CONCRETE EVIDENCE

I have a very clear recollection of a War-time defended gun position on a corner of the main road not so very far from our house. Or rather, the remains of it, for I would not have been allowed to go and see it during the War. I was too young, anyway. But afterwards, when we had the freedom of the roads thanks to our bikes, the structure was just the sort of place we liked to explore.
Memory tells me there was a pillbox - and probably a pole barrier beside the road, sometimes manned and operated at night by the Home Guard - and on the opposite side of the road some sort of false wooden bungalow set among a number of other bungalows, with a roof which slid back to reveal, presumably, although not during my visits, a gun which had a field of fire across the road. And next to the pillbox were heaped, in higgledy-piggledy profusion, a number of large concrete blocks.
I recall being told that, upon the invasion alert being given, these concrete blocks, or tank traps, would have been lifted and slithered across the highway by a local farmer and his tractor, to form a roadblock.
Decades later, and by now a dedicated walker living in Norfolk, one of our rambling routes took us somewhere in the east of the county when, beside a gentle river, we came across a little bridge. We decided to make it a coffee stop, and one of our number wandered into the nearby woods. He came back saying there were a lot of lumps of concrete laying around, so I went to look, and recognised them immediately. Tank traps, I said. Doubts were expressed by other of the walkers, but further exploration also brought into view the remains of another concrete pillbox, damp and ghostly and empty.
Alas, I can no longer recall where this bridge was, but for me there seemed enough evidence in the undergrowth to proclaim that this was indeed the remains of a defended river crossing. One of a number which would have been part of a defensive line, no doubt.
In more recent years we removed our place of abode from a village in south Norfolk to coastal Sheringham, in north Norfolk, and it was on one of our earliest visits to the town, when we were parking the car, that I looked across the car park - the one between the main roundabout and the steam railway station - and saw at once the familiar shape of a number of cubes of concrete. Six or seven, anyway, some of them used in the past to provide the setting for a row of public steps leading from the car park to the main road.
Tank traps, I thought. This was a defended position during the last War. But why put it there?
The matter rested quietly for some time until one day, after the bar and lounge at the town's Morley Club had been redecorated and fresh pictures placed along the walls, my attention was caught by a framed black and white photograph. An aerial photo of the area, taken in the early 1950s. There was the Morley Club, and there was the road junction and there, right in the corner, was the Station Road car park, completely surrounded by concrete blocks of a size I had seen before.
Suddenly the War-time sense of it became apparent. The car park had a field of fire across to the railway station, along and down the road to the beach, and across the main road junction. Whether the troops and Home Guard, behind their concrete tank traps, could have held up an enemy advance, I do not know. No doubt they would have tried. But the concrete blocks are a generally unacknowledged reminder of a very significant event over 60 years ago.