Eversley During The Second World War

A Memory of Eversley.

I lived in Spindle Cottage (now, I see, simply 'Spindles') with my mother from mid-1940 till the end of the Second World War, from the age of five till ten; my father, who was a codes and ciphers officer in the RAF, was captured in Crete in 1941 and spent most of his time in Stalag Luft 3, where he forged documents for various escapes, as he was a commercial artist in civilan life. We rented the cottage from the Clutterbucks, while the husband served as a naval officer.

Next door lived Mr and Mrs Leversuch (I never knew their first names) and their cat Ginny, who spent quite a bit of time in Spindle Cottage. There was only cold water and I presumably bathed in a movable bath in the scullery, though I have no recollection of this. There was an outside earth closet, the contents of which were kindly emptied periodically into a pit at the bottom of the garden by Mr Leversuch.

The exposed ceiling beams of the cottage were old ship's timbers and the wall plaster was bound with horsehair, some of which I occasionally was tempted to pull loose, resulting in pits in the wall by my bed.

The road outside saw frequent milirtary convoys, specially just before D-Day, when DUKWs, Churchill and Sherman tanks, jeeps, 25-pounder guns and limbers and all sorts of exciting military hardware passed the cottage. About ten years ago, when I passed through Eversley, the kerb outside Spindle Cottage still bore a series of regular chips in it from a tank's tracks where the driver had taken things a bit close.

There were regular Army manoeuvres, centering on the bridge over the Blackwater, which was believed locally to be mined in case of invasion; sockets for cylindrical concrete tank stoppers crossed the road on the village side of the bridge. After the Army left each week I collected any discarded Thunderflashes and blank ammunition, as well as the black bakelite caps that covered the fuse igniting tapes from practice grenades. Opening the blanks produced a useful pile of small diamond-shaped flakes of cordite which could be lit to produce a satisfying flash. I was once found having lunch with a group of Canadian troops, who shared with me their baked beans from a mess tin.

The silt from the Blackwater on one occasion was being cleared by Italian POWs, dressed in overalls with large white aiming disks sewn onto their backs; I got into conversation with one or two and explained that my father was a POW as well, which they seemed to understand.

Christmas decoration chains could be made from aluminium strips of 'window', about half an inch wide, dropped from aircraft; occasionally whole rolls of this could be found. Warning notices describing butterfly anti-personnel bombs made one careful about strange-looking objects, but I never found one; other notices offered rewards (I forget how much) for those finding Colorado beetles that were a threat to potatoes.

Almost opposite Spindle Cottage Miss Andrews ran the post office and delivered the telegram to my mother informing her that my father was missing, and the subsequent series of POW mail from Sagan. In the evenings one could hear the regular thump-thump, thump-thump as she banged the franking stamp on the ink pad and the letters she franked by hand.

The proximity of RAF Hartford Bridge, now Blackbushe, was what got me permanently hooked on aviation. It was probably 1942 when I saw rows of Hotspur training gliders and Whitley tugs up there; the smell of cellulose dope and 'proper' aromatic high octane aviation fuel was magic and quite unlike today's car petrol. My mother and I cycled up there very often, me on a large bike with wood blocks screwed to the pedals so I could reach them; while she collected blackberries I wandered pretty freely round the airfield and would sometimes be allowed into cockpits of Mitchells, Dakotas, Warwicks and Mosquitoes. Like most boys then, I could recognise any aircraft likely to be seen, allied or enemy, and could tell several by sound. I recall being most disappointed, when I won first prize for English at St. Neots school to find that I received a copy of Peter Pan; what I really wanted was R.A. Saville-Sneath's Aircraft Recognition, Part 1.

The village grocer was Bonney's, again almost opposite the cottage. We occasionally managed to get duck eggs off the ration from somewhere near New Mill. On our bike rides we often put Kilner jars full of milk in our saddle bags and the shaking on the rough roads produced a small amount of butter to skim off the top.

The local GP was Dr. Billing, who lived on the road to Finchampstead; when I had what might have been pneumonia he prescribed some of the earliest M&B 693 sulphonamide tablets, which my mother fed to me crushed in jam. They seemed to do the trick.

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