John Flemming

When WWII started John was just under 9 years old. He lived in a little village down by the sea half way up the cliff.

He remembers exactly where he was when the war started. He was down a back lane playing with his pals on a bike. It must have been about 11 o’clock when all of a sudden one of the lads came cycling up shouting it’s going to be on the wireless. We’re going to be at war.

Now this was really exciting for them being young lads because they thought it would be like something out of a comic.

So he rushed home as fast as he could and as he came through the door he saw something he wouldn’t forget for the rest of his life. His mother was sitting there with the radio on and she was crying and his dad was standing by her saying they’d been through it all before and it would be all right. That had been World War I. He was just in time to hear the words ‘and therefore we are at war with Germany’.

The first big change in their lives was when the evacuees came. They came from busy industrial places where there were a lot of factories, like Hull, Newcastle, and Sunderland. They had a billeting officer who decided how many children you would take by the size of your house. You got paid a ‘few bob’ but not really enough to pay for it. When the youngsters arrived John got a real surprise because the children had never lived in a quiet place like his village before. They were used to fighting for everything and a lot of them were very poor. If they wanted to insult someone they didn’t swear at them like you would today. They’d make fun of them because they were poor and they’d shout, “ Hey! Big head, no bread in the house,” because they were so poor they’d have nothing in the house to eat.

They were all particularly scruffy when they arrived. Jerseys with holes in and some even had no jerseys. You’d have thought there had already been a war the state some of them were in.

The Women’s Voluntary Service had a sort of shop where they took in old clothing and when the evacuees arrived they dished this out. They may have been second hand but they were a lot better than what some of the evacuees came in. Unfortunately they didn’t always get the right size but they didn’t mind they thought it was good. One of John’s evacuees, called Leonard, got a sort of leather bomber jacket 4 sizes too big for him but he was so proud of it.

Unfortunately lots of them arrived with nits and scabies so the first thing they did was take them to an old boarding house. They shaved their heads; burnt all their clothes and kept them until they were better.

It wasn’t a long time but one of the treatments for the heads was to put on Gentian Violet. Which was a bright bluey purple colour. So they all had purple heads. They put a white lotion on their bodies for the scabies and sometimes they came out from the boarding house, ‘The Anchorage’, with blue heads and white bodies looking like little Martians or a new tribe of red Indians; and they acted like it too! They just went wild.

Mangled cat

When they arrived the family at first felt sorry for them but within a few minutes they were fed up of them. One of them had found a carving knife and he was running around at playing murders trying to stab people. Also because the children came from industrial and mining areas they had gotten into the habit of clearing their throats and spitting. So they used to see how far you could spit. Some had gone through to the study at the back of the house to where the family kept their precious books and were pelting each other with them. That was bad enough – but they didn’t stay long because the last straw came when they found the mangle. They worked out that if they picked up the cat they could put its tail in first and then they could wind it through. Mr Fleming’s mother was quite a tolerant woman but when she saw this she got hold of them. She didn’t say get out - she threw them out! The next thing the family knew was the billeting officer and a policeman were at the door because by law you had to take them. They said, she couldn’t throw them out but she said, ”Oh yes, she could”. They came to an agreement and the family were sent different evacuees that were quieter.

The children had picked up some strange ideas. Leonard one of John’s evacuees had decided he was an expert on religion. He had never been to church in his life and probably wouldn’t have recognised one if he saw one. But he used to say strange things like, “Do you know what happens to Nuns when they die?” They put them in a corner and throw peas at them!” No sense to it but he just said he knew it. Leonard also said when Monks escaped from monasteries they were chased with hunting dogs. He was soon then saying there was a game called, Hunt the Monk. So the local children were all introduced to the game. One boy was chosen as the ‘monk’. Needless to say it was always Leonard who was given two minutes start to escape before being pursued by a howling mob of evacuees and local kids. The dogs all joined in barking. As it got more and more popular more children would join in. One of the lads who worked at the grocers joined in too on his tricycle with a box on the front. They’d all be running round the streets screaming and shouting with the dogs barking.

Leonard hiding from friends

Some of the children had even found some Andrew’s Liver Salts and put it in their mouths. So now they were all running after, the monk, alias Leonard foaming at the mouth. But the strange thing was we never caught him because when he heard the mob catching up with him in the street behind, he’d knock on someone’s door and say excuse me can I use your toilet and of course they would say come in. He’d wait there until they’d all rushed passed and then come out. When we’d all get home Leonard would be there waiting for everyone sitting reading his Beano.

The evacuees had had a very hard life but they seemed to fit in with everything and in some ways they were a lot brighter and more intelligent than they were given credit for because they had to live on their wits. They were born survivors and there was no real malice in them.

John was barred from going down onto the beach because there were rolls of barbed wire all along the sea front. The boarding houses and hotels were all shut up and no one was allowed in except for the army. However, the locals took no notice and often the boys went along the beach.

One day John and his friend were, floating on the inner tubes of tyres, out in the sea when they heard this machine gun fire. It got louder and louder and they wondered what to do. The next thing a great big huge German plane came over so low that the boys could not only see the black crosses underneath but the streaks of oil under the engine because it was so low. Next thing a spitfire came after it, chasing it away into the distance as they just floated along thinking that if their mothers had known what had been going on they’d be in serious trouble!

Being near the sea that was the kind of thing that regularly happened because they could see all around for 15 miles in both directions, from Filey Bridge to Farnborough Head and out to the horizon. Which meant they could see the convoys travelling past. Because it was far away the ships all looked like one long line but every now and then you would hear a boom and you would think, ‘Oh no! Dear me that’s a ship hit a mine or been torpedoed’ and sure enough you’d see the smoke going up. John often wondered what had happened but you were never told anything because of censorship.

One morning John and his father went out just at dawn to have a walk along the sea front to see what was happening. There was a big, high sea wall, like a pier and it went on for 2 or 3 miles. They were walking along when they heard this tap, tap. They thought it funny because they couldn’t see anything but when they looked over the sea wall there was a ship’s lifeboat with ten or eleven men in it and they were all dead. It was the first time John had ever seen anyone dead. He wasn’t frightened but he felt very, very sad. They said that the men died of exposure but when they did a post mortem they discovered one of them had a broken neck as he jumped into the lifeboat.

After boats had been torpedoed all sorts of stuff used to end up on the beach. Flotsam and jetsam was what they called it. There was lots of timber and oil from the oil tankers. To begin with John and his friends didn’t know what it was because they thought oil would be like car oil but this was thick and black and tarry. It looked different because it would sink and roll up into the sand and end up looking like black dumplings on the beach. Later they found they had white dumplings on the beach which turned out to be coconut fat.

Of course everything at the time was rationed so the ‘white dumplings’ were all collected from the beach and put in his mother’s big ‘copper’ kettle with water and boiled up. The sand sunk to the bottom. The water took the salt out of it and a nice thick layer of coconut fat floated to the top. This was mixed with the other chemicals, poured into moulds they had made out of wood, and bars of soap were produced.

One of the things that used to happen was that they got bombed. Some people may wonder at them being bombed because they were only in a little seaside village but there was various reasons for the bombing. One of them was that when the planes were going back to Germany if there was anything they hadn’t got rid of they got rid of it over them before going out over the North Sea. So they had a sample of everything. Sometimes a sea mine would be dropped on land but the worst ones were the incendiary bombs, which spread out and caused many fires. Also as the war went on they kept changing their designs. On John’s street they had a fire fighting party. ‘There were lots of rules but because there was a war on nobody kept the rules.’ For instance, although John was only nearly nine, he was still in his street’s fire fighting party. Now you were really supposed to be over 16 or not fit to be in the forces before becoming a fire-fighter. John was the youngest person in his streets’ fire fighting party.

What you had to do if there was an air raid was watch out to see if there was anything on fire and put it out or tell someone. In his fire fighting party there was himself nearly 12 now, his pal who was 14, the local plumber who had a glass eye and a one legged man. It didn’t seem very impressive but at least they were there. They had a stirrup pump with a hose on the end of it, to crawl near the fire. John usually did the pumping and someone else usually went with the hose but they had to soon stop that because bombs were designed to burn fiercer when water was put on them. So they then used sand to put them out. Next the bombs were made to explode so you’d be there on the floor crawling up with your dustbin lid to keep the heat off and the next thing you’d know there was a great big bang and the thing had exploded all over you. If you hadn’t had the dustbin lid you would have been in trouble. One time during one of the raids his dad was going on duty and had just opened the front door and the incendiary went right in the front door way. He got such a shock he jumped up in the air. The thing then shot under his feet and exploded. It burnt all the stair carpet.

One night there was an incendiary bomb dropped on the house up the road and it landed on the roof and we could see it burning. So John, the plumber with the glass eye and the one legged man and his mate rushed over there and knocked and knocked on the door. Although it was a 3 or 4 storey house there was just one old lady who lived there on her own. There was no reply so we broke the door down and rushed up stairs crying, “Mrs Harrison, Mrs Harrison your roof’s on fire.”
She was a bit deaf so when she woke up she cried, “Who’s there? Who’s there?”
They all replied, “Mrs Harrison, it’s the fire fighting party. Your roof’s on fire. You’ve got to come out!” But she only shouted back that she would call the police and to get out. So we said it was all right we’d call the police. The police soon arrived and sorted her out.

John’s village also had propaganda leaflets dropped on them. They were dropped in great big bundles. They were tied with rope or twine so that when the Germans were over the place where they would drop them. They put the bundles in the bomb bay and cut the twine and the wind would then spread the leaflets all over the place.

On one occasion they were in such a hurry they shoved them out still in the big bales. They landed like that and everybody wondered what they were going to do with them. It was against the law to read enemy propaganda leaflets but someone came up with a good idea. The Red Cross started selling them for 6d each for their funds. John recently gave his copy to a museum.

During the First World War his mother had been in France and quite a few of her relatives had been killed but she got so used to it that she didn’t hate anybody. She just felt it was all so sad and that it shouldn’t happen and the sooner it finished the better. She never really got agitated about the war until one night an incendiary bomb hit the local laundry and it got burned down to the ground. John’s mother had just saved up all her coupons to buy brand new sheets. They had newly gone to the laundry when it was bombed and ever after she swore that Germans had bombed it on purpose because they knew her sheets were in there. She never forgave the Germans after that.

John used to get sea mines washed up on the beach and the bomb disposal people used to take them to pieces. They lived just a few miles along the beach so when they were taking them to bits the local children would know about it and when the bomb disposal team went home for tea the children used to pinch the explosives. The mines had TNT in them, which looked like flint or treacle toffee. When cold it was very brittle and would break easily. The mines were packed full of linen bags full of TNT. There was an illegal trade going in school for TNT. You could tell the ‘TNT traders’ because it stained their hands yellowy brown. They thought they were very clever because they found that if you put a match to TNT it didn’t explode. In fact you have a job to light it but when it does start burning it starts with a dark yellow orange flame and clouds and clouds of smoke.

One day one of the lads at school that had the main stock of this TNT got word that the police were on to him so he decided to try and destroy the evidence. He threw the TNT into the back of the kitchen fire and on this occasion it exploded and blew the fireplace out and burnt the house down and blew his hand off and blinded him in one eye.

Years later John was to be reunited with one of his evacuees. By then he had moved to a different village but one Sunday morning, Leonard turned up at his front door. He had somebody else with him and asked, “Do you remember me?” John said of course he did and Leonard said he was looking for a particular removal firm in the town. John wondered why he wanted a removal firm. He replied it was because he was on the run from the police and had been told he could get a lift down to London with this removal firm. So John dutifully pointed him in the right direction of the removal firm and that was it.

John remembers one of the lads in the village was so keen to get into the RAF but he couldn’t because he was underage he had to get his mother’s permission so he locked her in the bedroom until she signed the form and pushed it out to him under the door. He went into the RAF and he was shot down on his first mission over the North Sea.

What did John say he learnt by it all? Life’s very interesting but also full of nasty and sad things.