A BOY'S WAR

1 R A B O Y ’ S W A R A L A S T A I R F O W L E R Sometime before the war began, peace had already gone: the talk was of wars abroad and a coming war at home. In newsreels the Italians bombed Abyssinia and the Japanese in Manchuria fired machine guns on wheels and with shields to protect the gunners. The fighting at home was about the League of Nations and other politics. My mother was a Shavian socialist, but Aunt Nannie, more of a goer, distrusted theory and voted Tory. Air-raid shelters were being dug in gardens, and at school we were given gas masks with windows that steamed up and made our faces hot. Our shops carried new toy trucks and artillery, but when I asked for extra pocket money my mother made me feel bad. My father still limped from the Great War, and he died in July 1939, just before the Second World War. His death left my mother frightened and unsure where to turn. To escape our house of death, we all went to Largs for a last seaside holiday. There, Nardini’s café had a mural of the Battle of Largs between Vikings and locals. Both sides had poor equipment, though: just axes, bows and arrows, and spears. After the holiday, war was almost upon us. We split up: my sister June and Aunt Nannie went home to Glasgow for the school term, 2 F O W L E R Y but my mother and I went to South Ayrshire in a hired car to be evacuees. I had only once been in a car before, when a visiting uncle drove us round the block in his Austin Seven and let me steer when the road was empty. Now, we were traveling fifty miles, past what the driver explained were cooling towers making clouds. Before we left Largs I got extra pocket money for Dinky toys – but only peaceful ones. No dark-green army trucks, only brightly colored tractors, harrowers, and vans. We were to live with Granny Shaw and Aunt Jean at Carrick Cottage in Maybole, a small town with a castle right on the main street. It was only a tower house, without portcullis or battlements. Carrick Cottage had an upstairs, and on the landing stood a big chest with many old things that I was told I could explore. I found a Victorian ship’s telescope, but no swords or pistols. Soon, on Sunday, 3 September 1939, war was declared. I was busy at the time deploying infantry with pith helmets from an earlier war that had somehow got into our luggage. Their orders were to defend the tree stump just outside the kitchen as a forlorn hope. As I moved them about I could hear the dreaded announcement on the radio. Real fighting began in December, when a British fleet cornered the battleship Graf Spee o√ Uruguay. We had no television, of course, but we followed the Battle of the River Plate on the radio and in the Ayr Advertiser and Reynolds News. We all admired the men on the British cruiser Exeter. The battleship’s heavier guns devastated the smaller ship, holing its superstructure all over. Yet our fleet drove the Graf Spee into the neutral waters of Montevideo harbor, where its crew scuttled it on Hitler’s orders. I did my bit for the navy by saving up for a fleet from Stevenson ’s, the stationers. The gray Dinky toy destroyers in their window had no lower hulls, so they floated well either on linoleum or on stormy carpet. My weekly allowance stretched to a destroyer, but the battleship (HMS Nelson) had to be saved up for. Supporting the RAF was more di≈cult: military aircraft were not to be had in Maybole. Studying aircraft identification counted for something, but few planes of any kind flew over Ayrshire. The only time I ever saw a German plane during the war was when we were on holiday in Carnoustie, on the east coast. It came in very low, strafing the town and making a terrifying noise. It went...