The Fakenham Section Office was built in the first years of the war, when labour and materials had been plentiful. It was the most comfortable office I had had since joining the A.M.W.D. Unlike my previous headquarters, it was not situated on an airfield but at a former Works Repair Depot. The Depot had become a central Motor Transport and Plant repair establishment and a clearing house for stores from abandoned depots in the area, and attached to the Section Office was a Depot Foreman with a staff of fitters and labourers. I met my Chief Clerk and typist, the Inspector of Works in charge of the mechanical and electrical affairs of the A.M.W.D., and a Clerk of Works whose duties covered the supervision of landing grounds. All these people had stayed at Fakenham since the office was built, an unusual state of affairs for the Air Ministry. I went over the layout of the Section, and found that my new post involved the supervision of eight airfields, the Depot, and two coastal Radar stations.

As the office was built on the outskirts of Fakenham I hoped that perhaps a house might come my way so that my wife could join me. In the meantime accommodation had been found for me in one of the local hotels, and I took my luggage to the hotel during the afternoon. After the office closed I returned to scout round the accommodation offered to me, and I was by no means impressed by what I saw. The residents' lounge was a drab place with poor lighting and a chilly atmosphere unrelieved by the dull glow of a coke fire. As I sat there waiting for dinnertime a girl came to make a fruitless attempt at livening the dying embers, and she was obviously surprised when I informed her that I had booked my room provisionally for a month.

As I sat alone at a table in the large dining room another man came in and took a seat nearby. We eventually started a formal conversation, and I found that he too was a resident. He was trying hard to obtain a bed-sitting room in the town, and he obviously was not satisfied with the hotel. When dinner was over I left instructions to be called in the morning and retired to the cheerless lounge. At last, feeling cold and tired, I went to bed. The hard straw mattress sank low in a deep hollow of creaking wires, and I slept very little. In the morning I gauged the time by the light coming through the window, but nobody called me. My new acquaintance was already at breakfast when I hurried into the dining room, and he greeted me without enthusiasm. I asked him how one had a bath in the hotel and he replied that one didn't, as the only bathroom was in use as a bedroom. I decided that I must at all costs find lodgings elsewhere, and when I reached the office I circulated my requirements to all the staff with an appeal for help. They were not optimistic; two men were sleeping in the office, and as for a house, that was impossible.

At dinner that evening my follow-resident, who I discovered was the Technical Representative of an aircraft firm interested in some of the aircraft at West Raynham, said that he was going on an accommodation hunt after the meal, and I asked if I might join him. We walked the town for two hours following up on information that he had collected, but apart from the exercise the expedition was fruitless. We returned to the hotel and I lay awake in the deep declevity of the creaking mattress with my mind filled with ideas for the most frightful methods of annihilating my unfortunate employers.

The demands of the office occupied me fully on the following day and drove personal discomforts into the background, and I decided on a tour of inspection of the airfields. The most important station was West Raynham, the first part of Norfolk ever to be bombed, a permanent R.A.F. establishment which was trying to settle down to a peacetime routine under a new Unit. A review of the accommodation showed that Fighter Command were trying hard to put a quart into a pint pot, and an R.A.F. Works Squadron under A.M.W.D. supervision had been assigned the task of erecting second-hand hutting to take the overflow. A part of the Unit was also in occupation of a nearby temporary station, and the Clerks of Works at both establishments were over-run with requests piling in for redecoration and repairs, conversions and new work. The Works Squadron was disorganised by the steady trickling away of tradesmen on demobilisation, and West Raynham was clearly suffering from post-war restlessness. Air Commodore Harvey, the Commandant, and his Station Commander, Wing-Commander Brothers, were faced with an immense task in the transition of the station from war to peace, and as I came to know them better I was obliged to admire their attention to detail, their concern for the smooth completion of all the many items of work under way, and their readiness to discuss with the A.M.W.D. any problem, however small, which arose during construction.

Although West Raynham and its satellite station were the most important from my point of view, I had to find time for inspection of the others, and on my third day at Fakenham I visited Little Snoring and Foulsham. Both of these stations had been bases for R.A.F. heavy bombers, but the Units were being disbanded when I arrived. In the Messes D.S.Os and D.F.Cs passed their enforced leisure time discussing the prospects of permanent commissions with the post-war R.A.F., and the problems of reinstatement in civil jobs when demobilisation took them out of uniform and put then into new suits.

As I drove round the perimeter track at Little Snoring with the Foreman of Trades I casually asked him if he know of any good lodgings in the neighbourhood. He thought perhaps his son and daughter-in-law would help me, and promised to ask them that evening. I went on to Foulsham and met the A.M.W.D. staff there before touring the field. Foulsham was one of the few stations equipped with F.I.D.O., and I gazed with interest at the miles of pipes stretched between brackets down each side of the main runway and the huge storage tanks standing by the edge of the perimeter track. Another unusual feature of the airfield was the large number of hangars built round the site. Instead of the usual two there were ten, now standing bleak and empty, and on enquiring the reason for that large number I was told that gliders had once been housed on the station. Apparently Foulsham had at one time been considered a very important base, and the uncanny quiet must have contrasted strongly with the activity it had once known.

Next day the Foreman of Trades rang up from Little Snoring to say that I could go to live at his son's house on the following Monday. I had only to last out a few days at the Fakenham hotel. At dinner that night, however, I decided that even those few days would be more than I could tolerate; the prospect of a week-end at the place was terrifying. After breakfast on the following day I packed my bags and asked for the bill; the account was staggering, and I was thankful that I was able to leave before incurring an expense beyond my means. I went to the office and took over a small spare room for the weekend, consoling myself in the meantime with the thought that it would not be for long, and that at least the bed would be comfortable.

On the Monday morning I again packed my bags and drove to my new lodgings. They were situated in Hindolvestone, very near to the Foulsham airfield, and as I drew up beside the trim new bungalow with its neat lawn and flower beds a beautiful scene attracted my attention. Behind the bungalow, rising from a sea of green in the near distance, was an ivy-clad ruin. The autumn sun gave a mellow beauty to the pile of green and grey which had once been a church tower, and sunlight streamed through the narrow openings which at one time contained panels of stained glass.

My new landlady met me at the door; she was a young woman, and as we talked two small boys came to the door, smiled at me in a friendly way and said good-morning. They were David, aged four, and Michael, aged eight. Michael should nornally have been at school, but his mother had kept him at home for a few days when she found that he had a temperature. She explained that Michael's sickness was the reason for my being delayed in coming to the house.

That evening a homely family party sat at table. Cecil Wakefield, a surprisingly young-looking man in his fortieth year, Millicent his wife, the two boys and myself enjoyed a hot meal followed by home-made cakes. On that evening a friendship was started, a friendship which I shall always remember as a highlight in my experience of Norfolk hospitality. There was none of the atmosphere of lodgings in the comfortable bungalow which Cecil Wakefield had built for himself in his spare time a few years before the war. I played with the children every evening before they went to bed, and at weekends there was invariably something new to pass the time. Cecil possessed a small car, and occasionally we enjoyed a run or passed Saturday afternoon cleaning and greasing. There were logs to saw up and split for the winter's stock, and always the boys to chase round the garden.

The church which had crumbled some years earlier had been replaced by a new building which stood a few yards farther up the road. When I first went to Hindolvestone the living was vacant, but after a few weeks the new vicar arrived and took up residence in the old vicarage next door to the bungalow. As my Sundays were free for the most part I was able to attend the services, and the new relaxation and opportunity for mental and spiritual refreshment proved invaluable during a period of restlessness caused by Air Ministry's failure to declare its policy concerning the wartime temporary staff who were still prevented from leaving for permanent appointments. It was natural that I should be disturbed at the insecurity of my position; my wife had presented me with our first child, and my responsibilities for the future impressed themselves upon me more keenly than ever in consequence.

At the office the most pressing work was the listing and disposal of surplus stores at the Depot and the stations. During the construction period the routine procedure of checking and writing-off stores had been allowed to drift; in fact the majority of wartime A.M.W.D. officials had neither understood nor attempted to understand the complex system of stores accounting practised by Air Ministry. Every station I had supervised had been very much in arrears with the work, and the war had been a convenient excuse for ignorance or for carelessness in reporting surplus or useless materials. As a result there were stacks of hutting and building materials on every site, and when the war ended the Works Accountant asserted himself and the Section Officers were made to carry out Boards of Survey and to prepare lists of surplus items. The matter of stores accounting had always been of interest to me because waste or hoarding appal me, especially when the materials are urgently required elsewhere, and for over twelve months I had tried to straighten out the stores at the various stations in my charge. It however became apparent when I arrived at Fakenham that the new Section Officers were likely to become little more than supervising storekeepers, and as the winter lengthened I found that practically none of my time was spent in the practice of my profession.

Two assignments came my way to break the monotony of stores routine, two tasks which gave me a feeling of deep satisfaction and a sense of usefulness during the dead anti-climax in the lives of the airfields. The first concerned Matlask, a grass airfield near the coast which had stood vacant since flying bombs had ceased to arose the coast. As no concrete had been laid on the runway strips at Matlask the Norfolk War Agricultural Committee arranged with Air Ministry for the airfield to revert to the plough, and we made arrangements to close down the station. The stores were removed to Fakenham Depot and declared surplus, and the A.M.W.D. staff were given notice to terminate their employment. The tractors and ploughs arrived to prepare the ground for crops, and I was instructed to remove the Sommerfeld tracking which was laid down the main runway. Sommerfeld tracking consists of a heavy wire netting stiffened with steel bars and laid as a mat on top of the ground to prevent rutting by aircraft wheels. The edges of the netting are laced together by means of flat steel bands one-and-a-half inches wide and three-eighths of an inch in thickness, these bands being pinned to the ground by means of strong angle-iron pegs about two feet long. Every bit of tracking and every peg must be removed to avoid damage to ploughshares. The area to be removed covered about fourteen acres, and the matter was one of great urgency. Nobody in the Area had faced the problem of removing Sommerfeld tracking before, and as the tough grass had grown through the netting the task was not going to be an easy one. I took an Allis-Chalmers DH7 bulldozer and a number of agricultural tractors from the Depot, drafted extra men from Foulsham to Matlask, and started work. A strong vertical pull was needed to lift the pegs out of the ground, and after a few trials we found that the bulldozer, with a heavy hook and chain fixed in place of the blade, could carry out this part of the work admirably. The one machine was too slow, however, and it was found that a ring and wire attached to the body of a tipping lorry was equally effective. The lorry straddled the line of pegs, an assistant groundsman slipped the ring under the head of each peg in turn, and the lorry driver operated the tipping gear. It was fascinating to watch the bulldozer and lorry pulling up pegs at the rate of two a minute in this way.

The flat lacing straps were rusted to the netting, and only about three inches of strap could be gripped at one end for pulling. We tried cable grips, brute force, and a variety of friction grips before I hit on an almost laughably simple gadget which could be made in the Depot from an old piece of thick flat iron. After the first grip had proved successful we made three others, and agricultural tractors were soon busily engaged pulling out the straps at high speed by means of the specially made grips which were attached to the draw-pins of the tractors by short tow-ropes. The next task was the lifting of the netting itself, and the bulldozer was used for this purpose. Four tow-ropes with hooks dragged over the netting, catching in the end of each roll and rolling it up like a carpet. A dragline excavator was brought from the Depot, its bucket removed and two crane hooks substituted, and the rolls were picked up and loaded into lorries for stacking off the field. We spent a week in lifting the first acre of tracking, but once the method of working had been organised we lifted and carted away an average of an acre per day.

The Superintending Engineer came to see the work in progress. He made no comment as he watched the tracking being removed, but as we drove away round the perimeter track, past the ploughs and the newly-tilled ground, he gave expression to his thoughts.

"I've been building airfields for thirty years - - " the sentence was unfinished.

"And this is the most satisfying job you've had to do?" I queried; I was in high spirits: I felt that the work we were doing was a happy sign of things to come. Swords to ploughshares, airfields to cornfields. My chief did not answer. He was an established Air Ministry official, and perhaps he did not share my elation.

The second task was at Foulsham. The War Agricultural Committee moved in to plough up the airfield between the concrete perimeter track and runways, and they asked us to remove the F.I.D.O. installation. The long batteries of burners were fixed to heavy cast iron brackets, and the brackets were in turn bolted to concrete blocks ranging in size from two feet cubes to pieces five times that size. The DH7 was brought from Matlask and fitted with its blade. Running alongside the burners the bulldozer ploughed a deep furrow beside the concrete foundations, then ran down into the trench in the opposite direction, caught the concrete with the blade edge, and lifted it in the air. A tow rope was next fastened to each battery of burners and the bulldozer hauled the sixty-feet lengths of writhing pipes on to a central dump on the runway. The feed pipes to each burner were buried a few inches below ground, and when a rope was fastened to the end of one of these feeds and the bulldozer rumbled away the two-inch pipe appeared out of the ground like an unwilling worm caught in a bird's beak.

Those two unusual operations were the last - and the most significant - which I carried out for Air Ministry. An appointment was advertised near my home; I applied and obtained the post. Air Ministry refused to accept my resignation, and I appealed to the Ministry of Labour. After two months my appeal was srupported by the National Service authorities, and on the last day of March 1946 I was at home.

Two men entered the dining room of the cafe and edged their way between the crowded tables. Their long untidy hair and grimy faces were out of place amongst the business men who occupied most of the accommodation, and their appearance attracted my attention as I awaited the arrival of my order. The first man was lean and small, and his shabby overcoat collar was burned up round his neck. His companion was a man in the forties, with a jet black mane, flat broad forehead, and deep-set dark eyes. A long straight nose accentuated the high cheek bones and square chin. I remembered having caught a glimpse of the man in a large limousine which had parked in a side street as I had walked from the office for lunch. The big car was towing a light trailer stacked with second-hand car tbyres, and I had noticed that most of the tyres had been camouflaged with mock treads cut into the hitherto smooth rubber, finished off with a shiny varnish to create the illusion of newness. The travelling tyre merchants were merely products of just one of the post-war rackets which had sprung up from times of acute shortage of materials.

As the two newcomers took their seats at a nearby table I was struck by the amazing likeness of the big man to Hermann Goering, the former Luftwaffe chief, at that time awaiting death at Nuremberg. Sentence had been passed a.week earlier on the Nazi gang, and the re-awakened interest in Nuremberg, coupled with the startling resemblance of the diner in my cafe, set my thoughts racing over current events.

Whilst Goering and his colleagues awaited judgment at Nuremberg, statesmen of the victorious Allies were floundering in suspicion and misunderstanding in Paris. America had completed tests on a remote unpopulated atoll with atomic bombs to ascertain the degree of effect it might have on more populous areas, at the same time protesting that atom bombs would never be used by Uncle Sam against anyone. Unspecified persons were testing rockets which were falling in Sweden. Threats of sudden death were made against our own Foreign Secretary in Paris. The world was certainly very careless to allow the lessons of 1939-45 to fade so soon in its memory as to permit the drift towards war to start again before the issues of the earlier conflict had been decided.

We are a strange company, we children of the 1914-1918 War. Born during a period of austerity, hardship and suffering, we have grown up with an inborn cynicism, a hardened outlook, and a desire to see the naked facts without gloss or decoration. In many of us the quality of hard-headedness and the cynical distaste for the methods of window-dressing and diplomacy were latent and almost unrecognised until the War caught us up in its turmoil. The boy who was called into the services emerged - if he was lucky - a fully-grown man, determined that it would not happen again. The Labour landslide at the 1945 General Election was more than the result of a reactionary trend "agin the Government" by the body of servicemen in this country or serving their country abroad. It was the only way the majority of youth could give expression to their new awareness of the need for a different world, and in their minds the obvious first stop was a change of leadership at the top. If a Labour Government had been in power in 1939, it is probable that a Conservative landslide would have taken place in 1945. The hard naked truth is that whatever the political system had been before the War, it did not prevent the War breaking out, and the man who has given seven years of youth to serve a military machine is going to see to it that the machine does not possess him again. That is one of the reasons why Lord Tedder's attempts to recruit a post-war R.A.F. have failed so far.

But there were many who did not have the opportunity, as have you and I, to help re-shape the world in ways of peace. They gave their lives to clear the way for us to carry on with the task. What we shall make of it depends, it seems to me, on how clearly we keep before us the picture of their sacrifice. The local Council of my home town have been trying for some time to foster public interest in a memorial to the dead of this War; their efforts so far have met with little support, because the ex-serviceman knows that his dead fellow-servicemen would deplore the expense of money and energy on a memorial if we meantime left the building of a better world to the unknown "other fellow."

On a sunny day in July 1945 I had occasion to call at Attlebridge. As I drove along the familiar roads to the site my mind went back to the mud and confusion of the winter of 1942-43, to the pressing days of 1943's midsummer and the arrival in the autumn of the first American advance party. I remembered then the hard winter of 1943-44, when we tried to complete the work of concreting and building in spite of frost and rain; the Engineers, thrustful and assured when they first came on the site, but much humbler men when they left. Then, at long last, the Liberators landing with their human payloads, young fliers with no battle experience. Easter 1944, a great day for me and for all those who had worked on that barren spot of Norfolk, for the handing-over ceremony on the main runway on Easter Monday was the beginning of the battle experience those young fliers had come from America to taste. The first Berlin raid - I shall never forget the feeling in the air that day - the Colonel's emotion on the night of Easter Monday, all these came back to me as I approached the field.

I drove past the empty sentry box and on to the perimeter track. There was nobody in sight. A covey of partridge with a month to live ran across the track in front of the car. Past the aircraft dispersals with their home-made kennels which the G.Is. had knocked together from bomb boxes as a shelter from the bitter English winds and rain, the only sign now of previous usefulness being the stains of oil and the odd shapes of tubing or spent bullet cartridges or suchlike flotsam left by the ground crews and ignored by the locals. Past the first hangar, huge and empty, where riggers had struggled to work on in the spring of 1943 in the teeth of a gale, and on to the long straight stretch of track running to the end of the main runway. The tyres purred happily on the smooth asphalt which had been laid atop the concrete to counteract the wear of American treaded aircraft wheels.

A few workmen moved desultorily round about the Air Ministry office. A worried storeman, his work no less for the deserted nature of things outside, fussed around with his tally cards. Two girls were calculating tax deductions for the week's wages. There was no other sign of life.

Eighteen months of sweat and worry and limitless spending had been followed by just one year of intensive use, with 100 aircraft and 3,000 men on the station. For a year only, on every day of that year, four squadrons had taken off in the morning, sometimes twice a day, with their loads of devastation, sometimes returning in full strength, but frequently short of one or two aircraft, occasionally more. The minor efforts of the early days of the war had faded into insignificance in the glare of the new dawning, the new offensive which reached its peak in June and July. Small wonder that I felt the oppressive stillness of the quiet at Attlebridge on that lovely summer day.

A few miles from Attlebridge, in a little-known area of Norfolk, is a deserted airfield, once the centre of an American Combat Wing covering three stations. On my first visit to the station I noticed a small grey marble column, standing in a grassy plot at the main entrance. The men of the Wing had contributed towards the memorial, a local farmer had given the land, and there was a Trust formed to maintain the site and structure. The small column was to stand there for ever in memory of the fliers who had gone from the stations in the Wing never to return. But to me it seemed a symbol of something more; it stands as an everlasting tribute to the men who built the field, the hundreds who worked there through two winters to prepare the way for the aircraft which later blasted at Germany and ended the war. It stands for the living as well as the dead, those airmen who each flew more than a hundred times over Europe and were fortunate to return, and the ground crews who tended the aircraft on the ground and awaited their return in quiet anxious hours of suspense, 'sweating out' the mission.

A civil engineer is always building monuments, not merely in columns of marble standing on consecrated ground, but in everyday construction of roads and buildings. It is not expected that those who use the roads or buildings should think of the men who built them; the builder takes the task as a matter of course. But there is a romance, a drama behind the forgotten airfields, and nothing will remain of many of them in the future save acres of concrete on a square mile of open country to revive the memory of the present generation or arouse the interest of the generations of the future.

It was a thankless task, an effort which flared up and died down in three short years. Yet those years were momentous years for the world, years which we hope will never be repeated in suffering and death and destruction, in waste and hunger and disease. Without those airfields and the men who used them it is certain that this country and the world today would not have been freed of the toils of war, but would probably have been dragged into the most unspeakable misery of a living bondage, of privation and starvation and sickness out of which it would never recover.

I hope the Trust will care for and respect the little marble column in that isolated plot of land in Norfolk. I hope the children of the future will read its inscription, and I hope that when they ask their questions, as children will, their parents will not brush them aside, as parents do, but will tell them of the days of the Flying Fortress, the Liberator, the Lancaster, the Halifax, and of the squadrons which once flew from mile-long runways on the moors.

THE END