Made In Hull By Maurice Fairfield Part Six - The War Part 2 (1/6)

(1/6), (2/6), (3/6), (4/6), (5/6), (6/6). Part One - Arundel Street Days Part Two - Our Terrace Part Three - The Calm before, (The Storm) Part Four - Schooldays Part Five - The War 1

Meanwhile, back in Hull to which we returned the schools stayed closed for about a year and we envisaged our summer holidays stretching ahead into a hazy future untroubled by thoughts of the cane (still applied with enthusiasm by male teachers) and struggles with the seemingly irrelevant academic basics which they threatened and coaxed into us.

Dispatching the evacuees was one of their last tasks along with giving out gas-masks. We queued excitedly for this treat in the assembly hall of Craven Street School. A teacher eyed us in turn and took what looked like the right sized mask from a pile and fitted it on each innocent face - adjusting the rubber straps until they fitted snugly. They were a hoot. You breathed in through a filter cartridge mounted on the front of the mask and when you breathed out the exhaled air escaped under the edges of the thin rubber face-pieces with a noise satisfyingly like a whoopee cushion. A fact we spotted immediately and excitedly worked to death, blurting and harrumphing like a host of flatulent granddads.

Toddlers got a Mickey Mouse mask in cartoon colours with eyeholes and a separate escape valve which made them easier to breathe in. Civilian gas-masks were hard work to breathe in and it is just as well we never needed them. Mothers with babies got a kind of baby-sized cylindrical chamber in olive-green metal. One end was made of a flexible early form of plastic with holes for the baby's legs. The apparatus was charged with air by a hand pump pleated like an accordion. Meanwhile on the scruffy, but poetically named Sweet Dews Farm there appeared, overnight, an anti-aircraft gun, its crew, and their temporary quarters.

Also a barrage balloon with its attendant winch-truck, steel cylinders of hydrogen and mostly female crew in the uniforms of the W.A.A.F. Also a searchlight battery, similarly staffed by a mixture of youthful or sometimes older soldiers.

The gun, swung and tilted with smooth, deadly swiftness in the hands of its masters fascinated the young boys who hung around as close as they could to watch the crews, who were mostly little more than boys themselves as, they practiced with their sinister, beautiful toy The teenage girls hung around the youthful crew giggling and horse-playing and teasing and chatting them up until their mothers claimed them and ordered them back to the boring safety of their homes uttering dire warnings and threats until the area was fenced against intruders.

The barrage balloons and their cables were to slice off the wings of low-flying aircraft and were strategically placed to be impossible to fly among so that bombers could not drop their cargo from an easy height. The giant, tightly inflated silver balloons were each about the size of a double decker bus, a tapered egg-shape with three stubby fins arranged like the flights of a dart.

They were usually hauled down to a little way above ground level where they swung in the breeze, their fins collapsed and flopping down like the ears of giant pigs. When the bombers were expected, they were wound out to the extent of their cables almost out of sight in the upper air where they caught the sun and glittered at their extreme height their cables humming deep baritone notes in the wind.

Continued on www.thisisull.com...... Next Page (2/6).

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