In my hands a whistle, a reminder of the truly dark times we faced together

ISPOTTED it, after hours, on prominent display in the window of a local charity shop the other night and scampered out to buy it the following morning. The lighter of £15, I am now the proud owner of what looks like a classic ‘Metropolitan’ police whistle, in nickelplated brass, as churned out by the thousand in its day by J Hudson & Co, Barr Street, Hockley, Birmingham.

Save for three engraved initials – ARP. For this was an air raid warden’s whistle, issued in the darkest days of the Second World War, when death from the summer of 1940 to the late spring of 1941 fell nightly from the skies – a war most objective observers believed we would lose.

Even today, traces of that protracted national nightmare are readily seen in Scotland and elsewhere. Lampposts still stand in Glasgow with the traces of the white rings painted around them, for token visibility during blackout.

On most older city streets you can see the nubs of the wrought iron railings sawn down and borne away to be smelted for the war effort. Some Anderson bomb shelters survive in Scottish gardens, and so long and painful was rationing – it did not finally cease till 1954 – that my parents, like all their generation, have an entire horror of wasted food.

Hitler’s war was the first with a serious ‘Home Front’, with civilians at many points in as serious jeopardy as our boys in uniform.

A protracted national ordeal with penal taxation, shortages of the most ridiculous things – when British intelligence in 1943 dressed up a corpse for Operation Mincemeat, to trick the Germans into believing we had no plans to invade Sicily, the biggest problem proved to be securing the body a pair of pants – and the evacuation of our cities, decanting hundreds of thousands of miserable children, and too often into unhappy or predatory situations.

These were years of stern censorship, with the laughably named Ministry of Information controlling every paragraph in the newspapers and grim little men reading your private post.

Drear and awful food – ‘Woolton Pie’, powdered egg, tinned snoek, officially approved recipes for crow; small children who, by 1945, had never seen a banana.

APHOTOGRAPH survives of my mother and her sister in drab ‘utility dresses’, complete with big patch-pockets. Everyone – man, woman or child – had to carry an identity card. You wrapped up warm at night, given the scant, rationed and very poor coal, and at every turn were battered by propaganda, from shouty posters to ‘public information films’ invariably narrated by know-it-all men.

And then, of course, there was the bombing. The infamous assault on Clydebank, in March 1941, was the most devastating raid of all anywhere in Britain. And there were also assaults on Greenock, Paisley, Cardross, and still unlikelier places such as Wick and Peterhead. I knew an elderly Wick minister who never forgot the sight of his ten-year-old daughter running for her very life as a Heinkel’s bullets chewed up the tarmac around her.

Even the Butt of Lewis lighthouse was once machinegunned. And, even when the bombers did not come, nights were time and again disrupted by the sirens, as you fled to the damp and spidery shelter in the garden or huddled with your neighbours at the bottom of the close. And you knew that practically nothing would save you in the event of a direct hit.

It is worth remembering all this, after eight years of highdoh politics, our protracted Covid ordeal and months of unremittingly depressing news, because it puts a great deal into perspective. Especially as the war increasingly fades from living memory.

You have to be in your nineties to have served in it; well into your eighties to have even the foggiest memories of it.

Certainly it had a long psychological afterlife. Thatcher’s first Cabinet, in 1979, included quite a few distinguished veterans – Lord Carrington, Francis Pym, Angus Maude.

Several of my teachers in the Seventies had fought in it, from the headmaster down – one tremulous modern languages master, who in 1983 finally took his own life, had been tortured by the Gestapo – and memories of catastrophic European war, three decades earlier, did much to carry the 1975 Common Market referendum.

But when Stronger In tried the same shtick 40 years later, in 2016, it availed nothing for the Remain cause. It sounded tired and tinny: that great collective folk memory had gone. And the anti-Semitism, silenced for decades by the enormity of Auschwitz, is lamentably on the rise.

Lockdown gave us just a taste of that generation’s experience, from what in hindsight seem like grotesque restrictions on our liberties to all sorts of strange shortages: eggs, yeast and flour.

WE are now thankfully back at a point where choosing to wear a face mask in a supermarket is less social responsibility than a calculated insult.

But there are still untold delays and inconveniences on account of the thousands of people, largely in the public sector, who still want to work from home – and on every main street we can see the shuttered shops and other assorted businesses that did not survive those two wretched years.

The Second World War has proved a seam still richly mined for books, fiction, cinema and television. Covid, rather, like the 1918 flu pandemic, is something we are all determined to forget. There will be individual memories, of course, but the collective and cultural legacy will be minimal.

I will never know who once, 80-odd years ago, toted my whistle. ARP men and women were never popular: the stock villain in Dad’s Army, after all, is the officious Warden Hodges. They did their best to help during air raids – guiding folk to shelters, handing out gas masks. In the aftermath, they administered first aid, helped to fight fires, joined rescue operations amidst the rubble, and wrote up intelligence about blocked streets, burst water mains and so on.

But the main job was to enforce blackout, with heavy curtains and shutters demanded in every home and with not a chink of light visible from the sky – and it was on this front they most grated on the general public, especially when sillier ARP wardens rebuked you for lighting up a cigarette on the street.

Still, 1.5million did their bit – and nearly 7,000 of them would pay with their lives.

This is not, to put it mildly, a great moment in our national story. There are dreadful uncertainties and pitilessly rising costs and our confidence in our rulers has never been lower. And, of course, we close September as a bereaved people.

But men are not flying nightly from the Continent to try to kill us, no tyrant is an existential threat to Christian civilisation – and even this storm shall pass.