Life's a Curve ~ My Way

Ralpapajan was born during World War 2 in a little village in rural England. Of course, in those days he wasn't known as Ralpapajan but as Robin Thurman.

He started life in the shadow of the chimneys of a pig iron factory and from the front garden the family could see Coventry burning after being bombed. Living as he did in the Midlands of Great Britain at war next to a steelworks operating 24 hours a day, with four tall chimneys belching out acrid fumes and tall flames from the blast furnaces, it was surely to be expected that his life would be short.

It wasn't. In fact, the factory was never bombed during the war. It lasted until a Conservative Prime Minister killed off industry a few decades later on. So why didn't the enemy, the Nazis of Adolf Hitler, bomb such an obvious target? A target that was producing huge quantities of a material needed for the war effort? The reason was because it was so obvious. The steelworks ~ those "Dark Satanic Mills" ~ had the only four-chimney configuration in the whole of England. They could not be masked. On a clear night they could be seen from a few thousand feet up from the Continent of Europe. And the incoming bombers made good use of this phenomenon.

Sure they had radio direction beacons that triangulated courses and guided them in but, once over their target country the radio waves were not as effective as a visual sighting; and here, stuck bang in the middle of England, was the perfect point for them to disperse to the various cities in the industrial heart of William Blake's "Green and Pleasant Land".

So little Asfordby Hill and its larger mother town, Melton Mowbray, (The outer farm of the family Melton) had only one bombing incident.

One day, shortly after he was born, he was told though he doesn't remember the incident, a German bomber had engine trouble as it was on the way home. The pilot decided to jettison his one remaining bomb and chose an area of blackness. In those days the night-time blackout would have been operating so the surrounding area probably looked blacker from the air when contrasted with the chimneys.

Eye witness reports at the time, Rob's mother and grand-parents, tell of the engine trouble. They obviously cannot tell of the reasons for the decision as to the area selected.

Was the pilot seeking to avoid dwellings and the consequent loss of life? Or was he simply getting rid of his cargo to make the plane lighter for the journey home? Did he make it? Did the crew survive the war? All such questions remain unanswered. All that can be established was that the bomb fell on a field, one that did not even have any farm animals in it. The bomb exploded and the only casualty was a shift-worker from the steelworks who was peddling his bike down the hill nearby on his way to an early morning shift. Apparently the blast from the explosion caused his lungs to collapse and he died instantly.

These then were the turbulent times he was born into. Food rationing, fuel rationing, survival vegetable growing, single pig keeping, American troops dashing around in convoys. At six months he decided to meet his grand-father and crawled out of the house when the women's backs were turned and across Melton Road to the foot bridge almost opposite. It was one of his first memories. A jeep with an soldier at the wheel screeched to a halt and the driver got out and handed him to his mother. He doesn't remember it well, much of the detail was filled in by his mother and grand-mother and in the repeating of the story his idea of the memory has certainly changed.

After the war moved with his family from Rhodesia, that fertile bread-basket of Africa between the rivers, the Zambezi to the north and the Limpopo to the south. The great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo, where the Elephant got its trunk, as it was called by Rudyard Kipling in his "Just So" story "The Elephant's Child".

This short book contains the memories of his life in what is now called Zimbabwe South Africa.