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Part two of an oral history interview with Mr. Ivor Chappell about his early wartime experiences when he lived in Kempston, Bedfordshire. The interview was conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

SEE ALSO memories previously submitted to the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ ‘People’s War’ website — ‘Joining the D.E.M.S.’, ‘Forever Young’ and ‘Some Christmas’s Remembered, 1942, 43, 44 & 45’ by Mr. Ivor Walter CHAPPELL about his time in the Royal Navy posted to D.E.M.S. gunner duties on board ‘Empire Spartan’ HMS Chrysanthemum and HMS President.

“It was the night they bombed Coventry and it was a moonlit night and a cold winter’s night because it was November 14th, 1941 and it was a moonlit night. Now we had a beautiful brick built barn in the back yard because this house had belonged to a dairyman. He used to travel around on a bike with a basket on the front with cans of milk - this is pre-war of course. So we had got a nice brick barn that had been his milk shop if you like. And we always had a dog. In that barn was a little curly headed dog called Bruce. Mum and dad they always had a dog, I mean they never got brushed and combed and what they ate would perhaps be a bit of bread dipped in gravy, we didn’t have meat, we didn’t have dog food and stuff. But anyway we had Bruce, he was a good dog, he was my dog. I used to take him down Spring Road and across Gardners field of a Sunday night, lovely! The sun was shining and the war was a thousand miles away, watching the aircraft flying over, the bombers and all this stuff and there we are Gardners field. Gardners was a farm down the end of Spring Road and he had got all them fields round, it’s all houses now. It’s the Fire Brigade H.Q., now - Gardners field — that’s where we walked.

Anyway, this is a story a little bit about Bruce and I think it’s marvellous. On the evening of 14th November 1941 we are sitting there, there’s a window there, there’s a door here, mum sitting there, the table sticks out here, dad sitting here in his armchair and we are sitting there somehow or other - there was this almighty bang! The whole house seemed to shake, the glass blew in from the windows and there was dust and dirt raining down everywhere and dad shouted, being an ‘old sweat’, he shouted, ‘Down, down, get on the floor!’ I can see him now he dived under the table with his hands over his ears, old WWI type. We all laid on the floor - mum was crying and the dust and dirt and the thing I think that saved us from a lot from when the window blew in was we had got the big thick black out curtains up. So we started to pull ourselves together and you could tell German aeroplanes by the engine beat, they always went, brooom, brooom, brooom. Whereas an English one would go roooooooooaaaar, you see. So we had the Germans over. Well they dropped, so we learnt afterwards, two landmines which was a hit and miss thing. It was a killer thing. I mean you drop something out of a plane two or three thousand feet up and it’s on a parachute, it’s drifting according to the winds, you aren’t going to direct where that is going are you? So anyway that was the bombing but the beautiful bit of this, which I always think is marvellous and it’s a story that I’ve got, we suddenly heard Bruce barking outside. Our little Brucey is barking. So I think dad said, ‘That sounds as though he is out of the barn!’ The barn was all shut up, padlocked, locked for the night. I ran out there, there was glass, there were bricks and everything all in piles in the garden and there’s Bruce, he runs past me. It had blown the door open, it’s blown his window in (in the barn) but luckily he was in a tea chest on a bit of old sacking and we used to face the tea chest away from the door to keep the wind off of him. Through the gate comes an Air Raid Warden and a couple of other chaps, ‘Are you alright in there, anybody hurt?’ Bruce goes for them - he’s saying this is my territory, keep out, woof, woof. They said, ‘Call your bloody dog off mate.’ So I called old Bruce. A little dog and it blew his door open, almost blew the roof off and he’s out in the yard among all the glass and that and he’s saying to these Air Raid Wardens ‘This is mine, keep away.’ He’s our watchdog.

We had slates off the roof and everything. In no time at all we had some chaps came to do the repairs. I think it was all Government sponsored. You’d have chaps come and replace the slates, because they were slates, they weren’t tiles. And they came and they did two things which I thought I don’t know, I don’t like it — it’s not fair. I’ll tell you what one of them was — we’d got a little outside toilet — you stepped out the back door you turned immediately left and there was the toilet. Why we never had a door inside I don’t know. You had to step outside and then step into the toilet. We had a little window there that you opened on a peg kind of thing so when they came — because that blew out — so they put a window in and you couldn’t open it no more! That was a bit naughty. So the only ventilation you got was the wind blowing under the door! But the other thing also was Bruce’s barn - that had got a window about as big as this in two bits and they fitted that window in and they fitted it to stay shut not to open so when it was boiling hot on a summers day, it had got an asbestos roof and he had got thick fur!

I was about 16 years old when that happened. We went over the allotments the next day. Now this is another thing were when this man up there smiled at us because if that landmine had dropped on the road or in the Barracks it would have created no end of casualties and God knows what else. But it drifted right over, over the trees even and it came down in the allotments - nice soft earth and that’s where the first one exploded. And we went and looked there the next day and it was the kind of hole that you could put a double decker bus in and you could cover it with soil and you would never have known. You could drop a double decker bus in it. But the funny part about it was, later on, maybe a day or two later, I think it was a Sunday two or three of us old boys would walk around what I call Honey Hills and where that landmine had dropped it was just a shallow crater. Now, I’ve been told, I don’t if it’s true or not but the landmine that landed over Queen’s Park, it had done no damage as far as I know, dropped over Queen’s Park in Honey Hills almost on the river bank in between some trees I think and it was just a gentle crater - it wasn’t a great big gash in the ground. Somebody had said that it was a misfire, it didn’t fire and I sometimes try to think if one of these heavy bombs had dropped there from about 2000 feet on a parachute how many miles an hour are they doing when they hit the ground? Because this was a shallow crater, it wasn’t an explosion crater.

And the other thing was that - you know when you are coming out of Bedford you come to the traffic lights, you turn right to go down Hillgrounds - well that road was at one time belonged to Howard’s whose big house is in Kempston Park. This is where they lived - this is why it is called Addison Howard Park. So anyway that was a road where the turn off to Hillgrounds is now, the right hand turn that was the gateway, big steel gates and then it veered off to the left because now it carries straight on. This leads off to your left where the big house is now that was their house, Howard’s house, but the thing was this landmine did create a casualty. There was like a lodge at the entry of Howard’s Park and there was an old lady of about 80 living there and I don’t know how but they must have found her. But I think it blew the roof off because I should think she was the closest to the landmine more than anybody and I think she died of shock and everything a few days later. That house was never re-built it was just a shattered ruin with the windows blown out and the roof gone.

Then the years went by and I turned 18 on the 25th of October 1942 and so I’ll say November, my sister Elsie and me we were going to Bedford, going to the Granada I think we were, pictures that was something and the old market, used to walk round - lovely. I went to the Labour Exchange, that’s where you went to join up, so I went to sign-on and they said, ‘What’s your preference?’ And I said ‘Navy!’ Well, do you know hand on heart I couldn’t really say why the ‘Navy’, I think it was the glamour of the uniform as much as anything. We were getting fed propaganda through all your newspapers and your radios, your wirelesses as we called them and there was all things coming up on the screen when you went to the pictures. I mean going to the pictures was part of your life and I think that’s why I went for the Navy. But the thing was it was just your luck! And again, you see you just don’t know how your life is formed for you do you? I mean I know a bloke that went in there a year after I did, a pal of mine, and he wanted to go into the Navy like us, Navy uniform! And they say, ‘Sorry, no vacancies. You’ll have to go in the Army.’ He lays out in Italy now - he’s 18 forever more. Joe his name was - came from Houghton Conquest. Just fate you see and he died out there, Joe King. I as say he still lays out there. If they’d have said, ‘Yes, we are taking Navy’ and they put him down for the Navy, he might be still sitting here might he? It’s just your luck. Like my dad used to say, mum would go to the bottom of the stairs and say, ‘Dad, they are over again tonight’ and he’d say, ‘oh, bugger ‘em’ — honest — and she’d say, ‘it’s the Germans, you can tell.’ She said, ‘The sirens have gone 10 minutes ago, come on get … ‘ he’d say, ‘well gal, if it’s got my number on it will hit me here wherever I am. I’ll bloody well stay here.’ That’s what he used to say.�

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