Philip, aged ten
Leaving England
It was early July 1939; two ten year old boys lay on their backs on the playing fields of their school in Ashford, Kent, waiting for the time when High Tea would be served in the Refectory; at weekends those of us who were boarders had the school to ourselves. There were just 40 of us across the age range 9-17, the day-boys – or Day Bugs as we termed them – had gone home. As we lay looking up at the puffy white clouds on a lovely blue sky I remember saying to my friend, whose name was Lyall (as was the custom in those days one only ever called other boys by their surname) “I wonder if anything exciting will happen to us in the weeks and months until this time next year?” His thoughts were much more short term – “I wonder what’s for tea?” he replied. To adults the English summer of 1939 must have been full of foreboding as Nazi Germany’s military strength had already shown itself in the occupation of some of its neighbouring countries. I recall that the Easter holiday of 1938 was spent with an aunt who lived in Kingston-on-Thames, because my father was concerned that war might be imminent, and my parents lived in Paris. I recall going to the cinema in Kingston and the Pathé newsreel showed scenes of Hitler meeting Mussolini, and the cinema audience hissed rudely, which at the age of nine I could not really understand.
Thus, soon after mid-July 1939, school term ended, and with it the end of my second year at school in England… it was “homeward bound”; the train to Folkestone, the cross-channel ferry (we – being my elder brother and myself – invariably travelled on one of two steamers – the ‘Isle of Thanet’ which was a paddle steamer, or the ‘Maid of Kent’. I believe that both took part in the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk ten months later). At Boulogne we disembarked and took the train to Gare du Nord in Paris, being reunited with our parents. Seven weeks after our return, war was declared, and all non-essential traffic to England ceased, and with it my memorably happy days at an English boarding school.
My father worked for the Canadian Pacific Railways company at its Paris office. A colleague in the Italian Shipping Lines suggested we occupied his rather nice house in Saint Germain, and as no-one knew whether Germany would start to bomb cities, we moved to Saint Germain for three months from our flat in Bois-Colombes, a suburb in Paris. My three months returning to French schooling were not enjoyable. Just one day was spent at the Lycée Saint-Germain. When my parents heard that the headmaster had addressed the whole school and said that he wanted to see no boys smiling or laughing, because their “elder brothers were now in the French Forces serving ‘La Patrie’”, coupled with the fact that I was ridiculed in front of the class for knowing no Latin, it was decided that we should attend the nearer local “École Communale”.
Anglo-French relations
The headmaster there somehow took an exception to having English boys in his establishment and Anglo-French relations at the age of eleven were not enhanced by his frequent ridiculing if one’s answers out loud in his class were wrong: one’s answers were repeated aloud by the master on the lines of “this English pupil thinks that (whatever it was) is (whatever I had said) to the loud laughter of the remainder of the class, though when a French boy gave an incorrect answer the response was merely “ah, mais non, mon petit, ce n’est pas ça” (“no, my boy, that isn’t correct”), and the master would proceed to give the correct answer. I was pleased when at Christmas my parents decided we should return to Bois-Colombes to our own flat. I do recall, however, sitting in the house at Saint Germain, reading an Edgar Wallace thriller, thinking, “Why isn’t something happening if we are at war?” recalling books one had read about the ‘Great War’ with graphic pictures. And so the ‘Phoney War’ continued, the French behind the Maginot Line, the Germans behind the Siegfried Line, and the British Expeditionary Force in North-Eastern France. Nothing really happening.
Given our experiences of schooling in Saint Germain, and bearing in mind that the school we had attended until 1937 was no longer catering for secondary pupils, my parents decided to employ a private tutor, who was a wonderful teacher. Apart from an exciting daylight raid on Paris by the Luftwaffe (we actually heard some machine gun fire from aircraft which flew over our flat) nothing happened until May 1940.
Read the second part of Philip Smith’s story here: Summer 1940, the fateful day
Comment on the story here.