once I remember going to school on the bus and passing houses on the Norwich Road which had been destroyed in an overnight raid. On another occasion when outside watching the searchlights at work, I saw a Ju 88 shot down and it crashed about a mile away killing at least one of the crew who was subsequently buried in Needham Market. This crashed aircraft became a good source of souvenirs for local children and I collected quite a number of cannon shells which provided lots of fun when the tips were levered off so that the filling could be extracted and lit with matches stolen from the kitchen drawer.

After the Germans gave up sending over massed night time raids they started using single aircraft, usually fighters or fighter bombers, for hit and run daylight raids in which they would come over at low level and drop their bombs and fire their guns at any target that they came across. Several houses were destroyed and people killed in one such raid on Needham Market and the location of the damage in the high street can be seen to this day just south of the old Town Hall where traditional old buildings have been replaced by more modern structures which do not match those which line the rest of the street. There were also occasions when farm workers out in the fields were machine gunned by these hit and run aircraft but I never heard of anybody being killed. Because these hit and run raids came in at very low level there was very little warning and a new kind of siren was introduced to indicate that immediate danger was likely. I seem to remember that this new warning was called a cuckoo siren and presumably consisted of alternate high and low notes but I can’t actually remember the sound it made.

Suffolk humour still persisted during the war and there was much amusement in our village when a member of the local Home Guard squad manning our local pill box accidentally fired his rifle inside the concrete structure. The bullet ricocheted round the inside and eventually came to rest having lodged itself in the folds of Charlie’s greatcoat. Nobody was hurt but the story is still told to this day.

As the war progressed more and more American servicemen were to be seen in the streets of Ipswich. During lunchtime breaks from school, groups of us would sometimes go into Christchurch Park where there were several areas of Rhododendron bushes much favoured by the Americans as places to take young ladies they had met in the town. We used to reconnoitre these bushes and, having established that the undergrowth was probably occupied and, having played a group game of dare or chicken, the loser would have to rush through the middle of the rhododendrons jumping over any prostrate figures that he came across and generally attempt to disturb whatever activity was going on. We were sometimes chased by irate Americans who were somewhat hampered by unfastened trousers. By my calculations, some of the young ladies involved must now be approaching their 80’s.

During the war, the American services were still segregated into separate black and white skinned units and one sometimes heard of occasional trouble in the Ipswich pubs when fights broke out between these different groups. I have vague memories of seeing the American military police attending a fight outside a pub near the Old Cattle Market. They were quite ruthless, freely using their long truncheons on the trouble makers and then throwing those arrested into the back of a large truck.

As the planned Normandy invasion drew near, the military presence in Suffolk increased. Close to where I lived, the whole of the main Ipswich to Norwich road was closed along the length that ran alongside Shrubland Park near Coddenham and nobody was allowed into the area though this ban on public access didn’t deter me or any other adventurous youngster. A military camp was created in the park with both tents and huts. The park was full of soldiers and their equipment, all carefully hidden amongst the woods. All along the edge of the main road, small concrete hard standings had been created every few yards amongst the trees and masses of vehicles were parked there, hopefully hidden from any enemy airborne reconnaissance.

After D Day and the invasion of Normandy, all these British troops left Shrubland Park and the camp was subsequently used to house German prisoners. Bosmere Hall near Needham Market was used to house Italian prisoners and I remember one evening, whilst fishing from the shore of Bosmere lake, hearing one of the prisoners up at the Hall singing a piece of Italian opera. The sound of his lovely singing floated round the Suffolk countryside and it made the war seem so far away. Both the Italians and the Germans used to come and work on the farm, though not at the same time. I remember a tall dark Italian soldier who had been a cavalryman and he loved to work with the heavy horses that we used. The thing that I found strange, and I still do, was that all these prisoners seemed to administer themselves. There were no guards and they seemed to be free to wander though I don’t suppose they had any money to spend and there was by this time no earthly reason for them to try and get back to their home countries until the fighting had finished. I remember a German called Rudi who was a communist and was delighted that his home town had been captured by the advancing Russians. I often wondered in later years if he remained a happy party member living in East Germany. There were two other elderly Germans who asked my stepfather if they could use one of his buildings in the evenings and they used to come down from Shrubland Park and make wooden toys. I particularly remember a merry-go-round that they made using an old gramophone turntable as the power source. One year, just before Christmas, my mother was approached by a small delegation of German prisoners who produced a swan ‘that just happened to have come their way’ and they asked if she would cook it for them.

Throughout the war I had kept a map of Europe on the wall of our Suffolk kitchen and, following each news broadcast, I would move the little national flags that marked the current front lines. Throughout 1944 the lines of flags marched steadily onward, inexorably squeezing the territory still held by the Germans, until at last the Germans had to surrender and the war in Europe finally came to an end.