TORCROSS - 1936 and 1945

A small group walks towards the camera. A mother, a nine-year-old girl and a baby in arms. And also the family’s dog. We’ll call him Rex even though that's not his real name. They’re all on holiday and a long, long way from their home in the Midlands. There’s a 14-year-old boy as well but he has walked on ahead with the dad who’s taking the photograph. (You have to say that it's not really the best of times to be a lad of that age - any more than it had been for the dad in around 1912 or 1913. The boy probably doesn't think about such things, or not yet, anyway - but the father is almost certainly starting to. It's much, much safer just to be a four-month-old baby).

They walk along, enjoying the sight of the sea and the sound of its gentle hiss on the shingle as the moment is recorded. Shortly, they’ll stroll around the end of the buildings to the left, on to the road near where it starts to curve around the end of the Ley. Their car is parked here, a boxy, black 1932 Morris with its Birmingham registration plate. It’s outside a little modern café with large windows and a glass door. Perhaps the family will stop there and have a scone with jam and clotted cream before climbing aboard and driving back to their lodgings, a farm near Sherford.

But at this very moment they are still on the edge of the beach. It’s probably the baby’s very first view of the open sea, not that he looks especially interested. They’ve walked down the row of houses and cottages where, here and there, some of the originals, built of thatch and white-washed cob, still survive. All of those homes look out from their front windows at the narrow stretch of stony track in front of them and, unobstructed, the shingle beyond it, sloping down towards an unthreatening sea. As the group walks towards us, all is as peaceful as it always is. No roar of truck or Jeep or landing craft yet intrudes, no Sherman tank nestles on the sea bed awaiting the attention of its saviour, Ken Small. Few people. No concrete. The scene will be repeated, year after year, unchanging, apart from the children growing older. Until, suddenly, one year, it ceases.

Several years pass. It's an impatient wait during which much happens, both here in Torcross and everywhere else. But then, finally, it's August 1945 and the group is once again standing on the roadside, by the car and near the end of the Ley. Events have overtaken the scene. The Americans have been. And then gone, leaving behind many of their own. There is vague talk of some disaster having happened nearby while they were here, out at sea. My father mutters about it but little is really known and all is, like so much else, shrouded in mystery and secrecy.

I'm nine, because it's now nine years since that very first photograph. I stand there with the others, looking around me and trying to retrieve glimmers of what I remember of everything from four, five, six years ago or even longer. Around the end of the Ley, with the sign you can't miss, Hannaford's shop seems to be back in business. But our little cafe is burnt out, the interior wrecked, the blackened door hanging almost off its hinges. I look at it sadly and try to remember it as it was and can only just succeed. My elder sister and our parents are probably doing the same but they won't find it quite as difficult. Rex isn’t in the least bothered about any of this and my brother is many hundreds of miles away in Italy and has been for more than two years. But we are all still around, one way or another, every one of us. We have survived. As the village has as well, just about.

Into the car, now a little Ford Prefect but of course still black, and off - back to our welcoming new lodgings in a cottage in Beeson, this year, as guests of the Honeywills. And no longer to the much-loved Keynedon Mill to which our pre-war hosts will never return, even though the Americans have long since departed..... 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS and SOURCES Almost all of the images which appear on these pages are part of the Myers Family archive and belong to various family members.

This family and local history page is hosted by www.staffshomeguard.co.uk
The Home Guard of Great Britain, 1940-1944
All text and images are, unless otherwise stated, © The Myers Family 2024 

INDEX Home Guard of Great Britain website 1940-44

INDEX Streetly and Family  Memories 1936-61

INDEX Devon Memories 1936-61

L9C September 2024 - Text and images © The Myers Family 2024