Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

FRIENDLY INVASIONS 198 had readily and without question accepted their task of housing and caring for the crowd of young strangers who suddenly descended on them. This did not mark the end of Tollington’s association with Buckden and the Huntingdonshire countryside. Some boys returned to farm work camps in the summer holidays, one summer boarding in The Towers, and the next in a disused wooden army encampment at Brampton. In addition, many of the evacuees have visited Buckden over the last 65 years, individually or in groups. The last official reunion took place in September 2009. Death in a wood It would be a mistake to think that Buckden’s only experience of the physical horrors of war was indirect or secondhand: news reports of the bombing of cities, the nightmares that woke a husband or son or daughter home on leave or drove a young airman to flee a dance in the Rifle Range to beat his head against a wall in rage and grief for friends lost over Germany. The reality was to hand for those who nursed or visited the wounded in evacuation hospitals, and for those who worked in the fire and rescue services. One of the volunteers for Buckden’s Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) was sixteen-year-old Robert Curtis, a Tollington evacuee who had decided to stay on in the village. He was looking for ways to enliven his boring life as a contractor’s time clerk at Graveley airfield: part of the attraction of the AFS was the chance of sharing night duty with a young female volunteer. Many of the first incidents the AFS attended were hayrick fires, most of them out in the open countryside where no water was available, except down by the river. A fire in a farmyard might be nearer a water-supply, but was no less terrifying for that: the heat from a group of burning ricks was, in Robert’s own words, ‘incredible; twenty yards away it was like standing in front of your own personal crematorium— and it could easily turn into just that.’ Inevitably, however, with the USAAF as well as the RAF flying out of local airfields, the Buckden volunteers knew they would have to face a call-out to their first aircraft crash. They listened to the stories of planes returning from sorties critically short of fuel or with controls damaged and crew members wounded or dying. Some came down within sight of their home runway, unable to clear the last belt of trees; others made it back only to crash on landing. The call came in the autumn of 1942. The reality, for Robert Curtis, was much, much worse than he could have imagined: ‘Our first plane had smashed through the trees of a small wood at Diddington. We had our school cricket ground there, a very pretty rural setting. There was nothing pretty about the crash site. The plane had smashed through the trees along a hundred yard path, leaving a smoking trail of splintered branches, blackened, stunted tree trunks and bits of broken wings behind it. The tall tail told us immediately it was, had been, a Flying Fortress, and on its approach to Alconbury. Impossible to imagine this dismembered, smoking, reeking debris as one of those elegant, high-tailed birds we had so often watched above our village, taking off and climbing east to join a hundred others on another daylight mission. This returning pilot had evidently fought his plane clear of the houses, his runway in sight, but couldn’t lift it past Diddington wood. Another couple of miles—another minute—and any of the ten crew still living might have been saved. But, as soon as we had the fires damped down, it was only too dreadfully clear they had all had it, and most gruesomely. ‘As I saw the tattered, bloody rags through the ripped apart fuselage, I could not help dropping the fire hose from my grasp. The pilot and forward crew had not stood a chance: smouldering tree trunks were embedded in the crumpled fuselage from the cockpit to the waist gunners, their mutilated bodies all welded together with smoking wood, shattered Perspex and metal framing in a grisly embrace of death. We stood, a shocked and silent huddle, choking on the hot, smoky air, that acrid, yet sweet, smell of burnt insulation— Tufnol, it was called... ‘Once the fires were out and the spilt fuel washed away, we were finished. If fire did break out again at least it would cleanse this terrible scene before the rescue crews arrived from the base. Thank god it was their job and not ours to clear away the mess.’