‘Derek, please, not so fast’

Letters

Vol. 30 No. 4 · 21 February 2008

From Martin Ward

It would be playing into the obviously overbusy hands of Derek Jackson, whose biography was reviewed so entertainingly by Ferdinand Mount (LRB, 7 February), to say I owe my existence to him, but there is a link. In the spring of 1942, when Jackson was trialling the tinfoil strips that would confuse enemy radar and save the lives of so many bomber crews, my father turned 17 and joined up before he was called up. He became the wireless operator in a Halifax bomber (Mount mentions the Lancaster and if there is one thing my father gets crusty about it is the latter’s cachet over the Halifax, much as the Spitfire is favoured over the Hurricane) and one of my first memories of him talking about the war was his enthusiasm for Jackson’s tinfoil. Indeed, he brought a few reels with him on being demobbed and in those austerity years after the war used to tear it up into strips with which to decorate the Christmas tree.

Martin Ward
Northampton

From Ted McFadyen

Ferdinand Mount seems to imply that the Germans never used the ‘Window’ anti-radar device in raids on this country. But I remember vividly, as a teenager living in North London during the smaller blitz of 1942-43, going out into the playing-fields behind our Muswell Hill house and collecting the shining tinfoil strips which lay scattered over the tennis courts and cricket pitches, along with the pieces of shrapnel much prized by schoolboys.

Ted McFadyen
Hove, East Sussex