Ten bombers

I spent part of my early childhood near an RAF base. In the playground we sung a variation of ten green bottles. It went 'There were ten German bombers in the air, in the air. There were ten German bombers in the air.' At the end of each verse a plane was shot down by the brave boys from the base. One day we were singing it in the back of the car and Dad shouted at us. I didn't understand why it was wrong.

I didn't have any strong feelings about the Germans. I was just ignorant. Even though I was born thirty-two years after 1945 comics still carried wartime stories. I read classic 1940s children's fiction full of German parachutists, bomb shelters and Nazi spies. It was taken for granted that the Germans were the enemy.

The idea faded and was forgotten. Maybe by the time I was nine or ten. I don't remember. When I started secondary school there was a girl who was half-German. I was fascinated by the romance of it and didn't even think of the war. I'd heard all these strange exotic place names like Bavaria and Prussia. I quite fancied being half-German myself. I asked tactless questions and couldn't understand why her response was so hostile. I couldn't understand why she wasn't proud and didn't want to talk about it. Looking back I can see that she must have been teased horribly.

Now it seems absurd that any British child could grow up thinking what I did or experiencing what she did. The war ended sixty years ago and we live in the age of the Euro.