OK, let’s tell you one told to me by the small gang of other workers bent over a rattling old style potato riddle as cold-fingered in the wintry blast we sorted out a potato clamp, grading my Dad’s King Edward spuds for market over 50 years ago.

Well out we were, in ‘the Gault’, the fenland landscape rectilinear, the ditches flocked with phragmites reeds, the single track road constructed by the Wartime Agricultural Committee always known as ‘the Warag’, ruler-straight and aiming to a skyline as flat as a spirit-level.

Kind of a gang-told story it was, by the other riddlers, farm-workers, in turn, passing time entertainingly over a boring job and the young lad, me, the only audience for their previously rehearsed play. A wartime story, polished even by repetition, but still one to thrill a teenager, if difficult to follow, disjointed, as each speaker politely waiting took their turn. The folk tale displayed all the eternal, the classical character traits which make us what we are.

What kind of a story? You may well ask, it contained ingredients of desperation, courage, discipline, valour and duty. A tale of booming bombers, dark nights, danger and death. Tragedy in the end. And all kicked off by finding the eternally unrusting aluminium bits and bobs, bolts and cable pieces, or tough thick unbreakable aero-glass that passed over the dirt-streaked blighty rotten potato-stinking squares of the sifting riddle.

" What’s this? Bit of metal looks like, with a rivet or bolt thing in it, and here’s another, only bigger?" queries Curious Youth.

" Aah, they keep a-turning up still then, bits and bobs…,them poor buggers.." From Age recalling past,

"Who..? what? and these funny bits of glass…?" asks Impatient Youth.

Bedingham’s drove we were hard by, now a tarmac track where it leaves the counter-wash and cleaves through Sutton Gault. It was more populated with scattered farmsteads then, in the 1950s, and more still so during the wartime. Desolate and featureless to the outsider that morning with the winter solstice only a fortnight past, the temperature lingered around freezing. The roadside rut-puddles were lidded with thin ice and rooks wandered about chakking to each other doubtless, but inaudible to us over the louder chak-a-chak of the riddlers single-cylinder blatting engine. Historically mostly rurally quiet at night, when folks lay abed resting from labours undisturbed, but the war and ‘drome’ was altering all that. Very much so in the recall I was listening to.

"Cor did they rattle the glass in the winders when they cum over low, thought the roof would blow orf, roar they did with their bloody great motors, ‘specially in the dark"

Especially as happened when on occasion a nasty Nazi nightfighter took it into his head to perform one of their clever and fatal tricks. To follow secretly in the dark, without lights, behind some of our RAF lads, our local squadron of tired bomber boys, some sent from distant parts of the empire like New Zealand,to aid the war effort, returning from a continental raid. Then the fighter shot one up on the runway "Blam!" so others could not land. Or perhaps it was a mechanical fault, or coastal flak, or ak ak guns over Europe which damaged planes, forcing them to return early. Or maybe memories ran incidents and observations together as we all do with receding time and age. Particularly it was understood that when returning early still loaded with bombs they were thought to be not allowed to attempt a landing, for fear of blocking the runway for the others.

No-one really knew, they just heard what they heard grating overhead, rattling their windows, grinding around up above waking sleepy headed children with school tomorrow, and they put it together to explain as best they could when next gathered together.

"It was terrible hearing ‘em, couldn’t do nuthin’ only listen, couldn’t sleep, my missus got that upset at times, round an’ round" Remembrance.

"They woon’t allow ‘em see, t’others were soon cummin and low on juice,’bin orl thet way, couldn’t risk ‘em all, mind yew, if one had gorn in despite orders they had they could hardly have a stopped ‘em could they? But they never did o’course, bombs aboard" Sensible, ruminating.

" Aah, they used tew dump the bombs over the channel, or anywheres" Says Know-it-all.

They still had their grumbly arguments, disagreeing, airing their old theories, their explanations, even into the late nineteen fifties, the farmworkers, and some were tough fenwomen, dialogues, shared folk memories by now, they must have started in the workaday misty dawn mornings back in ’42 and ’43 and the thousand bomber raids of ‘Bomber’ Harris, the Air Force commander under Churchill in 1944. They simply tried as a group to "figger it all out".

"jist wot in ‘tarnation woz a-goin on half the bloody night" Irritated moaned

"Leasways yew woz safe innya warm bed…, not like them…come down with a helluva bang didn’t ut…, poor basterds, We wished they could av letut land" From Pity and his Tearful headshaking wife.

"Aah couldn’t do it though could they, could a lost a lot more" Utters Thoughtful, pensive.

"Do you reckon it woz a Jerry then, come a sneakin in?" From Still Puzzled, inquiringly.

No one really knew.

Other local ‘dromes’ were equally busy at the time of the mass bombing raids, and East Anglia had hundreds being close to Europe, so no diversion being available resulted, (so I slowly understood by piecing together these unhappy reminiscences years later) in some of the most heart-wrenching local experiences of the war. Wayback from the front line the local Sutton folk may have been, so far from ‘the action’ most assume, but there are personal memories of wartime anguish and experience even here.

It had to be habitual to notice the buzz of activity from the airfield. There was even a decoy airfield lit up further up the Bedinghams road in Medlands fen. The real thing could hardly be missed when a raid was on, being a hilltop of traffic, busy lights, and gross deafening noise from huge numbers of roaring circling Halifaxes, Wellingtons and the ubiquitous Lancasters. You can see them memorialized in ‘The Chequers’ pub in the village to this day in large old photographs. New Zealand’s prime youth lined up so proudly uniformed in front of the huge four engined killing machines. Tears drip senselessly from my eyes as I trip my fingers over the keyboard at that small nation’s youth so sacrificed. The survival odds were awful. About ten missions it is thought before your time was up.

Thousand bomber raids over Cologne, the industrial heartland of the Rhur, Berlin, Dresden and elsewhere was our local contribution to the necessary ‘War Effort’, alongside the vegetables and sugar beet laboriously weeded and hefted by these same workworn calloused hands plucking off the riddle the ‘bad-uns’, ‘green-endeds’ and earth clods alongside mine.

At times this battle resulted in initially mysterious occasional endless circling of individual aircraft over the dark empty desolate fen, round and noisily around, deafeningly ear-splitting overhead then decaying to a distant rumbling drone…Why?

Low on fuel possibly, damaged perhaps, engines out of action even, and increasingly low in altitude. No hills to go behind or crash into, they could sometimes grind visibly and audibly around, unable to land for seemingly endless noisy hours.

Laying wide awake at these groaning sometimes shot-up Lancasters, peeping through cottage windows from candlelit bedrooms into the gloom at red flamed exhausts popping their fiery sparking heat under shining stars the farm workers waited and winced, helpless with pity, and understanding it was too low for parachutes.

Now we talk in our story of a featureless seven acre fen field, an unmarked place, with the slightest upward slope to one corner left by a fenland rodham noticed only by old-time ploughmen, distinguished by a narrow access track along one side. Walk down there from the low bank road yourself, you modern Sutton resident, turn left at the phone box over the rivers after the pleasant saunter enjoyed by many down Bury Lane. Go past the two neglected farmyards either side, the coaches made into hippy homes, and there on the right by a shrubby willow, stop.

Stop and with closed eyes listen to the wind, hurl back your mind imaginatively to join those watering farmworker’s eyes peering into the wrenched apart peace of a starry night now shattered by multiple earsplitting straining Rolls Royce cylinders frantically revving for a last gasp of altitude. You might hear an echo.

"Touched ‘er wingtip down by the road and cartwheeled she did, bits flying everywhere, flames and boom!" Vivid recall murmurs.

"Ended up here in the old Grass Ground, most of ‘er anyways…, all gorn, weren’t thay?"

"No, the tail gunner, they took him away, it broke off in one piece" from Know it.

"But he never survived though, did ee?"

"How would we know, never told us did they, nothing to do with us was it?" from Blessed Ignorance.

"Terrible it was, orl them young lads". Pity again choruses.

"If there woz ghosts, like they say there is up the Berristead, this ud be a haunted field this would, spirits not properly gorn to rest, wrestling that grut airplane to the last inch"

"Well there ain’t is there, doan be suh silly" from Practical.

And I swear I heard a moan in the Siberian wind all the way from the Russian Steppes, a shiver rattled down my spine, an authoritative voice half-heard, husky like that of a captain pilot on an aircraft intercom said briskly with the slightest Kiwi twang:

"Hold on chaps, hold on, I’m trying one more time…no…no… she won’t come up, see you over the other side…"

Coda

Alan Bennett’s History Boys tells us through his history teacher just to "Pass it on", and you ask for a story, so I do, it could even be a ghost story.

In retirement I presently take an interest in reading of Stalingrad and the Eastern Front. I wonder why?I study those massive battles, the T34 tanks and all, which way outstripped in death all that unfolded on our Western Front.

In my Sutton youth displaced Poles were housed in refugee camps up by Witcham, many came to our Sutton school. Ukrainians and others who I met at harvest time worked industriously in the grain stores at Haddenham and Witchford. Surplus tanks and armoured cars were parked in great lines by the Milton railway crossing at Cambridge. Did they spark questions years ago in my curious mind, is that why?

I think not.

Romantically, if you like, to me its ‘blowing in the wind’; its in those Siberian gusts that cruelly stiffened the tens of thousands of ghastly corpses on the frozen Steppe and then came howling here… to similar sister flatlands…bringing their ghastly burden of Knowledge, of the Price of War.

Its why I believe the EU is a ‘good thing’ too, founded for reasons so many seem to have forgotten, was it not our Winston who said "better to jaw-jaw than war-war", and don’t they just!

Rod Read, Bury Lane, born down the Gault during a chilly wet wartime February in 1944, now living in the Cottage the bombers shook on take off.