Bournemouth

After this camp we were stationed in Newcastle.  We had almost nothing to do and I wondered if there were too many of us and they were just putting us in a place where they had room.  We were there only a few weeks when we were again moved. 

 This time it was April and the place was Bournemouth right on the English channel, a beautiful town with a mild  climate.  We were billeted in one of the upper floors of a fine apartment building.  The building was covered with pink stucco and on a high ground overlooking a park.  It was a beautiful setting and my group had a large apartment with two baths.  The building was in such good condition, I could imagine that the tenants had only recently been evicted because of the war.

We were busier here.  We had a new improved method of navigation that took a lot of study.  We had exercise classes and swimming classes as well.  We swam in an indoor pool which had probably been a private club, I would guess, it looked so luxurious.

We were issued thin cotton shorts with no button or zipper, only a draw string around the waist.  It was hardly a decent garment.

Of course, I found the Red Cross station.  There were the usual comfortable welcome and lists of people wanting to entertain us Canadian airmen.  Then, too, I went to church.  Beside the fact that I wanted to go, church was a gold mine of Sunday dinner invitations.  One of these Sunday dinners, when I first was in Bournemouth, was at a lovely home and the people there had three of us to dinner.  The house was cold.  They didn’t have central heat, only fireplaces, and when the room would get comfortably warm, our host would throw open the doors to get a breath of air.  The steam from the food on the table looked like a fog in the house.  Walking back to billet from this house was an experience I won’t forget.  There was no moon, no street lights because of the blackout, and I only had the white line in the middle of the street to follow.  I didn’t have a torch (English for flashlight).  I could hear the echo of my footsteps, and I’d stop every once in a while because it sounded as if someone was following me.

I would have liked to have a flashlight, of course.  Here in England it is called a torch.  There were torches to buy but they were scarce.  I never saw one except in some person’s hand who had authority.  These torches had a shield on them so that only a sliver of light came through.  It would have been great when I went to see “Yankie Doodle Dandy.”  This was a flick that I saw at the flicks, otherwise called movies.  At night the front of movie houses were completely covered with blackout curtains, and the problem was to find the opening without help of a torch.  Once found, though, the blaze of lights inside was overwhelming.

It was in this area while I had a weekend leave that I visited the family of a friend of mine, an aviator, who had been killed.  They lived in a house where the bathroom was in the house, but the only way to it was to go out the back door and enter the bathroom by its outside and only door.  They did everything they could to show me I was welcome, even breakfast in bed with the best for me, but the best consisted of bread soaked in bacon grease, which I could hardly get down.

After this visit, back in Bournemouth I got in the habit of rising real early and going to breakfast by myself in a little restaurant nearby and reading the paper.  Sometimes I also went to the mess and had another breakfast.  In the evening we often went to see a movie.  When there was no moon and with the blackout, it was hard unless you had a torch to find a way into the theater.

On Monday, May 21st, 1943, I was in the target area of an air raid.  I had seen them in London, but I was always at some distance from the area when the bombs were falling.  It was afternoon and we were free of classes and duties.  It was a very warm sunny day.  Four of us decided to go up on the roof, study, and sun bathe.  And what other way to get a good tan but take off all your clothes, and that was the way we were when we were startled out of concentration on navigation by explosions and machine gun fire.  I jumped up with my clothes in my arm and crouched down in the corner of a wall near me.  I pulled on my clothes after two Falke Wolfe 190’s went by at roof-top level, so close that we could see the pilots distinctly.  I finally had my clothes on, I didn’t want to be killed and left lying on the roof in the nude.

Then everything was quiet, so quiet that we moved to the edge of the roof and looked out.  The steeple of the church was gone, it had fallen into the building.  The barracks where the Australians were billeted was burning.  There was a body lying on the grounds in the park.

I wanted to get out of this pink building in case the planes came back.  I went to pick up my blanket and found hot pieces of shrapnel on it.  I went out to see what happened.  I couldn’t ride my bike; I walked.  There was much damage in downtown Bournemouth, buildings in ruins and still burning.  I went back to the Australian barracks and helped where I could for several hours.  It wasn’t burning anymore, and most of the guys had gotten out safely.  The hospitals, schools and other available buildings had room for homeless and wounded.  Cars were touring the town and with loudspeakers ordering all military personnel to report.  This was to check for anyone missing.  I never knew if there were any of us killed.  The men I was with, like me, were not hurt. 

©Joseph H. Harrison 1999