Made In Hull By Maurice Fairfield Part Five - The War 1 (1/3)

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

We approached the end of a one off summer unusually sun-tanned, playing in the dusty street or at East Park and (most of us) wondering what was going on. Many of our parents looked worried. We had seen newsreels of Italian bombs and machine guns pacifying the luckless Abyssinians because Mussolini wanted an empire like everyone else. We had seen similar film of Hitler's bombers practicing on the undefended people of Guernica. Our grandparents remembered the First World War well: it was only twenty years away after all. Many of them, who had learned little or nothing from it, adopted an attitude of defiant good cheer - real or false.

Well here we go again, they'd say. Another lot coming then. Same as last time. Silly old sods, putting on a brave face already. They couldn't wait to start saying, Ah well, we mustn't grumble. We'll just have to put up with it, a philosophy which had allowed their betters to walk all over them throughout their lifetimes.

They dusted off their stories of Zeppelin Raids and food shortages. They repeated the propaganda about German troops in Belgium spitting Belgian babies on their bayonets. This story, manufactured in 1914, was still believed in along with the desirability of dying for one's King and Country. Jobless younger men were already joining up, and some men who had reached the end of tours of duty in the Army, and were on the reserve, were already being recalled to service. Leaving all that on one side, life was not too bad. As I mentioned it had been hot and sunny for a long time.

There had been a little more money around. Some people had jobs for the first time in years.

Those were the days of the singable popular song. In the warm autumn of 1939 the popular song was Boom! sung by a Frenchman called Charles Trenet. Boom. Why does my heart go boom? Me and my heart go boom, boom diddy boom cause I've found you. Not Shakespeare but it swung and it caught on and we were all humming it when the Prime Minister gave us the news we had been expecting. As the upper-crust voice told us we were at war with Germany, the eerie howl of the air-raid sirens echoed through the deserted streets for the first time augmented by the steam whistle at Hollis's Sawmill in Craven Street, a deep bass rumble which had told Hollis's work force when to start and finish all our short lives.

Continued on www.thisisull.com...... Next Page (2/3).

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