Page 9 - Martin Holmes - Old Derbeian Article

Derby School & WWII
not kill the Xmas dinner tradition and somehow Mother would always manage to have a good meat & veges first course, a decent Christmas pudding, mince pies and Christmas cake with almond icing!
The Xmas that Olga was stationed at nearby Ashbourne she got us a goose from a local farmer (quite an illegal transaction!). It fell to me to be draped in a sheet, seated in the outside toilet plucking it of its feathers; quite a laborious job with a messy aftermath of feather collection! But the meat was delicious!
The ornate iron railings across the front garden wall and the matching gate to the steps up to the front door at North Parade went to be melted down for “the war effort” as did some aluminium saucepans.
Manpower controls meant that my sisters got roped into the war effort from their jobs as librarians. Olga became a mechanic in the WAAF eventually passing out top of an advanced course only to be told afterward that women weren’t permitted to be fitters! Deborah, on compassionate grounds (Mother’s rheumatism) was drafted into the Inspectorate of Fighting Vehicles (IoFV) and similarly passed out of training at the top of her course and thereafter spent her time quality checking the manufacturers of fighting vehicle components.
For me WWII meant evacuation to Amber Valley and the virtual dissolution of family life. The nearest I came to any action was being part of a crowd of schoolchildren playing in a park which meant a test pilot in difficulty tried landing on a sloping railway embankment instead of our flat field and lost his life thereby; spending nights at home in the shelter awaiting the all-clear; being home when bomb blast blew out a window; picking up anti-aircraft shrapnel from the streets; seeing the results of bomb damage in other parts of town; seeing the glow in the night sky from the burning of bombed Coventry many miles to the south; seeing a German plane chased across Amber Valley by a pursuing fighter and later in the war watching (after days helping in the farm fields alongside Italian prisoners of war) our bombers circling to gain height in the very late summer evening sky before they headed off to Germany.
It also meant isolation at school as the pacifist views picked up from Mother, an unwillingness to believe that we always shot down more planes than we lost and that our armies’ backward movements were strategic withdrawals not retreats did not endear me to my colleagues!
Another effect was the loss of the best of our teachers at Derby School and the arrival of some second-raters, some of whom mercifully didn’t last long. Fancy sending a shell-shocked young man to teach at a boys’ “boarding” school or a pretty little French woman to teach French!