Cold War Child: hearing what wasn't said by Julia Jones

Peter Duck approaching Bawdsey
early 1960s

I was trying to reach the Bawdsey Radar Museum. A long planned visit – part of my background research for Pebble (volume six in the ‘Strong Winds’ series). I was impatient to arrive. Too impatient?

I took a wrong turning. A gate was open that should have been closed. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was inside some chain-link fencing and driving up a poorly maintained road. The brick-built bungalow to my left showed broken windows and missing slates. There were brambles. Unexplained structures in different stages of decay and dereliction. The grass was ragged. There were no signs.

I knew this wasn’t where I was meant to be. However modest the newly re-opened museum they would surely have put up a notice for visitors. I should stop and turn back.

perimeter fence

I went on.  Driving uphill towards the empty sky. As I neared the farthest edge of this wide space, I stopped my car beside a patch of concrete. If I were to walk a few metres further I’d reach the fence at the top of the cliff. I could look outward to the sea. Or I could look down and check whether the sandy slope was as orange and as friable as I remembered from the days I used to try and climb it as a child. It was an ascent to be made on all fours; feet sinking in to the crumbling surface; hands grasping at it, hoping to get hold of the shallow-rooted vegetation; staying low, trying not to think what would happen if I started to slip...

I got out of the car. Looked at the patch of concrete. Stepped onto it. Wondered about its function when this had been a working RAF base.

A young man in country clothes came hurrying across the grass. He told me the field was private. I shouldn’t be here. I must leave.

open gate

I didn’t want to. I began explaining how the gate had been open so I had just driven in. I was looking for the radar museum. My map had shown a left hand turning. That’s what I’d taken. It was an Open Day, I added. There’d be more people like me coming along soon.

This seemed to bother him. He explained that the gate shouldn’t have been open, except that there had been recent incidents of vandalism and he was waiting for a security firm. I felt a bit sorry for him but not entirely. Pleasant though he was he was determined to get rid of me and I wasn’t ready yet. I repeated the unwelcome information that there’d be lots of other people like me coming to the Open Day.

He said he needed to ring the owner but there wasn’t any mobile reception here. He’d have to go back down the hill.
"Good," I thought, meanly, "That gives me more time."

He told me again that I had to leave.

"Was this a missile base?" I asked him.
"Yes. There were some of them sited right here."

"Where?"

"Exactly where you’re standing. On that concrete base. I need to go and call the owner. You have to leave. Now."

Bloodhound

I vacated the concrete as instantly as if I’d been standing on a grave. I went towards my car and he set off to wherever it was that he could use his mobile. I didn’t drive away at once. I fetched my camera and returned to the edge of that concrete base. But I didn’t step on it again and there was nothing to photograph. I knew that this was the place I had come to find. It wasn’t the radar station at all.

I was born about ten miles away, in Woodbridge, in 1954. A ‘baby boomer’. We were peacetime babies, taking our lives for granted, assuming that our world – whatever it was – was ‘normal’.  That was very far from true. Khrushchev was the General Secretary of the communist party in the USSR: Eisenhower, then Kennedy, were USA Presidents. The superpowers were in a state of dangerously escalating hostility. My generation were Cold War children and Britain, in George Orwell’s phrase, was Airstrip One.

Woodbridge, the small town in East Suffolk where I lived until I was 12 years old was a good place to explore on my bike, go to Scottish Dancing classes, sail on the River Deben with my parents and younger brothers on board Peter Duck, pester relentlessly for riding lessons. It was also ringed around by air bases, military research stations, listening posts and weapons.

I don’t think these were talked about much, in the civilian world. Not in front of the children anyway. My parents’ generation was post-war, post-traumatic. They might be talking about their experiences now, in their old age, (I’m writing this on June 6^th, D-Day anniversary) but they weren’t saying anything then. They had put the past behind them, cleared the beaches, and were getting on with their lives; looking after us with love and to the best of their abilities. (Please allow me to generalise for a few lines longer.) We baby boomers are said to be a generation who grew up believing in progress and accepting our increasing affluence as if we had known nothing else. Fourteen years of food rationing ended in the year that I was born. The people who gave us this feeling of security and the space to focus on our own lives were those non-talkers, our parents. And also, perhaps, some of the people whose daily work they weren’t discussing.

Cliff

It was quiet as I stood in the empty field beside the redundant missile site. Then, into that silence came a few unexpected memories that took me back into my 1950s self. They were sounds and with them came emotions; puzzlement and fear.

The air raid siren.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3LGopSVju4

I am upstairs in my bedroom, looking out of the window as it wails above the town. Then I hear it again when I am somewhere near the railway station. I think it was a routine sound but why should this be? The war had ended nine years before I was born.

I know now that in some small towns the sirens were continued as a means of summoning volunteer firefighters –and I think that may have been their use in Woodbridge. In addition, thousands of World War 2 air raid sirens were retained across the country, in planned locations, to give warning in the event of nuclear war. They are still tested regularly in Plymouth dockyard in case of a accident with the submarines. The sound makes some dogs howl and, as a child, I would like to have howled as well. I remember vividly how it frightened me – even if it was routine.

Another sound that I hated as a child was the scream of fighter aircraft. Although RAF Bawdsey was primarily a research and radar station in the 1950s there were active fighter squadrons based much closer to home– at RAF Bentwaters, Woodbridge, and Martlesham Heath. My re-accessed memory is quite specific – I am alone in the garden when it comes – so I’ve used YouTube to search different jets of the period.  The sound that still gives me a cold shiver (though aircraft enthusiasts love it) is the distinctive ‘Blue Note’ of the Hawker Hunter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIhTsA4vPj8  It’s made by air passing over open gun ports. If you’re playing happily with your brother it’s possibly the sound you make by going ‘gnnnnnneouw’ as you roar past lifting your wingtips. If you’re on your own and get taken by surprise, it’s very scary.

Green Garlic

The RAF / USAF bases nearest Woodbridge didn’t have Hawker Hunters (as far as I can discover) in the 1950s. Bentwaters, for instance, was a USAF base with F101 supersonic voodoo jets which passed with such a whoosh that they were gone almost before you could look up. It’s possible that the Hawker Hunters came from the RAF base at Wattisham, twenty miles away, clocking up the surprisingly high number of flying hours that were needed to fulfil the pilots’ weekly quotas. All I can record is the heart-thudding effect they had on one small child if they caught her when she was alone.

Remembering heavy roar of bombers raises cold goosebumps though I’m not so able to place the memory. I think we were on or near the river and the sound was out to sea. RAF Sutton Heath (later RAF Woodbridge) had a specially extended runway so that Lancaster bombers limping back from war time raids across the North Sea could touch down on their last drops of fuel. A facility that had saved my oldest uncle (and his crew’s lives) as he navigated them home with an empty tank. But I’m sure I wasn’t told that story then.  I learn now that, when I was a 1950s child, there were regular low altitude practice bombings on the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Orfordness, some of them carried out from nearby RAF Martlesham, others from further away.

Orfordness, I thought as a child (and still think) was an eerie place. All we were told, as we came up the river on Peter Duck and landed at the Quay to visit the castle (treat for us) or the Jolly Sailor (treat for Dad) was that it was secret. Forbidden. No-one  allowed. So, as I watched the military landing craft regularly crossing from the Quay to the landing stage, I wondered who these people were who did go there – and what they went to do?  I’m sure I never asked. There was as much Don’t Ask as Don’t Tell in our way of living then.

RAF Bawdsey was a listening site in the 1950s (its missiles came later) – listening for whatever might be coming across, or down, the grey North Sea. It too was a forbidden place, emanating secretiveness and with sentries on the gate. From out at sea however, (or after a successful scramble up the cliff), there was no hiding the 4 x 350’ masts, retained in action after World War 2, nor the huge, much newer, AMES Type 80 (Green Garlic) unit that tipped and swivelled as it listened for the signals humans couldn’t hear. Who – or what – were they listening for? What did they fear? Whatever it was, it frightened me as well.

After I left the missile site that day, I did reach the
Radar Museum. There I met people (not from the 1950s but later) for whom RAF Bawdsey – and some other RAF stations – had been ‘normal’ places of work, who had stories to tell and explanations to give. I was glad of that.